If you had the right mindset and the wrong expectations, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio's Friday-night concert was something of an exercise in absurdist theater rather than a true concert. Imagine the surreal theater scene from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (but in a good way). Then imagine the theater turning into Space Mountain. Between the ridiculously high temperature in Slosberg Recital Hall, the long, unexplained set-up manoeuvers between songs and the pitch-black lighting throughout a few songs, the audience was generally bewildered throughout the concert.The Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio was founded by former Brandeis music student Gustav Ciamaga "in the days before MIDI, before synthesizers, when you had to use razorblades" to cut tape, said current BEAMS director Eric Chasalow (MUS). Such electronic music luminaries as John Cage and Alvin Lucier worked and premiered works at Brandeis during the studio's early years.

This concert is the 8th annual BEAMS "Marathon" concert. In the past, Marathon concerts have lasted up to twelve hours; this year's concert began at 8 p.m. and fell rather short of 12 hours in length. The performances varied in both visual and sonic aspects; one instrumental performance barely incorporated electronic elements, and other performances consisted entirely of pre-recorded music played back over the speakers of the dark auditorium.

Highlights included Prof. Wayne Marshall's (AAAS/MUS) "Nico Concreto 0-3 Months," which consisted of a photo montage and remix of his baby's cries, grunts and whines. Said one elderly concertgoer near me, "It's fabulous!"

Perhaps Marshall's background in hip-hop-a genre that people actually listen to-equipped him to make a remix of grunts and snorts into something highly entertaining, while other featured composers just baffled the audience. The lack of introductions for the works and the unconventional nature of the music itself left the audience with no idea as to when to clap or what to think.

The first performance, a vocal piece performed by Abbie Fisher and composed by James Borchers Ph.D. '12, took lyrics from various Petrarch poems. Sinister electronic whooshes, scrapes and other sounds accompanied Fisher's voice so closely that at times it was difficult to decide whether the hums and coos were coming from Fisher or from the recording. All Slosberg needed was some neon lights and some stumbling actors and we'd have had an Alphaville rendition of Mulholland Drive. This sort of exact marriage of electronic music and acoustic performance was what I expected from something that calls itself an Electro-Acoustic Music Studio.

A video of, like, Winamp visualizations followed. Naturally, the lights in the auditorium were turned all the way off, except the lights over the steps on either side of the auditorium. The issue with the darkness is, once the video ended, a three-part electronic work entitled "Possible Spaces" by Ciamaga himself began with no warning. At first I thought the video had broken and the music had continued on without it; after the second of Ciamaga's movements, I realized that the dark auditorium with nothing projected on the screen was an intentional setting for "Possible Spaces." Perhaps it's convention to play electronic music in pitch dark when there aren't any musicians to look at anyway. Regardless, the focal point that the video gave the audience previously was welcome, if only to give us somewhere to put our eyes. The long, rectangular floor lights along the sides of the auditorium along with the metallic-sounding scrapes and sparkles of "Possible Spaces" whizzing past our ears evoked not only that seminal Disney World ride but that seminal videogame, StarFox. I expected each movement to end with "MISSION: COMPLETE" and some cartoonish statements like "That was a close one, Fox!" Instead, the movements were met with tenuous applause and more movements.

After the intermission, the audience filed back into the auditorium only to watch composer Christian Gentry Ph.D. '13 and Hartford-based guitarist Matt Sargent and one of the audio engineers debug the connections between laptop and mixing board for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes. Said one concertgoer, "They've got five more minutes and I'm walking home. This is unprofessional." Luckily, Gentry's performance, "Dixie Highway," was rather entertaining, if a little long. Gentry read José R. Ballesteros' poem "Dixie Highway" along with electronic samples, jazzy piano chords and Sargent's guitar strains. Gentry's somewhat David Byrne-ian delivery was a little hilarious but at the same time very welcome in a more serious respect. Lines like "When we pull up at the house/it occurs to me/that I never saw any other person/outside of the car" and "knowing that as long as we/don't step out of the car/the whole world is ours" come straight out of the much-parodied "futuristic" aesthetic of the 1980s (think Gary Numan's "Cars"), but I applaud the somewhat concrete meaning proffered by the song. In the program notes, Gentry says that Ballesteros was inspired to write "Dixie Highway" after an afternoon of driving around southern Florida, which Ballesteros sees as "representing all that is beautiful and gut-wrenching about America." After an hour and a half of mostly un-visual, un-human works, this jazzy vocal work was quite refreshing in that it had more to say than "this is what electrons sound like, in my opinion."

A performance entitled "Covalence//Concertino for timpani and percussion quartet with electronic miscellany," by composer Peter McMurray MFA '08, was promising in both title and set-up: Four percussionists were to share a number of drums and xylophone-type instruments and, I assumed, "electronic miscellany." Instead, the conductor of this work set a boom box on a chair, turned it on, and he and the percussionists proceeded to spend about ten minutes (another ridiculously long set-up time) arranging the vibraphone, marimba, xylophone and many timpani on the stage. This was the first performance to use any instruments besides voice. I'm not sure why the timpani couldn't have been arranged to perfection before the middle of the concert. Regardless, once the instruments were arranged, the conductor turned off the boombox and the performers played a decidedly acoustic work. At one point, one of the musicians began to play jacks on the surface of one of the timpani. These are the kind of theatrics I came to see at such a concert. It was certainly very interesting to see the musicians interact onstage, but I wondered: Where were the "electronic miscellany"? At the beginning of the third movement of the concertino, I got my answer. The four musicians moved to the center of the stage, just behind the four or five timpani, and bent their bodies so their faces were almost touching the timpani. Some opera-type music began playing over the auditorium's sound system. At this point I stopped taking notes. How various audience members slept through this, I have no idea.

Another performance looked very exciting on the program: according to the program notes, Shawn Greenlee's "Augur" used "drawing as a performance gesture in conjunction with the methods for generating digital sound from graphic patterns scanned via a live camera or stored within the computer.The effect is a situation where singularities and chance occurrences manifest through the exploration of how an image can sound." Greenlee was going to draw and have the computer interpret the shapes of his lines into sounds, and sure enough, this is what he did. Unfortunately, the computer's idea of what a gently curved pencil line should sound like was kind of ear-splitting. We left during this performance with two works remaining in the program.

It's clear that the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio has the power to create some works both entertaining and thought-provoking. Borchers' "Secretum" was a perfect marriage of the electronic and that most acoustic of all instruments, the voice. Prof. Marshall's remix of his baby's cries and gurgles was more than just the product of an ecstatic parent. Throughout "Nico Concreto 0-3 Months," the audience giggled politely and marveled over Marshall's creation of a groove out of the comical snorts and grunts of baby Nico. I think probably the audience was relieved to the point of giddiness to have something concrete placed in front of them after the rest of the first hour and a half of performances, but that doesn't diminish the obvious ear (and eye) for rhythm that Marshall displays in the short work. However, the majority of the works were not always very audience-friendly, both in presentation and in composition. Maybe I don't really dig electronic music, but based on my brief informal audience poll, I don't think I was alone in finding much of the concert unimpressive.