She’s Marching to a Millennial Beat

We’re in a loft on the third floor of a warehouse somewhere in downtown Los Angeles’ bleak, grungy industrial sector, where electronics wholesalers are busy blowing out their stocks in storefronts and loading zones. The loft has been converted into a musicians’ paradise, strewn with electronic and acoustic instruments, rack-mounted boxes of electronics, a new Mac G3 laptop computer and a venerable Kimball grand piano tucked away in the corner.

The center of attention, however, is a fascinating hybrid of advanced electronics and the primordial urge to strike things to get a sound--a long, flat, marimba-like instrument called the MalletKAT PRO.

The slim woman with fashionably close-cropped blond hair wielding mallets in front of the instrument is Amy Knoles, who has spent roughly the last half of her 40 years making her mark in the diffuse Los Angeles new-music scene as a percussionist, a longtime member of the iconoclastic California EAR Unit, and now as a composer.

She strikes one of the touch pads on her MalletKAT and an infectious percussion groove comes jiggling out of the large monitors, the overture from her new multimedia piece “TWOXTENXTENXTEN+ONE,” which premieres at the L.A. Theatre Center this week. She strikes another pad and produces sampled voices in whatever pitch she desires--and yet another pad creates voices that have been electronically analyzed and converted into other musical sounds. On top of that, she adds her own real-time playing, moving up and down to her beat.

Sure, the dabbling consumer can perform some of these tricks at home on one of those inexpensive keyboards that the wholesalers downstairs are no doubt peddling. But not with this carefully layered sophistication and complete confidence in technique, nor with this superb sound quality.

And sound is just one aspect of Knoles’ art, for “TWOXTEN” will incorporate music, still photography and digital video--all controlled by Knoles in live performance from her MalletKAT and her laptop. At an estimated 45 minutes in length, it’s the most ambitious piece Knoles has conceived, one she hopes will satisfy her long-held desire to express herself in musical and visual terms simultaneously.

But first, what does the title mean?

“Well, if you do the math,” Knoles says, “you get 2001.”

Of course.

“I’m trying to be accurate; the [Royal] Greenwich Observatory says [the millennium] is 2001,” she adds. “But the piece has several different views on that.”

A collaboration with photographer Richard Hines, “TWOXTEN” will attempt to present a panorama of change at the turn of the century, of how Los Angeles is changing, of what the people who live here think of change and what it all means. To do that, Knoles has rounded up a cross section of individual voices to be sampled--children from the Inner City Arts program downtown, members of UCLA’s Neuro-Psychiatric Institute Imagination Workshop and L.A. poet David MacIver, whose analysis of the millennium she taped over the phone.

As symbols of change, she and Hines have assembled video and still photos of some noted and notorious architectural touchstones like Staples Center, the Japan American National Museum and the Belmont High School construction site, along with more abstract images. Her trusted roommate of 13 years, Fu Fo, a noisy parakeet with black and gray feathers and a bright yellow head, also makes cameo electronic appearances in the score.

Near the end of the piece, Knoles has written a pop tune that, in her words, is “sort of throwing it all up in the air, saying we’ve got things like ‘Jurassic Park’ and computer art; Waco and electric dildos; Velveeta and Velcro; Advil and tampons; good things and bad things; where are we going, what are we doing with this.”

A Milwaukee native, Knoles had wanted to be a percussionist as far back as she can remember, pounding on Quaker oatmeal boxes as a kid, playing drums in rock bands (which she says was really good for her sense of timing). She spent a couple of years at the University of Wisconsin studying timpani before splitting for California to attend CalArts, where she fell in with the new-music crowd immediately and terminally. She landed there at the right time, for the now-fabled CalArts Contemporary Music Festivals of the early ‘80s were in full bloom, and she got an invaluable education working with visiting composers like Steve Reich, Mauricio Kagel, Morton Feldman and John Cage, and resident new-music mentors Stephen “Lucky” Mosko and Morton Subotnick.

It was Subotnick’s influence that eventually had the most direct impact on her present direction.

“You know, I was never really interested in composing until I got ahold of electronics,” she says. “I walked into a rehearsal with Mort Subotnick with the EAR Unit--we were working on a new opera of his, ‘Hungers’--and they had this KAT MIDI mallet instrument.

“I said, ‘What is that?’ And he says, ‘That’s what you’re playing.’

“You can get any sound you can imagine, instead of always the marimba and whatnot. So that opened up this whole world. I’ve gotten very interested in sampling text and then manipulating that text with electronics and playing back words from the instrument, and that’s a big part of what this piece is about.”

Much of Knoles’ newfound creative liberation came as a result of a $10,000 1999-2000 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, which enabled her to buy a high-end digital video camera and to commission visual collaborators. It also bought her time: nine months to think and conceive without worrying about a rental clock ticking away on hardware.

Ownership does have its perils, though; all of her equipment was stolen at a festival in Bali in January, and in some cases, the replacements--a new laptop, for example--have forced her to learn new programs and interfaces. Since Bali, she constantly has been on tour as a solo artist, with the EAR Unit and with Bang on a Can bassist Robert Black in the duo Basso Bongo.

So with the new interfaces not yet working properly, Knoles says that she has had to “limp her way through,” making the technology work onstage. But the first performances of “TWOXTEN” will be a welcome challenge for her because she really wants to play it in a hands-on, emotionally charged manner. Indeed, in its way, all of this technological future shock feeds into her millennial theme, juggling the good with the bad.

“It’s an interesting life in general, being a musician,” she says. “I live this kind of crazy life that’s really high and really low sometimes. This year has been just wonderful--I’m taking my mom on a cruise--but next year, I don’t know.”

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“TWOXTENXTENXTEN+ONE,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St. Dates: Saturday, 8 p.m., and next Sunday, 3 p.m. Price: $10. Phone: (213) 485-1681.