An Improvisation on Musique Concrete

Musique concrete--basically the electronic manipulation of natural or found sounds--has become part of the international electronic music vocabulary.

Even the Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9” and Frank Zappa’s “Freak Out!” made exuberant use of this technique.

And though much has changed in sound and technology since the French launched musique concrete just after World War II, French explorers like Lionel Marchetti and Jerome Noetinger continue to produce inventive, flowing offshoots.

Their performance at Beyond Baroque Sunday night was quite different from classic, composed musique concrete: This was a live, completely improvised session.

It was also a throwback to a simpler era, with the two composers seated at a table crammed with cables, tiny speaker cones with paper cups vibrating on top of them, ordinary telephone pickups and, for a touch of modern technology, portable CD and MiniDisc players.

By now completely attuned to each other’s instincts, unleashing an encyclopedia of virtuoso techniques, Marchetti and Noetinger produced an intuitively integrated 36-minute improvisation.

Marchetti was especially fun to watch, shaking a pickup over the speaker cones to produce wild flute-like screaming, blowing through a clarinet mouthpiece or a harmonica through another pickup, toying with buzzing ground hum produced by unplugged cables.

Sometimes the soundscape was reminiscent of the boiling electronics of composer Iannis Xenakis; sometimes the extreme high-frequency pitches were painful. Yet it never taxed the attention span.

Appearing with Marchetti and Noetinger were two Northern California composers--John Bischoff, who produced an austere, droning soundscape, and Dajuin Yao, whose powerful, careening, surging half-hour piece was nearly symphonic in its sweep.

Unlike their French colleagues, Bischoff and Yao used laptop computers as launching pads.