4/4 No More?--Big Sur plays host to the next wave in music

What is one to make of a musician who performs "improvised electronic music from custom-burned compact discs and corrupted household appliances," or a composer who plays music which "incorporates the theory of brain wave acceleration through clusters of sounds separate and evolving?"

Is this genuine "roots music" for the 21st century, or merely a bunch of obsessive weirdos noodling around with bizarre instruments for their own edification?

Whatever it all means, music lovers willing to embrace the unusual can find out this weekend as the Martin LaBorde Gallery and Henry Miller Library host the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, Saturday and Sunday.

"The music is part of the whole evolution of contemporary music, especially improvisation," explains Salinas-born composer, improviser and keyboard player Ernesto Diaz-Infante, a featured performer and one of the festival organizers along with Robert Deford of the LaBorde Gallery.

"A new generation is taking the roots of experimental music to the next step, using different things like computers and technology. The music is exploring every possibility of sound, structure and form, and it''s not really that challenging when you have so many mainstream forms pushing it to that end."

Among the featured performers are Carl Stone, a San Francisco Bay area musician and composer who reworks "appropriated materials" and music samples to create infinite variations and mutations of musical sounds and themes.

One of the more intriguing performers is another Bay Area resident, Tom Nunn, who designs and builds his own experimental instruments that include bronze rods attached to stainless steel "space plates" and "electracoustic percussion boards" set on buckets with inflated balloons that resonate with eerie, otherworldly beauty.

For anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary trends in jazz, rock and world music, there is much in this weekend''s festival that will "sound" or at least feel familiar.

As alluded to by Diaz-Infante, the new experimental music combines elements of free jazz, improvisation and industrial/techno, along with traces of psychedelia and a kind of minimalism that evokes the music traditions of Asia and Kabuki Theater.

Where "traditional" improvisation is usually grounded in some structural form, whether a particular chord structure or harmonic or melodic mode, experimental music seemingly eschews those formal trappings for a more organic approach, where the structure emerges and evolves out of the musicians'' improvisational response to the music''s sound and tonality, something Diaz-Infante likens to aural abstract expressionism.

"Most people have a hard time applying it to music, but basically it''s not that difficult to understand, it''s like a painting or poem or an art film, and I compare it to other art forms like Jackson Pollock''s action painting," explains Diaz-Infante, who currently features experimental music recordings Wednesdays from 2-6am on KAZU.

"There''s definitely a structure and form either by listening to the melody, texture or overall sense of the [musical] environment," adds Diaz-Infante. "This music doesn''t have a pulse or beat and can get a bit discordant, but when it starts exploring out there, it has the energy of rock and the feel of punk. These are artists who have something to say." cw

Saturday and Sunday, 11am-7pm. Tickets $7 each day/ $10 two-day pass. Call 667-2574 or 620-1550 for info, or check out the festival Web site at www.henrymiller.org/events. >

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