EAR Unit Creates Textures in Sound

It is too easy to overlook Alison Knowles’ beautiful sound installation, “Gentle Surprises for the Ear,” amid the noisy, violent and disturbing work so prominent, visually and aurally, in the “Out of Actions” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Knowles was an unusually gentle and nurturing presence among the original Fluxus group, who whimsically flew in the face of traditional notions of performance, poetry and visual art in the early ‘60s. Food and the Earth are often evoked in her work, which crosses all boundaries--including into music--and is maybe better suited for an “Out of Life” show.

But if MOCA is showing little use for the actual living performance side of Knowles right now, its competitor across town, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is embracing it. Wednesday night her “Frijoles Canyon Live,” which was premiered by the California EAR Unit, transformed the dullishly institutional Leo S. Bing Theater into a mysterious, even mystical space.

The idea behind the work, in which Knowles participated, seemed straightforward and simple. Performers wandered throughout the theater, which was darkened but not pitch-black, stopping now and then to play a tone or two on their regular instruments or to pick up exotic instruments from a table and strum or shake them. The sounds--ringing, dinging, humming, droning, reading, breathing--were generally quiet and didn’t compete.

It sounds easy but, in fact, the creation of a fragile sense of time and space, as done here for a bit more than 15 minutes, is very rare in musical performance. A radio was turned on at one point. A talk-show host was trying to identify the most snobbish area in Los Angeles, and he seemed, in this context, surreal, only further underscoring just how effectively Knowles created a respite from the petty mundane.

In her attempts to open music up into the world, rather than keeping it a closed system, Knowles took many cues from John Cage. And a variation on Cage’s “Telephones and Birds,” which opened the program with amplified coin tossing and telephone calls and recordings, helped set the sonic stage. But the EAR Unit, which calls this series Woven Voices, I think because the different kinds of music it assays often don’t make conventional sense, also presented the first local performances of three recent unrelated pieces.

George Edwards’ “The Isle Is Full of Noises” ran in circles around intricate but prosaic thematic material; Linda Bouchard’s “Sept Couleurs” did something similar with splashes of instrumental effect. Both seem constricted and self-referential to uninteresting selves.

But Kamran Ince’s “Turquoise” was astonishing. An American of Turkish heritage who also studied in Turkey, Ince, who was born in 1960, is that rare composer able to sound connected with modern music, the modern world, and yet still seem exotic.

“Turquoise” has the energy and drive of rock music. It is melodic, not harmonic, music. Short single phrases, vaguely Turkish sounding in their ornamentation, are repeated with slight variations. They remain in high register and are loud. And they are played by all the instruments of the small chamber ensemble almost in unison, but not quite. The split-second inaccuracies are exact, and the music fractures, ricocheting through the space.

There is a new CD of Ince’s music on Argo, and he is also a good orchestral composer. It seemed surprising that no one from the Los Angeles Philharmonic was on hand to check this out, just as it seemed surprising that no one from MOCA was on hand to check out Knowles. The concert was poorly attended. How strange that the EAR Unit, exciting and interesting as it is, can remain so marginal.