If hackneyed, generic, new-agey images are your thing, and you like to pretend you like challenging music but really just want decorative melodies covered in noise, run right out to see Terry Riley's Sun Rings, now playing to sleeping audiences at BAM.

Laura, Christopher, and I came out of the performance last night all agreeing that we liked the music okay, but didn't like the visuals at all. Well, I woke up this morning with a decidedly more negative view. The music, posing as complex, meditative, and challenging, is really just noisy, boring, and unlistenable. It's a string quartet, written for and performed last night by the Kronos Quartet, that is played to the accompaniment of tape loops (I suspect it's digital at this point and not actual tape) of sounds of outer space recorded by NASA, digital synthy music washes, and bits of historical spoken audio (also, seemingly, from NASA). Riley is famous for incorporating tape loops into his music, often with much success. In fact, I have a Kronos CD of his music that uses this form to great effect (Requiem for Adam). But what I heard last night was extremely disappointing. The string music, though some of it is really lovely, is almost too easy on the ears at times--filled with harmonic cliches and easy resolutions of phrases. I think it's supposed to be providing comfort, but it instead evokes the image of an avant-garde composer trying to write mainstream music and falling flat on his face. And if that weren't bad enough, the music itself is constantly distracted by the constant space sounds and other pre-recorded audio in such a way that I was sometimes wondering if that faint rumbling I was hearing was actually the subway running under the BAM opera house (it might have been).

Add to this a chorus, singing from the pit. The text Riley set is from "One Earth, One People, One Love," a speech written by Alice Walker. I don't know about the speech itself, but the text within this piece comes off as a post-9/11 feel-good bit of pollyanna, such easy a trap to fall into when trying to create art in response to tragedy--especially a tragedy with a huge political component.

And all that is what was best about the piece. The truly awful part was the visual component by Willie Williams (with melodramatic lighting by Larry Neff). Scientific drawings, planet Earth rotating in lonely black space, Mars spinning alone in its eternal winter, flashes of flares on the sun's surface--and then the descent into really terrible cliches: Koyaanisqatsi redux images of traffic patterns juxtaposed with horse-and-carriages, a family looking lovingly at each other, mountains!, a flower!, nature in all her glory. And if the content wasn't bad enough the execution was as shoddy as a second-rate graduate student. Framed video that didn't fit the screen, awkward transitions, and generic stock-photo missteps out the whazoo--these are not worthy of the BAM Opera House, the Next Wave Festival, or any more of my time.

Post-concert soul cleansing was provided by Christopher's homemade peach-raspberry pie, a bottle of prosecco, and one-too many snifters of cognac. Additional soul cleansing this morning comes in the form of Beethoven symphonies--Eroica and #9, and it feels great.