Passing through a row of prisonlike metal doors in the backroom maze of Roxy's NoDimension Space (better known as NoD), I enter a dark room lined with partially disassembled antique radios and tape recorders. Beyond this electronic graveyard, at the far end of the room, sits a roughly wired Internet server pumping bytes onto the World Wide Web and blinking like a Christmas tree.

Walking past the computer and turning into a narrow room, I'm greeted by Ladín Železný, the drummer for SkupinaC, an ambient music band with subtle jazz influences. It seems as though I've wandered into a rehearsal nook for a laptop computer music act. But Železný is quick to point out that this isn't the band's studio. It's the control room for an Internet broadcast project called Radio Lemurie.

Founded in 2003, Radio Lemurie is a meeting place for experimental artists like SkupinaC and Michal Rataj, who will close this year's VeCer Lemurie concert series at NoD. Over the past few weeks, the series has been presenting adventurous Czech radio artists and composers in a live setting. Given the Czech prowess for engineering, coupled with the country's strong tradition of musical training, the mix of technology and Czech music seems natural.

This energetic combination of electrons and talent has for years been audible via Internet radio projects like Czech Radio 3's rAdioCUSTICA, Radio Lemurie and Radioateliér, which airs every Saturday just after midnight on Czech Radio 3's regular broadcast (105 FM).

Audio dining

VeCer Lemurie's closing concert will definitely bring home the advantages of live music over virtual broadcasts. Not only is SkupinaC a group that has gone full-circle from acoustic instruments to laptop computers back to live instruments in real time, but they've recently added food to their performance.

As SkupinaC's bass and "dissolved strings" player Jan Dufek explains, "For years we were doing experimental soundscapes, acoustic experiments in space and so on. Then we met a wonderful cook named Rudolf Šmíd. While drinking beer with him one night, Šmíd just decided we should prepare food during the concert and include the recipe for the food throughout the program."

On a recording of SkupinaC's January premiere food/performance, you can hear a suave narrator weaving in and out of the audio collage, chanting a recipe in Czech over Dufek's bass, Aleš Killián's guitar and Železný's drums.

Making contemporary music more palatable has an added benefit, says Dufek. "Once the plates of ratatouille or whatever are in the laps of the audience, they are less likely to make an early exit," he notes. But there's also legacy in the idea. "As in the history of Renaissance or Baroque painting, we are simply putting food back into the picture by putting food back into our art."

A different spin on Mozart

With over a decade of musical works including arrangements for the Ahn Trio's EMI recording Groovebox, radio compositions, theater music and soundtracks for television, Michal Rataj brings to VeCer Lemurie a slightly more tame work he's titled Deconstructing Mozart.

"I decided to do this composition/performance as sort of a personal version of Mozart celebrations," says Rataj. "It's not to celebrate all the fascinating work Mozart composed, but how he made himself immortal at the very microscopic level of musical structure."

Even though Deconstructing Mozart is mostly improvisation, its foundation is inspired by elements Rataj describes as Mozart's "combinatorics, sense of instrumentation, light polyphony and precise harmonic formulations of musical structure." Indeed, when Rataj performs the piece it is possible to hear Mozart unfold in beautiful moments that uncannily echo 20th-century music and free jazz.

Rataj's theoretical underpinnings for his piano work may not sound as fun as a plate of ratatouille, but both acts offer savory contemporary sounds. And at press time a late addition to the concert was announced, a duo known as Birds Build Nest Underground performing works for "five turntables and prepared vinyl."

Granted, finding one's way through the puzzle of contemporary and experimental music can be a lot tougher than finding Radio Lemurie's offices in the dusty back corridors of NoD. And whether VeCer Lemurie's closing night really offers what Rataj calls "sound organized in time, that will be remembered across time" — well, only time will tell.