Electrifying encounters

Despite its reputation for insularity, French art has often thrived on outside influences. Had Debussy not heard the glittery music of Indonesia, for instance, his music -- and French Impressionism -- might have turned out differently.

Still, given French intellectuals’ abhorrence of American culture (and politics) these days, it is refreshing to find some of the country’s more risk-prone artists venturing out. Such was the case Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Hall’s REDCAT performance space with “Transplant: France,” a program of French new music and new media.

In fact, the evening represented a collaboration not only between French musicians and visual artists but also between West Coast musicians and a video artist. The Japanese got in the act too.

There was, in short, a lot of collaborating.

First came a 2001 film, “The Tale of the Floating World,” by Alain Escalle, with music by Cecile Le Prado. Shot in Japan and featuring a mixture of actors and various new animation and anime techniques, it offers an atmospheric, grim, yet almost comic-book view of Japan under nuclear attack. A Buddha sinks, birds are sucked into a whirlpool, written Japanese characters on a page mutate into insects, nude bodies contort, irradiated skin cracks. The score is an electronic soundscape, a richly complex interweaving of various environmental and musical sound sources.

But for all its technology, “Floating World” is essentially a glossy version of much deeper and more elegant French and Japanese cinematic and musical representations of Hiroshima, such as Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour” or Shohei Imamura’s “Black Rain.”

The collaboration in “Crash-Test” was between French composer Pierre Yves-Mace and four young CalArts performers who call themselves the Transplant Ensemble. For 30 nervous minutes, piano, trumpet, cello and oboe did this, that and the next thing.

Though it was ever changeable, the music’s most common changes were between jumpy figurations and a moody, jazzy base state. Electronics were periodically used, with sound radiating from a dodecahedron speaker array placed in the middle of the audience. The players were on the go, constantly finding new spots in the theater. They were also exceptional, able to hold a listener’s interest even when the half-hour score began to wear out its welcome.

Gilbert Nouno’s “Hitsujigusa Nymphaea,” for bass and electronics, brought together the remarkable French bass player Joelle Leandre and the local video artist Carole Kim, who improvised along with the piece. Musically, it’s a showcase for Leandre, a gripping virtuoso who gives the impression less of playing her instrument than of being a puppeteer who brings it to expressive and often extravagant life. The electronic modifications by Nouno, who operated a laptop during the performance, added a further voluptuousness to her sound.

Kim, working in a cage-like contraption onstage, projected shards of glass and metallic objects onto the screen, along with clips of men walking, peapods etc. It probably takes considerable virtuosity to accomplish this kind of thing live, but the result looked simplistic, especially when she tried to mimic in a very limited way Leandre’s exhilarating rhythmic qualities.

The program ended with a spectacular free improvisation by Leandre, CalArts pianist and composer David Rosenboom and the Bay Area percussionist William Winant. But again there was an electronic interloper: this time David Wessel, also from the Bay Area.

Leandre, Rosenboom and Winant all love to play with tremendous speed. Good colleagues, they reacted politely to one another at first, but soon enough competition began, with piano keys, drums and gongs, and fingers on bass strings all flying. Wessel tapped on a touch-sensitive pad controlled by a computer, pleasantly thickening the overall sound but keeping it grounded.

With the hour growing late, the improvisation was kept short. In 15 minutes or so, there was time for only a few sparks to ignite. Had it been longer -- say, two or three hours -- a remarkable conflagration might well have occurred.