kronos quartet w/matmos

In the 1980s, the Kronos Quartet seemed dangerous: they were funky, black-clothed gate-crashers at classical music’s gate, letting the unruly clamor of bohemia into the concert hall. Twenty years later, they have aged into a certain “cool older uncle” status, and it suits them. As they sauntered onstage at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on Friday night, I was put in mind of latter-day Sonic Youth; the four members projected a similar kind of craggy hipster Zen.

The concert on Friday was part of the Kronos Quartet’s Perspectives series, during which the members were basically given license to play whatever they wanted, and invite whomever they pleased, over the course of several nights of concerts. With a curatorial mindset and Rolodex like the Kronos’s, you could be certain beforehand that there were going to be some colorful sounds and characters on display. I went to Friday’s show, which was subtitled “Playing With Toys and Technology.”

Featured guests included the fellow San Franciscans Matmos, an experimental duo whose albums often have an oblique, high-conceptual bent. (The Rose Has Teeth In the Mouth of the Beast was a series of sonic collages dedicated to gay icons, while A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure made rather gruesome musique concréte out of the sounds of an operating room.)

The two groups collaborated on a generously sprawling and sometimes messy work called “For Terry Riley.” The work opened up with a small orchestra of pre-recorded scuffles, clicks and twitches before the quartet joined in, adding another layer of percussive noises — scrapes, plucks, odd staccato accents — to the texture. The whole thing gathered in force and momentum, spreading out into a glistening, enveloping web of tiny noises, before Matmos blotted it all out with aggressive blasts of fuzzy distortion. Projected onto the wall behind the group, as is customary for Kronos, were visuals: in this case, swaying plants and trees that transformed into pinwheeling, nightmarish psychedelic cartoons as the music grew louder and more frenzied.

Other guests during the evening included Margaret Leng Tan, who, the program noted, has been recognized by critics as “the world’s first toy piano virtuoso.” This is exactly as awesome as it sounds (note: not subjective. This sounds incredibly awesome). Leng Tan sat down to a piano in front of her that had been prepared, John Cage-style, with a toy piano to her right, a tiny hand-cranked music box on her stand, and various other tiny noisemakers. Her first piece, written by the Australian Erik Griswold, was part artistic decathlon, part romp-a-room; other instruments she played during this piece included a bicycle horn (lodged, for real, under her armpit, which she honked just as you would imagine); a slide whistle, and a bicycle bell. It was fearless and amazing. Afterward, she sat down to a menagerie of plastic, toy instruments to perform a traditional Chinese dramatic opera as arranged for … toys. It was dumbfounding. And long.

The quiet heart of the evening, however, was neither the young-cool-kids-in-residence Matmos or the colorful, slightly kooky avant-garde pianist Leng Tan; it was Victor Gama, a quietly serious, even severe-looking Portuguese-Angolan young composer whose two works formed the spiritual center of the concert. During his first piece, “Sol(t)O,” shaky camera footage of ruined houses in the Namib desert screened on the back wall — the site, scrolling text informed us, of a suspiciously killed Angolan anthropologist’s field studies. Onstage, Gama performed on a variety of instruments he made himself. Some resembled no other instrument you’ve ever seen or heard — such as a thumb piano inverted into the belly of a snare drum — while others, like a huge, free-standing zitherlike instrument with silk strings, seemed to be ancient ethnomusicological discoveries.

His second work, “Rio Cunene,” brought Kronos onstage, who played their own instruments, but also picked up and played makeshift, tiny instruments made by children from the Angolan village of Xangongo, instruments that had been built from the remnants of military materials. The symbolism, as first violinist David Harrington plucked on an oblong, sad-looking little mandolin-like thing made from artillery shells, was heartbreaking, and, more than any of the other pieces performed that night, got at the sense of mournful dignity that small children’s toys can carry with them.