Michael Snow, Alan Licht, Aki Onda

The Snow/Licht/Onda concert was proof that the most unconventional of instruments can be used to create imaginative soundscapes. Canadian pianist/electronic manipulator Michael Snow has led a life of diversity as a celebrated avant-garde filmmaker and improvising artist. New York-based guitarist Alan Licht has operated in a variety of musical spheres, influenced by everything from the minimalism of Steve Reich to no wave bands like Sonic Youth. Japanese-born, New York-based Aki Onda is an equally intrepid artist who, aside from composition, production and photography, uses a most unlikely instrument -- a cassette Walkman -- to create a personal view of music as texture and experience. The trio's hour-long performance, while not its first, found them still very much in exploratory territory, looking for ways to shape sounds ranging from spare and atmospheric to dense and industrial. While there was little relationship to the familiar, the set had its own form, even if suggestive of a relentless barrage of sound.

Snow, at various points, put a portable radio up to a microphone, broadcasting whatever he happened to find, including a radio announcer discussing a festival taking place in Victoriaville. Like many other moments during this often intense spatial-temporal audioscape, serendipity reigned --the postmodern self-referentiality of the radio announcement being a prime example. But perhaps what made the set so interesting was, above all, the audience' awareness that many of the sounds being produced by Snow, Licht and Onda were as new to the artists as to the audience. Improvisation as texture, not as rhythm, melody or fixed form.