The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood has a surrealistic appeal about it. It houses the Center for Inquiry, a haven for skeptics and rationalists in an otherwise fantasist city.  It suits the place, however; Arthur Conan Doyle’s beautifully hand-written investigations into séances line the walls, as do some of Houdini’s writings, and names such as Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno (mystics surely) are trumpeted as important precursors of people like Steve Allen among others. The latter’s bust, something I never expected to see in this life, adorns the otherwise well-appointed theater. It is also the venue for ResBox, an experimental music showcase curated by Hans Fjellestad.

Yann Novak’s music, or sound art as the composer calls it, was presented first. It had something of the theater’s ambivalence or surreality, though, not in the sense of lacking conviction, or assurance, or even a pronounced aesthetic – Novak has clear musical designs, and a sensitive ear – but the sounds had a metaphysical quality, an otherworldliness to them. One never felt that they could be the result of rubbing, striking, plucking, blowing, or any of the various ways sound in this veil-of-tears world we live in is made.  Paul Lanksy, noted composer and theorist, once described this style as “outer-space” music. Because the listener can’t ground it to the their own physical experience of sound, it becomes something else: psychodrama, the music of alien worlds, and so on.  Louis and Bebe Barron made their careers scoring 50s sci-fi movies with these “electronic tonalities.” The association is inescapable.

That said, the music was lovely. He played slowly evolving granulated frequencies, often filtered to create an almost sine-wave purity to the timbre.  Dissonant tones beat over clouds of gently modulated noise. Sometimes the interval of a fifth, or a cluster of pitches in a key, would break like light above the abyss of static. The music changed continuously, seamlessly moving from texture to texture. If it had any point of departure, it was likely Kim Cascone’s work in the late 90s like Blue Cube [ ], or Cathode Flower.

The second artist, Steve Roden, played lap steel guitar and manipulated a variety of effects units and samples, different from Novak’s laptop derived sounds.  It reminded me more of Mike Kelley’s “pathetic” art than any music I can think of. Whereas Mike Kelley deals with everyday kitsch items such as stuffed animals and plastic baubles – one memorable work is a single dirty cat dish lying on the floor – Roden works with unwanted sounds.  He looped nasal singing, slightly out of tune lap steel chords, amplifier hum, and little glitches etc. The music had no form, just one texture followed by another, none of them particularly prepossessing. It was amateurish, or calculated to seem so; sounds awkwardly faded in and out, and there was no sense of direction to what I am assuming was an improvised piece. The performance was novel, and there was a kind of pathos to it. Roden patiently gathered together all of the sounds that nobody else wanted, like a team in which all of the members were picked last.