Resistance Opens Ears to New Music

Festivals of new music, in this year of El Nino, have been almost as lush and astounding as the foliage that has greened the hills. As if from nowhere, Beyond the Pink, a performance art festival, sprouted earlier in the season. Equally unexpected is Resistance Fluctuations, which began Tuesday night at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Six packed days of concerts are meant to explore and contrast what is on the minds of the more adventurous and mostly younger composers here on the West Coast with those in middle Europe (mainly Austria). The idea is that there is a lot less communication in new music between cultures than one might expect in the Internet era.

While instrumental virtuosity will not be ignored (the ensemble Klangforum Wien will be performing some of the Austrian new music), electronics and multimedia are at the heart of many young composers’ work. And that was the case with the opening concert, which featured two composers recently graduated from California Institute of the Arts.

The music of both Kent Clelland and Marina Rosenfeld is resonantly ambient. It doesn’t particularly interest the ear over time. Change is gradual and not astonishing; there is practically no drama; invention is more pronounced in the creation of an original soundscape than in its evolution or progress. It produces a pleasant, sonically overgrown environment, but add other media, as the composers did, and the music seems happy to recede into background.

There may be more musical variety in Clelland’s score to “Messiah” than was heard in a 20-minute excerpt from his collaboration with choreographer Tanya Blood Hinkel and her improvisational theater company, Project 423. Clelland’s thickly textured electronics here served somber movement and dim lightening. Six “movement artists,” first seen standing on toe in a circle, strain heavenward, collapse, then rise, zombie-like to gradually make contact with one another. This work, which concerns humanity’s quest for something outside itself, has other episodes of music for instruments and vocalists.

Rosenfeld’s “Fragment Opera 3” is abstract despite its title and use of video. Seated on the floor and operating turntables with three “DJ/performers,” she mixed unidentifiable sound sources live throughout the performance. A graceful wide sheet of paper, extending from ceiling, served as a screen for video.

Nothing much happens. The source recordings skip repeatedly over the same passages. A wash of repetition, with a trace of a distant backbeat, is the main effect. Fiddling with the dials (changing the mix of the four sources) changes the timbre but not the effect. The video is equally attractive and uneventful, a study of light flashing on a lattice. It is a long performance, pleasing and soporific. An audience large enough to spill into the aisles responded cheerfully.

How these works will fit into a larger scheme of Resistance Fluctuations in which the use of noise will be one theme remains to be seen. Tuesday’s concert had the feel of a prologue to an epic, with the “new and unpredictable music” (the subtitle of the festival) still to come.

* Resistance Fluctuations continues through Sunday at various venues, $7-$10; (310) 577-4684 or check https://www.wires.org