San Francisco Classical Voice

Riemen's instrument looks like a post-apocalyptic Rhodes piano; some of its insides are removed and sitting next to it, and it has all sorts of foreign objects crammed into it like shrapnel — with strategically placed microphones to capture the various sounds of it all. The piece began with a variety of scratchy, scraping sounds, which Riemen contrasted with gentle sustained pitches, deep and resonant. He used lots of stuttering rhythms, as if a groove kept trying to get started, but could never take off. There were also electric shock or spark sounds that would interrupt periodically. The range of colors that he got out of this instrument was astonishing, and, because it was a real instrument with real things vibrating, the sounds had a more sensual and visceral feel than you'd be inclined to get with a computer. The pacing was good, with changes coming at just the right time to keep it always interesting.

Heckert's Chain Boxes, which opened Saturday night's concert with a sudden metallic racket, was the least timbrally complex piece, but startlingly effective. The setup for the piece had two sets of what looked like wide orange stairs with three steps each, with a metal chain draped across each step. Each chain was held on one end by a robotic arm which yanked the chain at varying speeds and with varying intensities causing it to thwack against the stair in various rhythmic patterns and volumes. Behind the stairs were two upward thrusting metal arms with buckets on the end. Motionless at first, the arms started rotating a few minutes into the piece causing the buckets to bang into each other. Eventually, the arms got going so fast that first one and then the other bucket was flung off revealing short chains that spun and clanged against one another.

The piece featured intricate and varying rhythmic patterns, with the chains overlapping and interlocking in many different ways, and a surprisingly wide palette of dynamics and colors, from the tutti racket of the opening, to gentle, almost introspective parts featuring only a few of the chains. The pacing was perfect with changes coming at just the right moments, keeping fresh a texture that could easily have become monotonous. The piece was visually engaging as well, with waves of motion moving down the chains in different shapes and at different speeds, and the vertical arms in back spinning faster or slower The piece ended with an incredible buildup as the chains got faster and faster and louder and louder until it all coalesced into a glorious cacophony of beautiful metallic noise.

Sunday night closed with harpist Zeena Parkins plucking, scraping, and banging an enormous array of colors out of her harp, from deep trance-inducing resonances to raucous electric-guitar distortions. The pacing and timing was spot on, and Parkins wasn't afraid to stay for long periods of time with simple, soft, luminous sounds. It had a deep, emotional, and vulnerable feeling to it, dreamy and otherworldly.

Friday night opened with another harpist, Victoria Jordanova, performing her piece Suspended. She too pulled many wonderful sounds from her instrument, starting with octaves and sitar-like overtones, moving into deep moaning drones, profoundly calming as they vibrated and resonated through the hall.

There were many other intriguing performances by local musicians. Thursday night opened with Chaos Butterfly, a duo of Jonathan Segel and Dina Emerson, seamlessly blending electronically generated sounds with electronically manipulated acoustic sounds of wine glasses being struck and rubbed, a violin being plucked, and Emerson's expressive, full-throated vocals, looped and layered into glowing harmony. The mix of electronics and the human voice, though common in pop music, does not seem to be so common in “serious” electronic music, and it was a refreshingly beautiful sound.

Sutekh, another local, who opened Sunday's concert, performed an untitled multi-sectional laptop work with projected images, beginning with cool-jazz-meets-Bach vibraphone/glockenspiel lines, moving into more typical electronic music sounds, on to a section featuring resonant chords that grew louder and dissipated, with electronic chirping in the background, then a beautiful Bjork meets Steve Reich song with female vocals over a minimalist texture, and finally a rousing, rhythmically propulsive, bass heavy piece of Dance music. Every section was absorbing and well-crafted, and it was especially refreshing to hear some music that had significant melodic and harmonic content to it. The sections didn't hang together though, and it seemed to lack any kind of unifying structure or narrative flow.

Guillermo Galindo, performing under the name “ga*in_dog”, burst onto stage Friday night wearing a space helmet and carrying a cross. On the stage in front of him was a mess of wires on a table and an eerie rotating metal contraption on a pole which looked like some sort of futuristic alien communication device. As Galindo moved the cross toward different parts of the wires or toward the rotating metal contraption, it created different types of harsh metallic and electric sounds. Later, he pulled out a drill as well and used it in a similar manner, creating still harsher and louder sounds. Some of the piece was truly difficult to listen to, the sounds were so harsh and loud, and I kept thinking as it was going that it all seemed kind of gimmicky, yet at the end it left me with a very powerful and moving impression.

The other works by locals were Patrice Scanlon's Colors, which featured three dancers whose movement through different parts of the stage determined the sounds that were triggered, and Blevin Blectum's noisy and dancey Mari Lwyd. Along with New Yorker George Lewis and the LA laptop sextet The Hub, these pieces all struck me as a bit monotonous, perhaps more concerned with the technical processes involved than with the resulting sonic experience.

The Hub, the only performance I strongly disliked, was worse than monotonous. It was soulless and pretentious, as the laptops burbled away incoherently and a projection screen displayed words that sometimes just seemed random, sometimes seemed to be in-jokes, and sometimes pronounced what the Hub was doing at that moment, as if we were being given insight into something very important and profound. Perhaps if electronic music were brand new, this random assortment of mildly interesting sounds could be justified as a means of exploring the possibilities out there, but this has been done, one must do something more interesting with these materials now.

Morton Subotnick's Until Spring Revisited, performed by the composer and Miguel Frasconi to close Friday's concert, does do something more interesting with these sounds. Though the sounds themselves are generally fairly typical electronic music sorts of sounds, Subotnick treats them with great nuance and attention to detail, arranging them into intricate rhythmic grooves that get interrupted, as if other sounds are being hurled at them and smashed against them. The piece was structured and paced well, not as quirky or innovative as some of the festival's other pieces, but the most elegant and well-crafted.

All in all, the festival was a delightful mishmash of various approaches to using electronics in music, with an emphasis on theatricality and on combining electronics and live performance in novel ways. It was particularly heartening to see that, on the whole, the most vital, interesting, and innovative work was being done not by the established out-of-towners, but by the Bay Area's own local musicians.