California EAR Unit Plays Both Sides for the Middle

More than most groups around, the California EAR Unit still believes in the idealistic and not unreasonable notion that high and low culture can meet on some middle ground and just get along.

That was the subplot of its kickoff concert in this season’s residency series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wednesday. It was a program full of premieres--in the world and in L.A.--plugged and unplugged.

Michael Gordon’s “acdc” set the tone. Gordon deploys a different brand of post-Minimalism, with an ear for rock music and such European models as Louis Andriessen, and here, the music was driven by both a sure pulse and an attractive looseness of assembly. File under Garage Art Music.

Arthur Jarvinen’s “Dream Crush Music, Raw,” too, is an imaginative rock-ish piece. The Los Angeles composer played two kick drums and tuned metal plates, grounding the sound of two organs--their textures sometimes recalled Steve Reich and Stereolab--and Robin Lorentz’s violin.

Lovable garage aesthetics returned when Lorentz played through a noisy little amplifier, along with cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, for the swooping gestures and dancing cadences of Shaun Naidoo’s “Electric Fences.”

Effects themselves were the centerpiece of Johannes Marks’ “Konzert fur Halle und Drei Instrumente.” Tones, colored by extreme reverb, hung in the air, taking on a life of their own and democratizing the human input. Meanwhile, the technical component in Martin Herman’s fascinating “Ring Zone” was the computer he “collaborated” with in the creation of the score, a dazzling piece, intricate yet fragile.

Kitty Brazelton’s cheeky “Exposition, Development & Recapitulation of the Inner Ear” was perhaps the most structurally traditional work of the lot, but with plenty of irony attached. She thumbs her nose at musical analysis and projects a mock-serious air, but the music is more exuberant than memorable. Its main virtue was as a solidly expressive vehicle for the full forces of the EAR Unit, rough and ready, and smart.