From Newsday, June 2004

To outsiders, Japanese culture offers enticingly contradictory images, ranging from the austerity of a Zen garden to the gaudy, pulsating nightscape of Tokyo. Thursday's Japan Society concert of world- premiere compositions performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars highlighted the richness and unpredictability of today's Japanese musical scene.

The program opened with "Gion" by Nobukazu Takemura, best known for his sound effects for AIBO, Sony's robotic dog, along with a varied output in trip-hop, ambient and techno music.

The cool, spare first movement of "Gion" builds on fragments of music traded off among the instrumentalists. A quizzical clarinet figure gives way to brief twangs on electric guitar, a sly bass riff or a sprinkle of notes on cello, vibraphone or keyboard. It might be half-remembered wisps of Esquivel.

Working the computer, Takemura joined guitarist John Benthal, bassist Robert Black, percussionist David Cossin, keyboardist Lisa Moore, cellist Wendy Sutter and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn in the central movements of "Gion." Here the sound world grew denser, enriched with watery twitters and a faint electronic wind. Instrumental phrases were electronically augmented and stretched like taffy, while Sutter and Black engaged in a wary duet. The roaring final moments dissolved into an eerie, translucent sonic mist.

Somei Satoh's "Shu" ("Spells") examines the ambiguity of its title, which can mean "incantation," "curse" or even "prayer." Satoh's prior works explore Japanese concepts of time and space: in his words, how "silence and the prolongation of sound are the same thing in terms of space."

This notion of the immanence of silence seemed to shape the first movement of "Shu." It opens with a velvety, somber piano chord, followed by a long silence, another chord, more silence and a whispered cello tone. Do the sounds rupture the silence, as Westerners tend to believe, or is the silence a living, expansive entity that swallows up the sounds?

The virtuosity of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, seductive in its own right, invited such meditations. Cossin's gongs and Sutter's cello swelled in and out of nothingness, while the rattle of pebbles in a dish, the chthonic hum of the bass and the soulful interventions of the clarinet took on cosmic intensity. In an extended solo, bassist Black summoned surpassingly subtle gradations of tone, sometimes more like shudders than sounds.

The second and fourth movements of "Shu," in a more familiar minimalist idiom, open with iridescent, Debussy-like splashes on piano, gorgeously played by Moore, over which the other soloists, first singly, then in unison, weave a passionate exchange. The plaintive, descending phrases of the final movement rise to a crashing climax, then suddenly stop, with the reverberation of the instruments allowed to die out over a long, spellbinding moment.

These demanding, unusual works not only won over Thursday's attentive audience, but even made the chaos of a rainy night in New York sound newly wonderful and strange.