Future Sounds Set the Beat for Saturday Edition of Parties

The scene was decidedly festival-like inside UCLA’s cavernous Ackerman Grand Ballroom during Saturday’s installment of the eclectic-music celebration All Tomorrow’s Parties. A guy randomly handed out CDs of his material. Some people danced, while others lay on the floor and vibed on noise rock, free jazz, hip-hop and electronica. One group even briefly got a game of Hacky Sack going.

Of course, as this third in the four-night event continued exposing listeners to the sounds inside the collective head of festival curators Sonic Youth, the lineup offered more in the way of cacophony than sing-alongs.

Still, hotly anticipated appearances by Japan’s Boredoms and techno veteran Aphex Twin underscored the event’s forward-looking sensibility.

Certainly when the Velvet Underground (one of whose songs gave the festival its name) first did its thing, few realized the impact it eventually would have on mainstream and avant-garde music alike. Considering how many mostly young people filled Ackerman, with more waiting outside in a long line, it was possible to imagine a world in which some of this music could become pop.

Early on, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore joined L.A. experimental music fixture Nels Cline, along with percussionist William Winant and reed player Mats Gustaffson, in a thunderously dissonant free-jazz turn. (Also playing early was experimental rock act Bride of No No.) Later, Chicago saxophonist Fred Anderson picked up the free-jazz thread less discordantly with numbers that alternately expanded into space and smoothly snapped back into a groove.

Despite stances against commercialism in rap, hip-hoppers Madlib and Cannibal Ox were more conventional than expected, complete with the usual throw-your-hands-in-the-air/buy-the- album concert cliches. Backed by a deejay, Harlem duo Cannibal Ox lamented materialism, but their efforts to rev up the crowd seemed a bit half-hearted, although the hall’s acoustics often made them hard to understand. Later, L.A.’s Madlib offered a more sonically dynamic turn, abetted by a large supporting cast of rapper pals and the adeptly inventive deejay Peanut Butter Wolf.

The closest the nine-plus-hour program ever got to pop was punk trio Sleater-Kinney. Its angular, emotionally raw tunes with feminist messages were hardly mainstream, but the songs did have structure and sometimes even hooks. Not so for Boredoms, but the Japanese quartet did eschew its more violently noisy tendencies in favor of an intriguing tribal-industrial drum-and-bass sound propelled by three drummers and spiked with leader Yamatsuka Eye’s keyboards and occasional keening vocals.

Not that you really needed hooks to reel in this crowd. Pretty much a fragment of a beat was enough to get folks flailing about with happy abandon. An astonishingly large number of people craned their necks to watch Japanese ambient-noisemaker Merzbow concoct droning soundscapes on his laptop and other equipment. And that rare set by Aphex Twin? It mostly featured him capering onstage in a mask and white robe to a recorded track. Which may be the future of music, but