Experiments Take Festival to Frontier of Sound

Experimentalism is attitude turned into action. Old norms are undermined and reassembled according to fresh perspectives. At the fifth annual Beyond Music Sound Festival over the weekend at Beyond Baroque in Venice, experimenters staked out interests loosely linked to curator Brandon LaBelle’s themes of space, language and body.

That resulted Saturday night in works that oscillated between music, sound and the final frontier of noise, pushing machinery, such as laptops, into secondary roles. Chicago-based Olivia Block, for example, generated sounds from a metal pan filled with assorted ingredients and equipped with a contact microphone, then processed and distributed them in a sensuous rumble, always accenting the source’s physicality.

An impressive electronic musician, New Yorker Stephen Vitiello is a site-specific thinker who gives ambient music his own kind of punch. He blended colorful static, throbbing hums, echoing clacks and other real-time noise with gruff elegance.

Los Angeles’ Damion Romero sought to render sound as a bodily presence in itself, relying on dense, loud, low tones to grip the room and the listener’s sternum. Physicality went a step further in Arizonan Jeph Jerman’s piece, performed with quasi-shamanistic theatrics on natural found objects--rocks, bones and the like--to surprisingly musical effect.

On Thursday night, a festival-adjunct presentation at Art Center in Pasadena featured Yasunao Tone. Tone’s fascinating CD-ROM works are based on the visual-to-sound translation of Chinese calligraphy. Insisting that he’s interested only in “pure noise” and not in composition, he inspired a heckler to ask, “Then what good are you?” With a grin, Tone explained: “I don’t project myself into the noise; it’s open to the audience.’ ”

And that’s experimentalism.