There was a time when it was not such a painless matter to make live computer music-I can recall electronic artists early in this decade who, lacking laptops, brought a whole PC and monitor on stage: serious dedication. Nowadays anyone can plug in their cheapo laptop and inflict a gnarly aural stream of ones and zeros on the ears of humanoids (though you might ask Girltalk about the joys of having your Dell laptop flake while dozens of people expecting a show watch you troubleshoot it).

As computers became widely available in the 1980's, a few pioneers such as "electro-acoustic" innovator Carl Stone wrangled increasingly sophisticated music out of them. He is still on the scene and performed a wild and wonderful set at Scholz Garden last month. This innovative music pulsed with ideas, constructing delicate, whimsical, imaginative micro-worlds. While there were ample blobs of the psychedelic digitally-processed textures beloved of electroids and knob-twiddlers, underneath an actual composition hummed along.

Unlike the social- functional, beat-heavy, dance-derived electronic music mainstream, which rarely shows evidence of thoughtful composition and songwriting, Stone's art contains layers of interwoven melodic and harmonic structure, and crucially, actual thematic development. Think about how musically dull much (most?)electronic dance music tends to be: it might work very well for the sake of the groove, but would anyone contemplate covering those songs in another idiom-say, bluegrass, jazz, or salsa? (By way of contrast, a classic song like "Ring of Fire" could be played in a hundred styles). The work of Stone stands as a challenge to the lazy dullards of electronica: the bar has been raised.