New voices, deeply eloquent sounds inspire at the Audium

They’re doing some cool new stuff at the Audium, and its “New Voices IV: Sounds of Resistance, Identity, & Place” (Thursday to Saturday evenings through April 5) is proof that offbeat, expressive SF spirit, often so hard to find these days, is far from dead.

A trip through the wee sonic spaceship’s omega portal on Bush Street for an immersive acoustical journey in total darkness has been a local right of passage since avant-garde musician Stan Shaff opened the custom-built “theater of sound” in 1969, with a record-breaking 61 speakers placed in every nook of the groovy space. There, you would experience cosmic “sound sculptures” via Stan’s twinkling, booming compositions that blasted you into far-out electro-acoustical realms.

Recently, Stan’s son Dave has recently opened the space up to “new voices,” giving up-and-coming sound artists free reign to perform their compositions on the classic equipment, now boasting a whopping 176 speakers. The trio of composers he’s put together for this program—Briana Marela, Phillip Laurent, and Shanti Lalita—each bring totally unique and addictive aesthetics to the table.

On the night I attended, Laurent went first with “Remote Viewing,” which “considers how space can be measured in possibilities.” For me that meant calling up surreal mental imagery to go with the abstract yet melodious music. “Remote Viewing” traverses a post-rock/post-jazz landscape recorded with live instrumentation, including cello and bassoon—Laurent played pipe organ and synthesizer—then spatially manipulated live from the booth. (I don’t know how any of the participants did this part shrouded in utter darkness.) Passages of flivvering flutes/horns were transcendent, as were accents of submergent bass. A kind of Pharaoh Sanders-meets-Radiohead vibe.

Next up was ‘Sense/less” by Shanti Lalita, who started with a funny and ice-breaking performance (I won’t give it away) in the lobby to the very cute crowd, and then led us once again into the main room for a three-part impressionistic, sample-based exploration of the gooey mess that is our current emotional and sensory state. Trauma, doubt, self-loathing, hatred (snippets from that disgustingly racist “comic” from last year’s Republican National Convention played—remember when we thought he had gone too far?), numbness, dissociation…. but then also self-affirmation, self-care, escape, presence grounded in the body.

The closing passage was quite lovely and relaxing, including some beautiful repeated melodies that bounced around the space. Some could take this coda as a sonic locus for the energy of a refreshed resistance. Lalita was using the composition to address personal struggles with food, body image, and visibility, and also made something we all could relate to, which avoided cliches for something harder to grasp, new.

I don’t think a visit to the Audium has ever made me tear up, but Briana Marela’s touching “Qué Pena” got me. Marela tells the story of the grieving search for her father’s origins after his death—complicated by her insecurities around her lack of fluency in Spanish, the language of his homeland. A linguistic gulf as wide as the Styx, but crossable somehow. The narrative piece “crafted with a Buchla Music Easel synthesizer, live vocal performance, and text,” was simple and elegant, with a few surreal and humorous touches to give it the ring of an excellent short story. Marela, too, started in the lobby with an invocation, and her hypnotic voice, live-singing all the way through, led us on a journey inward using only sound and imagination.

Before the show started, I eavesdropped on some fascinating audience conversations, including one with a very young-looking young composer—they hope to perform at the Audium one day—describing their opera in progress, about “beings of light” who transform the world after climate change destroys it. What a freaking relief from the normal talk about market assets and series fundraising, product launches and coding errors! Definitely giving Adium and “A” for that alone.

NEW VOICES IV: SOUNDS OF RESISTANCE, IDENTITY, & PLACE runs Thursdays-Saturdays though April 5 at the Audium, SF. More info here.