Joel Vandroogenbroeck plays the synthesizer at a benefit concert under the trees in the leafy Guadalajara suburb of Pinar de la Venta. Photo by J. Pint.

“I like to use both high and low technology,” he told his audience, producing murky sounds from his Synthi A synthesizer (“the same kind Pink Floyd used in Dark Side of the Moon,” he notes), as well as crystal clear notes from a tiny piano keyboard on the screen of an iPod. Beside the thunder maker, the low-tech items included a thumb piano and a wooden frog.

Vandroogenbroeck’s new composition is called “Ambient Electronic Music for Silence: Imagenaction” and was accompanied by projected, computer-generated fractal images and space photographs taken by Nasa.

An album known as “Brainticket,” one of the very first to use electronic sounds, is Vandroogenbroeck’s most famous brain child.

“That was before the synthesizer,” he says, “and we actually used an untuned shortwave radio to produce a lot of the effects.”

According to The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, the encyclopedia of German electronic music, “Brainticket is one of the most revered and quoted of psychedelic albums. For 1971 it was nothing less than revolutionary ... a strange and unique album that’s still surprisingly startling and fresh today.”

After “Brainticket,” Vandroogenbroeck went off to Bali where he fell in love with a totally different kind of music, which local people often play nonstop for 24 hours a day, for religious reasons. In time, he learned to make and play an instrument called the Joged Bumbung, consisting of bamboo tubes hung like vibraphones or marimbas.

“They cut parts of the tube away and tune the hollow section to resonate with an adjacent tongue. The two parts have to be almost but not completely in tune. The sound is fantastic. And this is played with hammers made of bamboo and recycled tires!”

Back to Switzerland went the composer, where he promptly started a Joged Bumbung band, which successfully toured Europe.

“We even did concerts accompanying these Balinese instruments with gongs, strings, flutes and other classical instruments, which made a very good combination. I would like to do something like this here in Mexico. It’s such happy music.”

It is interesting to note that out of Bali came what is called minimalist music today, the kind played by Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Vandroogenbroeck says he first came to Mexico “by accident.” In 1984, he had won first prize in a Japanese competition for electronic music and was invited to San Francisco for three months. He wanted to stay longer but was running out of money. Then someone suggested he visit Mexico, which had just suffered a major devaluation.

“We took the train to Los Mochis and stopped in Creel, where I experienced a real case of culture shock. I saw pistoleros and Indians and felt like I had gone 200 years into the past.”

He then began visiting Mexico year after year until one day he returned to Basel to find his car buried under a meter of snow. He sold all he could, gave away the rest and came here to stay.

“There’s something magic about Mexico,” he says, and it seems Mexico finds something magic in the music of Joel Vandroogenbroeck.

For more on this always-avant-garde composer, see www.brainticket-art.com. Groups interested in arranging a concert should call Vandroogenbroeck at (33) 3151-0230.