An EAR Unit Encounter of the Rambunctious and Cryptic Kind

We can always count on the California EAR Unit, those resident keepers of the new music faith, to give convention a good run for its money. But at their recent residency concert, Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the ensemble seemed in a particularly rambunctious mood. Ideas and methods to the left of normal amounted to a running theme.

On this program, young compositional thinkers, with notions sometimes more immediately gratifying than wholly effective, were given the run of the place. Juliet Palmer’s “Deep Stew” is fractured groove music of the art sort, pushed along by a rickety but insistent pulse, reminiscent of Captain Beefheart’s rhythmic chang-a-lang. That drive is pulled apart to reveal something more cryptic and spacious. Closing the show was another rock-cum-minimalist barnstormer, Lindsay Vickery’s “Leo Szilard,” eighth-notes pitted in a relentless, bravura race toward an uncertain goal.

For Toshi Ichiyanagi’s open-ended “Pratyahara Event,” the EAR Unit broke out the bric-a-brac, including kitchen implements, a pie in the fiddler’s face, bubble blowers and a tape machine playing Counting Crows, all with a dadaistic purpose. Inspired by mentor John Cage and Eastern meditative strategies, the piece is a strange brew of deadpan zaniness and poised, deep breathing.

In another twist, two pieces by Unit members were composed against type. Violinist Robin Lorentz’s “Tahoma” is an endearingly roughhewn piece based on crude techniques imposed on violins by non-violinists, including the frictional sound of resin-coated fishing line and the percussive twang of chopsticks on the strings. Percussionist Amy Knoles’ “Belgo,” meanwhile, combines post-minimalist variations for pianist Vicki Ray, who interacts with a puzzle of samples, of text, the composer’s pet bird, and undulant percussion beds.

The evening’s most oddly moving piece had to be Julia Wolfe’s “Girlfriend,” heard in its world premiere. An unexpectedly delicate, rhythmically compelling sample patchwork, the piece combines screeching tires and intimations of a traffic calamity with droning, mournful chords in the live music component. The juxtaposition creates a hypnotic tension between the onstage reality and the suggestion of a sobering reality on tape, although in itself, a fairly dreamlike sound source.

In the cracks, some nameless beauty emerges. Likewise with this EAR Unit encounter.