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TOURING PROGRAMS
Morton Subotnick - "Then and Now"
"Morton Feldman's "Crippled Symmetry"
VIDEOCTAVE
An evening length program of music with linear and interactive video. The haunting the Fall of the House of Usher (1928) film by James Sibley Watson Jr./music by Jeff Rona, Princess Nicotine - Blackton/Stone, the trippy Tricomatic created by Clay Chaplin, the very LA Squint - Hines / Knoles, & Cave Taylor/Beglarian.
Review of "Squint"
Short Takes: Sextet's music covers range of emotions Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Like the grinning and frowning masks of theater, we often categorize music as sad or happy, when in fact the best pieces cultivate real human emotions that fall in the shades between these poles. Three of the six pieces it performed gravitated toward sadness, with slow and lamenting music anchoring them, but filled out emotionally in fascinating and complex ways. Composer and EAR Unit percussionist Amy Knoles' "Squint" did so by juxtaposing crawling music with oncoming fast cars at night on a California freeway (projected on a screen), balancing the latter's innate compartmentalizing of humans with epic ambient sound in the audience-surrounding speakers.
Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette
MORTON SUBOTNICK - "THEN AND NOW"
Morton SUBOTNICK heralded in London, as the “Grandfather of Techno” needs no introduction, as the seminal Silver Apples of the Moon to his latest, The Other Piano never ceases to amaze. The Award winning California E.A.R. Unit grew up with Mort’s music and have continued to work with him through their more than 25 years in existence. We are offering a 75th birthday celebration concert with the ghost computer pieces Trembling and Axolotl, the blockbuster Key To Songs as well as a soon to be completed new ensemble piece in a blanketing surround environment. Please refer to the enclosed DVD as well as the web site for more information.
"...electronic music...unpredictable, mysterious, physical, sensuous, ecstatic." - Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
"ECLECTICA"
Draws from the Unit's vast repertoire (over 600 pieces) including works by: John Adams, Julia Wolfe, Eve Beglarian, James Sellars, Stephen "Lucky" Mosko, Frederic Rzewski, Kaijia Saariaho, Eric Chasalow, Mel Powell, and others.
LA WEEKLY, MARCH 12 - 18, 2004
A Lot of Night Music
Man of Many Worlds
by Alan Rich
“Cleverness is not necessarily lovely,” Mel Powell once wrote, in lines quoted in a recent REDCAT program, “nor is loveliness necessarily clever.” The California EAR Unit’s recent tribute to their onetime friend and mentor was enough to prove that, in at least one instance of Powell’s music, those attributes did come together. What a treasure was this Mel Powell...a “new” media concoction wherein percussion virtuosa Amy Knoles “remixed” an old Mel Powell abstract painting with the ensemble’s recording of Powell’s Immobiles. Powell’s 1996 Sextet, his last work of consequence, written two years before his death, ended the program, as much a love letter from composer to performers as music can boast. From first note to last, he guided his six players through the art of conversation: the solo statement, the refutation, the argle-bargle, the rumination, the reconciliation. If you need a single work to define the essence of chamber music, let it be this. If you need a single group of supremely dedicated players to define the essence of what it means to make music together, let it be these.
"James Sellars accurately titled Go a densely textured ten minute non-stop vertigo trip...down geared to a more tender section before the final mad dash to the end." - Albuquerque Journal
"John Adams' enormously effective Road Movies , the horizon line of a melody shifting almost imperceptively in a lazy drive thru Paris, Texas." - The Independant
"Julia Wolfe's 'Girlfriend' was the evenings most oddly moving piece. An unexpectedly delicate, rhythmically compelling sample patchwork, the piece combines screeching tires and intimations of a traffic calamity with droning, mournful chords in the live music component. - Los Angeles Times
"THAT 70'S SHOW"
The very best of the 70's!! Fluxus events, "Revenge Before Breakfast"- Henry Brant, "Timara Settings" - Lucky Mosko, "Immobiles" - Mel Powell, "The Black Page" - Frank Zappa
"Everything that was happening in the 70's at least everything that happened at this one exhilerating event seemed to be happening for the first time." - Alan Rich, LA Weekly
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MORTON FELDMAN'S "CRIPPLED SYMMETRY"
An evening length trio by Morton Feldman.
"...a mesmerizing, time bending, spiritual experience..." - Mark Swed, LA Times