MUSIC REVIEW : Robinson’s Electronic Music

The really radical challenge of electronic music is its concentrated focus on purely aural events. No theater of performance distractions here, no interpretive charisma or ego.

Monday at the Santa Monica Public Library, computer composer Michael Robinson darkened the stage and auditorium, to “encourage an atmosphere of fantasy.” Then, not quite trusting his sounds to their own devices, he gave us pictorial titles and little stories about the pieces in spoken commentary, while illuminating just his shoes with a flashlight.

The influences Robinson cited ranged from the Doors through John Coltrane to Morton Feldman, all of which could be heard in his most distinctive music. Robinson relies on additive motivic layers, ostinatos and absolute clarity of texture in his work, expressed through computer-controlled synthesized sounds.

The chief exception to the dominance of pulse and linearity was “Delayed Response.” Inspired by Feldman’s String Quartet, it presents a slowly shifting harmonic pattern, conveyed in lush orchestral synth washes.

In sharpest contrast was “Trembling Flowers,” from 1985 the oldest piece on the program. Through sheer speed and polymetric complexity it was the most dense in information, chittering in nervous rushes of stereotypical electronic beeps.

Perhaps the most structurally and thematically interesting of the works surveyed was “Summer Streams,” dedicated to Leonard Bernstein. It proved much more spicy in chromatic inflections and engaging in its intimations of traditional polyphony.

“Pink Candle,” conceived as “a small Requiem for Jim Morrison,” exposed Robinson’s rather limited percussion palette. His attempt in “Pictures on the Wall” to capture the feeling of a Coltrane improvisation in this almost contradictory medium was more successful, apparently drawing on his own experience as an improvising saxophonist.

The rest of the program fell into a mold of well-crafted but uninventive textural variations. Robinson sets up an obsessive ostinato, layers loops of little diatonic fragments which he lets accumulate a certain degree of sonic inertia and then abruptly pulls the plug.

Best of these was “Pilgrim,” with its odd timbral accents and middle-Eastern modality. Most banal was “Gift,” with the cheesy sound quality and bent perkiness of a video-game score.