L.A. WEEKLY
June 12 1998
by Alan Rich
Fluctuating Sameness

I furloughed my eardrums from the Saturday concerts; they had paid their dues on Wednesday during the 60-minute duration of Carl Stone's Dong Baek, an electronic work created live by Stone at a small computer activating a large selection of samples. The pleasure in this kind of music is in the association; in a long and genuinely beautiful passage midway in the work Stone seemed to locate both me and his music in the bell tower of a medieval cathedral - Notre Dame, perhaps, hanging out with Quasimodo - with the bells pealing ecstatically, an organist trying out luscious harmonies far below, and a gorgeous vista unfolding, down a river and across some meadows. Then, however, came intense, ear-gnawing pain, horrendous masses of sound piled upon sound, made the more agonizing in the confinement of a small room at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, one of the festival's principal venues). I cannot, of course, claim that my 73-year-old ears are the receptors Carl Stone and his younger colleagues have in mind when laying out their statements on contemporary communicativeness; yet I had heard beauty

-- Alan Rich
L.A. Weekly
September 12 2002

full review available at : http://www.laweekly.com/ink/98/29/a-rich.php