‘Beyond’ Festival Pushes a Few Musical Boundaries

Dubbing an experimental music event the “Beyond Music Sound Festival”--which celebrated its third annual incarnation over the weekend--might encourage sneers from disbelievers, who dismiss it as aimless noise. But if one accepts the definition of music as organized sound, and that the creative impulse naturally challenges conventions, this festival’s sonic goods could just as easily be termed “inside music.”

At Saturday night’s program, at Beyond Baroque in Venice, the diversity was telling. Experimental music culture is now broad enough to embrace both the gentle, playful invocations of Anna Homler’s sound palette, which opened the evening, and Francisco Lopez and Amy Denio’s mad, perversely meditative assault--in the dark, no less--to close.

At the outset, Homler sang, with her usual abstracted elan, and coaxed tinkly tones from an array of plastic toys, as the duo Spastic Colon (whose name sounds painful but whose product is blithe) spun a graceful electronic web of sounds around her.

Tom Recchion’s weirdly soothing “Mood Music (Part 2): What a molecule of water would sound like if you could hear it” fulfilled the evening’s camp-ambient quotient. Recchion likes to play with tape loops, deconstructing tidbits of lounge music and jazz riffs into surrealist seduction. Toward the end of the longish piece, unfortunately, David Toop’s prerecorded recitation of a dryly cheeky poem all but put the kibosh on its loopy, ethereal charm.

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Best of all, Bay Area-based John Bischoff demonstrated the vitality and breadth of electronic music as a live medium. With a small keyboard triggering a laptop computer, Bischoff drew on various modes of sound production and manipulation, from synthesis to sampling, in three disparate movements. The most striking was the middle section, “Immaterial States,” a hypnotic rise and fall of tones, gradating in timbre as it went. Visceral impact was the upshot: You were there, even without understanding where “there” was.

Defying any images of electronic musicians in concert, hunched over gadgetry, the Lopez-Denio wall-of-sound occurred sans lighting. Audience members even used blindfolds to deaden any visual aspect or distraction. Denio, a wonderfully uncategorizable, Seattle-based new-music figure, has been in many delightfully quirky projects. This was not one of them.

Her long, sung tones, which sustained into a clustered chord, yielded to a thickening electronic wall of sound and furious volume. Eventually, a near-shattering rumble of white noise, speckled with specific sonic details, literally shook the house. To quote the festival title, it was a piece that went “beyond music,” into physical phenomenon.

The modest, vigorous little festival, which also ran on Friday and Sunday nights, included minimalist Pauline Oliveros, microtonalist Kraig Grady and the duo of Devin Sarno and Petra Haden.