EAR Unit Mixes Nostalgia With the New

As one of the reigning new music ensembles on the West Coast, the California EAR Unit lived up to its reputation Wednesday night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They served up no fewer than three world premieres, and one of those was a unique interaction with Bay Area-based vocalist-loopist-performance artist Pamela Z. Contemporary credentials were in order.

But it also took the liberty of basking in relative nostalgia, performing Stephen L. Mosko’s 1984 work “Indigenous Music II,” written for the Unit when it was in its infancy. The piece, closing a generally strong and diverse program, fared well, sounding provocative and of-the-moment, and it was beautifully evoked by the group.

Mosko, another pillar of the local new music scene, wrote the piece with the idea that the word “indigenous,” in our wildly cross-filtrated cultural world, can mean many things. Here, it stands for a solid marriage of classical music intention and an obscure, possibly alien, folk music tradition--surging tones and chords and rugged bursts of percussion plotted in an affectingly minimal, but not minimalist, scheme.

Among the premieres, Mathew Rosenblum’s “And how war yore maggies?” mixes bits of prerecorded text (James Joyce and Cuisinart-ed cliches) and a nattering web of musical motifs into a dryly humorous, free-associative jumble. Another new work, Randall Woolf’s “Modern Primitive,” is a complex lark of a piece that wears out its welcome: Its episodic structure and obsessive rhythmic ploys--not executed with the Unit’s usual precision--begin to strain interest.

Pamela Z is, as the saying goes, an intriguing bunch of people, a vocalist who mixes street instincts with vestiges of operatic singing and other between-style sounds, and she also is a gifted improviser and manipulator of delay loops to build up layers of sound.

With her new piece “Shifting Conditions in the Southland,” Z threw the Unit into the loop, passing it pleasant, simple materials to play as a foil for her voice. The collaboration is a fine idea, but this piece seems like a tentative step that forces the two entities to meet halfway, diluting their respective strengths.

The concert opened on the safe turf of Mario Davidovsky’s fascinating piece “Flashbacks,” written in 1995 partly for the EAR Unit. It employs its atonal vocabulary to expressive, painterly effect, with an attention to color and nuance, and is all about variation and contrast. It’s as if the music depicts the odd, selective nature of memory.