New and zesty sonic experiences from 175 East

By WILLIAM DART

They've lounged around on tatty sofas staging John Cage, conscripted cups and saucers for a piece by Michael Finnissey and, on Sunday, the musicians of 175 East will wear headphones so they can keep up with a click track for Mort subite, a work by British composer Brian Ferneyhough, named after a Belgian beer.

It's been six years since James Gardner created 175 East to inject a little alt.music into the concert scene. They've brought us alternative classics from the likes of Cage and Feldman alongside cutting-edge commissions from here and abroad, opening a window on some new and zesty sonic experiences.

This Sunday, the group is offering a star turn in Scottish pianist Lynda Cochrane, whom Gardner describes as "doing everything from pretty cheesy stuff, including an album of film-music themes, to hard-nosed modernism".

Don't be put off, Gardner adds, by "the misguided notion that contemporary is very loud and plink plonk. Joanna Baillie's piece Charh is extremely mellow and subdued, creating gong-like sonorities from a prepared piano."

Cochrane is very much the soloist in Gardner's own work, More than one attempt, which "starts off like a slightly mad piano concerto and then the piano and the rest of the instruments start working in their own time zones".

Gardner works through the other offering on Sunday's menu. Nick Chase's Crush racket diversion, with a title that sounds as if it's waiting for a dance mix, is "a little miniature, like a palate cleanser".

Marc Yeats' Davey Jones' Locker is "a bit of a tone poem, with the xylophone doing bones in the Saint-Saens tradition". Only with Peter Maxwell Davies' clarinet and piano work Hymnos does one sense caution, although Gardner's thumbnail description of "angry and in-your-face, like so much of British music in the late-60s" might be just the right provocation for some punters.

175 East are on the air this week (check out Concert FM tomorrow at 8pm) but you're experiencing only some of the group's impact if you stay in Radioland.

Gardner sees what they do as "essentially designed for a live audience, with all the energy that is part of such an event. If live music has anything to offer it's that sort of energy".

Audiences are growing, although too many Aucklanders are still missing out on revelatory music-making in what must be one of the city's most elegant venues, in terms of both acoustics and architecture.

Hopetoun Alpha is a minute's walk from K Road, far from the groves of academe, but then Gardner has firm ideas on musical ghettos: "You start talking about targeting audiences and then you end up ghettoising.

"Remember that when you're targeting for anything, there's always the chance you're missing someone out who just might like it."

* 175 East, Hopetoun Alpha, Sunday at 8pm.