"KNOLES HYPNOTIZES WITH HER SONIC BEAT"

Percussionist Amy Knoles has long been one of Los Angeles new music luminaries. In part because she lies bare the ambiguity and malleability of the very term new music. Saturday night at the Los Angeles Theater Center, the term translated to a hypnotic display of post-digital impressionism, in the form of her multimedia piece "2 x 10 x 10 x 10 +1"

Though best known as a charter member of the EAR Unit, Knoles has worked on other creative projects, including finding expressive avenues for the MIDI-controller known s the K.A. T. MIDI Mallet. The marimba-like keyboard affords her access to whatever palette of sampled sounds she desires.

Her first low tone coincided with a blast of stage smoke from behind her, and smoke continued to be a recurring motif, threading through Richard Hines’ visual mosaic of projections, as well. The sum effect of the piece even alluded to the quality of smoke: seductive, ambiguous, ephemeral, and potentially hazardous.

With simple harmonic pads and undulant beats, the piece owes as much to pop and ambient music as any more complex mode of serious music.

By Josef Woodard

The Los Angeles Times June 12, 2000
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(Review of the sextet version of "Squint")

Short Takes: Sextet's music covers range of emotions
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Arts & Entertainment writers offer capsule comments on this, that and the other thing ...

Like the grinning and frowning masks of theater, we often categorize music as sad or happy, when in fact the best pieces cultivate real human emotions that fall in the shades between these poles. Such was the case with the performance by the California EAR Unit on Saturday at Bellefield Hall Auditorium.

The adventurous new music sextet appeared on Pitt's Music on the Edge series. Three of the six pieces it performed gravitated toward sadness, with slow and lamenting music anchoring them, but filled out emotionally in fascinating and complex ways.

Composer and EAR Unit percussionist Amy Knoles' "Squint" did so by juxtaposing crawling music with oncoming fast cars at night on a California freeway (projected on a screen), balancing the latter's innate compartmentalizing of humans with epic ambient sound in the audience-surrounding speakers.

-- Review by Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Critic

Dieties of the Big Bang
by Alan Rich

When Amy Knoles played her multimedia percussion piece TwoXTenXTenXTen+One (=2,001) at the L.A. Theater Center a couple of weeks ago, she began with a thwack on an actual ashcan, a kind of tribute to the avant-garde spirit of time immemorial. But mostly she got her fantastic range and variety of sound by banging with small sticks on an unimposing, boxy gadget on a table in front of her, K.A.T. MIDI Mallet by name, that had been preprogrammed to send forth a galaxy of sounds beyond the reach of normal instruments, infinitely variable, infinitely fascinating, made all the more magical by puffs of stage smoke, and by a video display that included some fancy dance steps by Amys pet cockatiel Fu Fo Shit Shit (honest!). Where was the music this time? All around, it was, and you better get used to it.

Knoles this slender, blond Diana of the Big Bang remains a mainstay of the E.A.R. Unit while building a couple of parallel careers on her own. One of those involves teaching; I spent a rewarding day with her not long ago at Chino State Prison, where she had guided an eager group of prisoners into building their own instruments and composing on them. She has performed with Bang on a Can, and has recorded Varèse Ionisation, a cornerstone of the percussion repertory, with the Ensemble Modern (Produced by Frank Zappa) unreleased so far, for reasons somewhat baffling. Her solo disc on Echograph, Men in the Cities, is a collection of works written for performance with various multimedia installations, including the Robert Longo exhibition at the County Museum that gives the disc its name.

June 23, 2000