NEW MUSIC L A 1987 : ‘L.A. ECLECTRIC’ : MUSIC FESTIVAL ENDS WITH TELEVISION

There was something depressingly prophetic about the scene Sunday evening at Parachute in West Hollywood: The New Music L.A. festival ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with an audience watching television.

“L.A. Eclectric,” produced by Modern Visual Communications with CalArts and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, proved to be a sort of MTV circus for the trendier-than-thou crowd. TV sets and speakers emitting the electronic scores ringed the central area of Parachute, which, appropriately enough, appears to be a fashion warehouse.

Natural images and source material dominated the techno-centric program. Robert Campbell’s “Epiphany,” for example, manipulated eerie, monochrome visions of what seemed to be grass and flames on one screen, presided over by an Ansel Adams-like moon on another.

The most effective merging of sight and sound was in David Stout’s “E-scapes.” Here the graphics were generated electronically but presented poster images of sunrises and seascapes in three vignettes, supported on equal terms by an active accompaniment.

The backgrounds of Stout’s “A Prisoner of Light” offered stunning visual geometries, but the foreground--a deliberately blurry mad scene for actress Lisa Gershten--seemed coy and cryptic.

The agenda’s longest piece turned out to be its most static. Michael Scroggins’ kaleidoscopic graphics danced like an animated crazy quilt to Barry Schrader’s gently droning “California Dream,” attempting to accumulate a climax rather than develop one.

The strongest music stood alone. Mark Waldrep’s well-defined “Morphism II,” based on the sounds of water and birds, worked evocatively in the cavernlike Parachute. Frederick Lesemann’s “Shotsona,” a jittery, percussive dance created entirely from a recorded coyote’s howl, was also effectively structured.