Between Bytes : Carl Stone composes for the computer on a full stomach of L.A.’s spiciest ethnic foods

Of the serious composers in California, Carl Stone is the one who has always performed in nightclubs as well as concert halls, for spiky-haired punks as well as the Ph.D-and-ponytail set. Like Philip Glass, he has a substantial pop audience, those who have gone beyond Brian Eno records to appreciate Stone’s sophisticated, pulsing sound collages. He composes for the computer, not the orchestra; he plays the microprocessor the way Maurizio Pollini plays a Baldwin. Stone, 37, is easily the best-known young composer in Los Angeles.

Each of his pieces is named after an ethnic restaurant: Sukothai, Woo Lae Oak, Shin Kee, Pho Dac, Chao Nue, Kong-Joo.

Spicy Asian cooking is to Stone what the Immortal Beloved was to Beethoven, what opium was to Berlioz--an eternal source of inspiration.

“Hot food is the cheapest high imaginable . . . “ Stone said, snagging the last chunk of crispy chile-fried catfish and waving his chopsticks for emphasis. Droplets of orange oil spattered the Formica.

” . . . and lately I’ve been eating a lot of barbecue,” he said. “Much better than false drugs. Longer lasting.”

I was too busy protecting the dregs of the glass-noodle salad to argue much. “Have some more duck curry,” I said.

“I’m a real hot-chile junkie,” Stone said. “This morning I had (the stinky fermented Japanese soybean mush) natto for breakfast, and I put hot salsa even on that. By the way, do you want the rest of those noodles?”

We were at one of L.A.’s first Thai restaurants, Vim, which had given its name to one of Stone’s early works for the Macintosh. Like other joints on Vermont’s pioneering Thai restaurant row--Arunee, Ocha, Thai Kitchen--Vim has pretty much escaped attention in the last few years, and seems to cater to a mostly Latino clientele. But Vim’s portions are huge, its food blisteringly hot. He hadn’t been back since the middle ‘80s. “ ‘Vim’ was composed a few years ago,” said Stone, who is 37, “and I don’t really think the piece holds up that well. It was kind of an experimental work. But I’m glad to see the restaurant’s holding up just fine. It seems like basic country Thai cooking.”

I took a swallow of Thai iced coffee. “Why do you name your pieces after restaurants, anyway?” I asked.

“It’s essentially random,” he said and maneuvered the glass noodles to his side of the table. “If I like a restaurant, I put it at the bottom of my waiting list. The next thing I write gets the name at the top of the list. It’s instead of calling things ‘Etude Number One,’ say, or ‘Sonata Number Three.’ People always come up to me at concerts and say, ‘Wow, that one really reminded me of the barbecued chicken at Chao Praya.’ It’s nice they feel that way, but that’s not what I have in mind at all. The titles of the pieces are supposed to be abstract.”

In concert, Stone sits behind his computer, screen glinting blue off his glasses, baggy ‘50s suit hanging from his frame. Occasionally he slides the computer’s mouse an inch or two, very deliberately, or tweaks a knob on one of the various processors that tower to his left. His art is an ultra-sophisticated version of what a hip-hop deejay does--cynics have called him Mixmaster Carl--reprocessing and recombining anything from plucked, room-length stretched wires to old Smokey Robinson tunes into a thing wholly new. At his best, he leaves his audience with the sensation of a moment well-examined, of suspended musical time.

But a couple of days later at Sanamluang, the Hollywood Thai cafe and namesake of an ’86 Stone computer opus, what was well-examined was a bowl of Chinese spaghetti, a Saturday-only special of noodles in a tart broth with a good handful of chopped, sour Chinese pickles.

“I’ve been trying to order this dish for years,” Stone said, “but they’d never give it to me. I thought it was some kind of a plot.” Last week a waitress finally told Stone that Chinese spaghetti was breakfast. It’s usually sold out by noon. He poked listlessly at a clump of bright green pickle. “But this spaghetti isn’t very exciting at all.”

“Neither is this,” I said, biting into a beef ball that tasted more scorched than grilled.

“We could get the curry noodles or the General’s noodles, which are always great here, but I’ve eaten them a hundred times,” he said. “Let’s go for barbecue instead.”

We drove south from Hollywood at noon on the hottest day of the year, a heat that overwhelmed the thin wisps of cool air drifting from the air conditioner of his Subaru. As we hit Koreatown, he snapped in a cassette, relentlessly bouncy pop from a Korean lounge singer named Mr. Lee. “I played this on my radio show (KPFK’s Imaginary Landscapes) the other night,” Stone said. “A listener went down to Koreatown looking for it, but the clerks at the record store just laughed. They had a whole aisle of cassettes by guys named Lee.”

At 54th and Vermont, he slowed and pulled into the dingy parking lot of Mr. Jim’s, a rib mecca whose radio slogan used to be: “You need no teeth to eat Jim’s beef.” (As poet Richard Meltzer once pointed out, if you actually have no teeth, it rhymes.)

“I like the way the meat falls off the ribs when you just rake your lips over them,” Stone said. “ ‘Mr. Jim’s’ was the first piece I ever did that wasn’t named after an Asian restaurant. But the sauce isn’t really hot enough, and the hot links are too smooth.” Time to move on.

He started the car and drove south to Imperial Highway, where the tiny rib shack called Mom’s announces its presence in wood smoke a half-mile before its parking lot. I had raved for years about the complexity of Mom’s extra-hot sauce until I peered into the trash bin and saw spent gallon jugs of commercial sauce and emptied bags of cayenne--not much of a secret recipe, but it worked. This time, we saw a truck from Pete’s Louisiana Hot Links leave just as we pulled in . . . which explained the wonderment of Mom’s hotly spiced links, and the perfect crunch of their skins.

“Next thing you know,” Stone said, “we’ll find out that they buy precooked spareribs from Noonan’s and sweet potato pies by the gross. I don’t care though--this is the best sauce in L.A., and the smoke gets all the way into the meat.” The beef ribs were especially good, the dense meat smoked a luminous red under its black crust.

“Mom’s,” a tribal, free-jazz-like piece with wild computer drums, and “Gadberry’s,” which sounds something like an Aaron Copland take on Javanese gamelan music, received their local premieres in a Little Tokyo art gallery just last month.

A half-hour after lunch at Mom’s, our third that day, we found ourselves driving yet another order of barbecue, from Gadberry’s up on Broadway, to a grassy traffic island at 95th and Broadway that Stone thought would be a good place for a picnic. The hot links, even on bellies full to bursting, were astonishing, coarse crumbles of beef almost too intense to eat.

“When I was little,” Stone said, wiping sauce from his cheek, “an Indonesian woman who worked for my father made food for me sometimes--fried rice, noodles, nothing fancy--and she’d always give me sambals , Indonesian sauces made from fruit and coconut and things. So the first time my parents took me to a real Indonesian restaurant, when I was about 10, I think, I piled on the sambal the way I had at home, except these sambals were hot .” He reached for a toothpick. “By the time my hair stopped smoking, I was hooked.”

In the next couple of weeks, we made pilgrimages to the namesakes of half his oeuvre. We visited Dong Il Jang (a Koreatown restaurant and an ’82 piece based on Okinawa folk song and Smokey Robinson), where we ate raw, chile-marinated crab and a sweet sort of steak tartare spiked with raw pears. We went to the Korean dive Kong-Joo (a 1990 bit of Stone chinoiserie), where we had the house specialty, barbecued goat, and we stopped by the spot where Wall Me Do once stood. We went to the Little Tokyo sushi bar Shibucho--sushi is one of the few non-spicy foods Stone tolerates--where he joked with the sushi chef in fluent Japanese, and we had a beautiful sashimi of squid and Spanish mackerel cut into linguine-thin strips and served with ponzu . He refused to go back to Sukothai and Chao Praya.

He did agree to go back for a Korean fresh tofu casserole at Jangtoh, which inspired a favorite Stone composition, a spare, beautiful 1988 work built around the sounds of a melting ice sculpture as it dripped pebbles through a framework of gongs and bamboo built by artist Mineko Grimmer. “Actually,” Stone said, “Jangtoh is only my second-favorite soontofu restaurant in L.A. But, the best place, Beverly Soontofu is a lousy name for a piece.”

He called the waitress over to the table and asked her for chile sauce. She went over to the cold case, took out a jar of brick-red chile paste and carefully spooned a bit into Stone’s tofu. When she finished, he took the jar, scooped out a walnut-sized chunk and stirred it into his food. The waitress gasped.

“There, now it’s spicy,” Stone said. “Just right.”

Carl Stone’s Favorites--Some Guidelines

Dong Il Jang, 3455 West 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 383-5757. O pen daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Full bar. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $16-$35. Recommended dishes: raw crab; bim bap (cold noodles); barbecued short ribs.

Gadberry’s Barbecue, 5833 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 751-0753. Open Tue.-Sun., noon to 10 p.m., Fri.-Sat till 1 a.m. No alcohol. Cash only. Takeout only. Dinner for two, $9-$13. Recommended dishes: hot links; ribs.

Jangtoh Soontofu Restaurant, 4451 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 665-8664. Open daily, 6 a.m. to midnight. Beer and wine. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, about $15. Recommended dish: combination soontofu.

Kong-Joo, 3029 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 737-9487. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, about $15. Recommended dishes: barbecued goat; goat stew.

Mr. Jim’s Pit Bar-B-Que, 5403 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 778-6070. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., till midnight Fri.-Sat. No alcohol. Cash only. Takeout only. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$15. Recommended dishes: beef ribs; spareribs.

Mom’s Bar-B-Q, 1050 W. Imperial Highway, Los Angeles, (213) 756-8405. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., till midnight Fri.-Sat. No alcohol. Cash only. Takeout only. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$15. Recommended dishes: beef ribs; hot links; sweet-potato pie.

Sanamluang, 5176 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 660-8006. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 5 a.m. No alcohol. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$12. Recommended dishes: General noodles (with barbecued pork, roast duck and shrimp); beef curry noodles.

Shibucho, 333 S. Alameda Ave., third floor, in Little Tokyo Square, (213) 626-1184 . Open daily for lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; for dinner, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$60. Recommended dishes: sushi, sashimi.

Vim, S. 831 Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 480-8159. Open Wed.-Mon., 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Beer and wine. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$18. Recommended dishes: crispy fried catfish with chile; hot and sour shrimp soup; glass-noodle salad.