From his laptop, everything falls right into place

L.A. composer from Tokyo uses sound to create scenes, readies for ‘Daimatsu.’

- MARK SWED MUSIC CRITIC

MARK SWED Los Angeles Times

LAPTOP composer Carl Stone, far left, takes a curtain call with saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu and butoh dancer Taketeru Kudo at Za Koenji in Tokyo on Nov. 1.

The Suido-bashi metro station was packed with Tokyo rockers on the last Saturday in October for an Oasis reunion concert at the Tokyo Dome, a landmark baseball stadium across the street. I, however, wandered around the block onto a nondescript residential street seeking out a building with a secreted Ftarri sign.

That is a cramped basement performance space with room for 20 folding chairs and a small stage on which there were two tables set up for electronics.

Shelves along the walls were filled with hundreds of obscure CDs and DVDs for sale featuring improvisors and avant-gardists. This sold-out event featured young sound artist Elico Suzuki, who goes by suzueri. She had that morning made little transparent plastic cubes with electronic circuitry inside. When she pushed them around her table, they emitted whistles and wails, which a giggly suzueri accompanied by singing into a microphone, adding her own charmingly oddball whistles and wails.

Next to her was a 72-year-old cult-legend laptop composer dressed in black and wearing his trademark fedora, conveying ageless cool. There was no way to figure out what Carl Stone was up to. He sat and stared at his screen, positioned away from the audience, as inscrutable as someone at a cafe working on a laptop.

There were no wheres or whys to what came out of his iPad. Stone transforms and distorts sounds he records of our sonic environment as radically and as astonishingly as a sculptor does with stone.