The New York Times
March 9, 2002

Music Review
By Allan Kozinn

The Updated Face of Electronic Composition

As part of its 30th-anniversary season, the Kitchen is presenting "Electronic X-travaganza," a three-day electronic music festival that opened on Thursday evening and runs through tonight.  The prospectus includes a few retrospective glimpses: works by David Behrman, for example, that had their first performances during the Kitchen's early years.  Mostly, though, this is a festival of new work by young composers and ensembles, and even the 1970's works by Mr. Behrman are reconfigured to account for updated technology.

technology is a crucial part of the story.  String players continue to play on Stradivarius and Guarneri instruments from the 18th century; but no self-respecting electronic musician would lug a stack of 30-year-old modules into a concert hall when a laptop, a sampler, a keyboard or a drum pad interface, and a handful of compact sound processing devices can do much more.

Holland Hopson opened the concert on Thursday evening with a low-key but varied set that used a time-honored process in which live performeance sets off computer processes, which then repeat and modify recorded versions of the original live sound.  In the first of his three pieces, Mr. Hopson played a fluid saxophone line against a backdrop of electronic squawks and screeches reminiscent of the sounds of electronic antiquity (that is, the experiments of the 1950's).  His second work, a vocal piece in which his sung lines were repeated electronically, so that live and recorded vocals overlapped, was more immediately pleasing.  He ended his set with a piece for what he called an electronic rattle--a small box that produced electronic sounds when turned, shaken or moved.

Douce--an ensemble that includes Gisburg, a vocalist and keyboard player; Phil Painson, a programmer who also played keyboards; and Jonny Sender on electronic drums--played a set of attractively quirky songs in a quasi-pop style.  At times, Douce's combination of electronic scratch sounds, dark-hued timbres and female vocals calls to mind the English band Portishead.  But the group's expansive, seductively twisting melodies, its bright keyboard sounds and Gisburg's extraordinary range and agility give the band a distinctive, irresistible sound.

Lukas Ligeti used a drum pad to activate sound samples that ranged from a simple whistled melody to more complex West African and Korean percussion instruments, Brazilian guitar flourishes and the whoosh of music played backward.  His pieces were energetic and cacophonous, but beneath it all there was a fascination with rhythm that found its purest expression in Latin-tinged work for percussion sounds.

The work that had the most direct ties to classical electronic experimentalism was "Mechaniques(s)," a collaboration between Dafna Naphtali, a vocalist and sound processor, and Hans Tammen, a guitarist.  Mr. Tammen drew sounds from his guitar with an arsenal of devices that included a miniature violin bow, a gizmo that crawled slowly down the fingerboard and something that looked like an electric toothbrush.

The concert ended with a series of improvisatory collaborations by all the performers.