2008, a spacey Odyssey for the ears

The small, devoted, decidedly mixed crowd that gathered at Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey’s concert Saturday night was intriguing. Wired youths and old-timers alike sat clustered in the center of Neighborhood Church in Pasadena to get the best surround-sound mix from a dozen loudspeakers. Two of L.A.’s finest pianists (one classical, one jazz) staked out positions farther back.

But everyone had the same passion. We came to trip on sound. Sonic Odyssey is an electronic music series now in its fourth season.

Sitting in a darkened concert hall listening to loudspeakers is, of course, so ‘60s. Surround sound has reached the mainstream consumer market, and electronic music is hardly exotic anymore.

An iBook replaces what in my student days required a multimillion-dollar computer. Back then, we trudged to hills behind Stanford University, where musicians had access to something called a PDP-10 only between 1 and 6 a.m. The computer spewed out punch cards, which we mailed to the Bell Labs in New Jersey. A week later we got back tapes with a minute or two of sound.

Back then too we overlooked the alienating nature of listening to music without performers in a concert hall, because the sounds themselves were new and amazing. But the emphasis, with or without drugs, was on personal psychedelic experiences. The concerts eventually came to feel alienating, and the fad faded.

Yet here in Pasadena, in a Craftsman church, was a community. In an age of visual overload, sound for sound’s sake seems fresh again. And Sonic Odyssey is clever at things you can’t so easily do at home.

After the lights went down, the composer and director of the series, Jennifer Logan, seated at a mixing consul, announced each piece and read the program notes in her best, cool airline stewardess voice. She then, in real time, directed prerecorded two-channel pieces across the 12 loudspeakers circling the hall.

The biggest challenge for an electronic music composer is to find a gimmick that is more than a gimmick. By its very nature the music has to sound machine-made, has to do things humans can’t. Still, it must express something.

The most enchanting pieces were Logan’s own “Chimera,” in which birdsong and piano are somehow conjoined into silvery clatter, and Carl Stone’s “Al-Noor.” Stone, an Angeleno relocated to Japan, offers no description of his source material. Over 11 minutes, the voice of an Asian singer takes on voluptuously vibrating electronic textures that add layer upon layer of emotion. The piece is the title track of Stone’s addictively listenable new CD but was even more moving when moving through a large space.

In Rocco di Pietro’s “Etudes for Crippled Hands,” off-centered, electronically fiddled-with piano sounds were inspired by the composer’s work with disabled youths. As a modern artist who feels he must unlearn how to draw to discover spontaneity, Di Pietro learned from “crippled hands” accidents of complexity.

Christian Eloy’s “R.A.M.” was an animated jungle of sound. Curtis Roads’ short “Pictor Alpha” bopped genially. In Peter Grenader’s The Secret Life of Semiconductors” and Patricio da Silva “Artificial Life, the New Generation,” the composers took the moving of electrons as their subject matter.

All evening long, sensual, flowing sound engulfed the senses, proving once more that there is no end to what you can do with electronics. Maybe the ‘60s aren’t over, after all.

--

mark.swed@latimes.com