Leaving the performance, the crowd wondered what they’d just witnessed. As they headed down the steps from Movements Gallery and into the raucous Sixth Street night, they talked among themselves. Was that real? Was it Memorex? Had the guy who’d just fled the stage really lost his mind?

Nobody was quite sure.

I, too, wondered what composer / electronic wiz Andrew Baron was up to. For certain, Baron’s “Century Plant,” a piece in which the songwriter conducts
a virtual orchestra while creating live “loops” with his acoustic guitar and a delay pedal, was among the most clever live shows I’d seen. Instinctively, I felt the mischief at hand, and I marveled at the guy’s ingenuity.

In a series of intriguing encounters with the self-taught maestro, I’d soon
discover just how talented, and impossibly abstract, the “real” Andrew
Baron is. He’s reluctant to discuss the why’s and what-for’s of his work
because he believes that work is his primary raison d’etre. If not for the
music, perhaps, he wouldn’t be in this world at all….

In any case, I came away from our conversations with the sense that I’d met
a man from another realm, who was perhaps from another time, even. His
vision fascinated me, and his abilities really did astound me. Therefore,
it didn’t seem far-fetched when a film editor from CBS News who’d seen
“Century Plant” during SXSW flew back to Austin the following week to see
it again. The editor likened Baron to a modern-day Mozart. Well, now, I
thought, having spoken with the LA fan: That’s a stretch.

But in the weeks following, I began to think that maybe Baron, a shy young
man who studied philosophy and learned programming as a kid on one of Texas Instrument’s first personal computers, was truly a musical genius.

With “Century Plant” and another score Baron played for me at his home
studio, it was clear that the Austinite hears entire “symphonies” in his
head. Hearing the composition, he then plucks the parts from his brain –
parts for flute, violin, cello, bass, etc. – and commits them to a
synthesizer/recorder, which automatically annotates the score. He later has musicians such as Will Taylor, Susan Barrett, Graham Reynolds and others perform the music for recording. For Century Plant, Steve Brudniak mastered the score.

But like the decidedly non-linear Baron, in telling his story my perceptions begin to lose their linear movement. So here, I must regress to March and explain the performance that tipped me off.

“Century Plant” consists of three visible elements: Baron, a projection screen and a technical assistant. On the screen behind him, a videotaped orchestra plays on “cue,” pausing during his banter, then resuming when the
maestro finishes. Pre-recorded by a different set of musicians, the score is woven into the video so that the whole performance depends on the
split-second coordination of real-time and pre-recorded actions and sounds.
Time blurs. Reality chuckles. It’s all happening at once. Moreover, one
small misstep and the whole thing is thrown off – like a bad dub job in a
Spaghetti western. And the magic is lost.

Live, Baron himself occupies a nebulous realm. He is simultaneously the
narrator/guitar-player/maestro, and the subject of the narrator’s tale. In
the tale, we hear and see the portrait of an artist — a young man who
concludes that his contributions to modern music are misunderstood, and who ultimately flees the performance, screaming down the stairs, never to be
heard from again. When the piece reaches its crescendo, Baron the narrator
and Baron the tragic composer merge. In the event that Movements does
“Century Plant” again, though, I’ll say no more. Better to say what one can
say about the real Andrew Baron….

He’s not really shy; he’s unintentionally elusive. He’s off somewhere
hearing music, and yet he’s quite present. He has great faith in his music,
but he’s very humble. I suspect that he channels.

And yet, my attempts to have him explain “Century Plant,” or a score he
recently wrote for dancer Ellen Bartel, led to fuzzy retreats and diversions.

To wit, Baron emailed me one day and said, “…In a nut shell, I would prefer
to be perceived though my art rather than through my daily, popular human
qualities; I would rather someone think that I am as beautiful as my music
or that I speak like my poetry, all of which I can sculpt through
performance, but (can) hardly live up to in reality, due to all of the
trivial, normal details that I must attend to, like washing the dishes,
going to the post office, moping the floor…etc. And while all of this may
sound kinda egocentric, actually, I notice that one’s lofty opinion of an
art work can become lesser when the art is defined…. So, some mystery
behind the artist is needed to preserve the value of the art, so that the
observer can infer what ever is desired. Maybe. Sometimes? For me….”

Instead of reading pomposity into it, I felt sure that Baron was simply
being frank. I believe he feels that preference is a matter of perception.
And as such, how can one explain or define or quantify one’s own art. Its
value remains in the mind of the beholder… Besides, what does the artist’s
“real” life have to do with anything?

Of life in general, we also spoke. The meaning of life, to Baron, seems
inextricably bound to one’s work or art. That alone gives us purpose. He
became further convinced of this while studying philosophy at Bates
College. “Either there are no answers, or they’re there but we can never
know them,” he told me one afternoon as he played achingly lovely melodies
on his piano. “If we don’t know them now, then we can’t have any real
purpose other than what we create. Everybody designs their own existence….”

I pushed for the “real” meaning behind Century Plant. Did it reflect how he
feels as a musician, a person? Was the Andrew Baron in the piece parallel
with AB in reality?

He smiled, and evaded. Then I realized that he’d already answered my
question: Everybody designs his or her own existence — thus, the
triflings with time and perception and truth in “Century Plant.”

After many earnest emails and conversations, I’m left to surmise that
Andrew Baron, the real-time AB, is all about the moment. And despite my
questions to him, I now think the answers (my perception only, mind you)
are simple: Nothing is what it seems. Ask. Seek. And you’ll still wonder.

-Shermakaye Bass, special to The Austin Statesman, XL’nt.