Knoles Hypnotizes With Her Sonic Beat

Percussionist Amy Knoles has long been one of Los Angeles’ new music luminaries, in part because she lays bare the ambiguity and malleability of the very term “new music.” Saturday night at the Los Angeles Theater Center, the term translated to a hypnotic display of post-digital impressionism, in the form of her multimedia piece “TwoXTenXTenXTen+One” (do the math: and it comes out to 2001).

Though best known as a charter member of the California EAR Unit, Knoles has worked on other creative projects, including finding expressive avenues for the MIDI-controller known as the K.A.T. MIDI Mallet. The marimba-like keyboard affords her access to whatever palette of sampled sounds she desires.

Her first low tone coincided with a blast of stage smoke from behind her, and smoke continued to be a recurring motif, threading through Richard Hines’ visual mosaic of projections, as well. The sum effect of the piece even alluded to the quality of smoke: seductive, ambiguous, ephemeral, potentially hazardous.

After prolonged exposure to digital sounds in the hourlong piece, though, some degree of sample fatigue set in. That made brief articulations on actual, physical instruments--including a huge parade drum and an overturned garbage can--feel like sweet real-time relief.

Generally, Knoles’ sonic inventions soothed and tickled, but the thematic elements of the piece meandered. Maybe that’s because the new millennium already seems like old news, perhaps disempowered by an uneventful Y2K and Knoles’ attempt to get at the heart of this strange, sprawling city that is Los Angeles: it’s a portrait of a wily ghost.

With simple harmonic pads and undulant beats, the piece owes as much to pop and ambient music as any more complex mode of “serious” music. An ambitious yet also easygoing opus, its textural flow culminates in a catchy, Laurie Anderson-esque “theme song.” Knoles unreels a chic, scattershot litany of phrases (“Marshall stacks,” “Bill Gates,” etc.) meant to invoke some poetic closure. But it’s all about fragments in search of a whole, which could define the work, and also it’s purported subjects--the new millennium, Los Angeles, the whole crumbly enchilada.