Music comes in many forms and for Gino Robair, music is more than just a 4-minute song heard through the airwaves of someone’s personal radio.

Robair is an improvisational percussionist from San Francisco who performs a style of music both creative and unique in its own light. Robair and members from the School of Music performed an improvisational set on Wednesday at the Old Baptist Foundation Recital Hall. The performance began with a 20-minute solo by Robair followed by a 40-minute set with the other members.

As Robair sat down in front of his snare and tom drum, the lights dimmed and a faint echo hovered above the music hall. From the darkness emerged the sound effects of a suspenseful sci-fi, performed live with an array of different instruments and household items.

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“A lot of what I do is focused around drums but I don’t always play drums with the normal implements,” he said. “I have tried to find ways to excite a drum head that is different than just hitting it with a stick or a mallot.”

Robair used various objects like motors and found objects like Styrofoam and blades off a street sweeper in his performance. Creating a sound most people would overlook, he said.

“Using everyday objects as musical instruments is something I really enjoy,” he said. “Everything is fair game for a percussionist to play so I like to take advantage of that.”

Robair said he likes to use a prepared piano and electronics like small analog synthesizers.

“I write for a magazine called Electronic Musician, so I get a chance to try out new software and hardware all the time,” he said.

Ron Coulter, a percussion, improvisation and jazz studies senior lecturer, facilitated the event. Coulter said it was a pleasure getting to spend time with Robair.

“He is like an encyclopedia of this sort of improvising contemporary art music,” Coulter said. “He is highly unique.”

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Robair said he formulated his own creative style at an early age. As a toddler, he played pots and pans he found around his parents’ house. He began taking drum and piano lessons when he was seven, he said.

“I realized I wanted to compose by my junior high school years and built from there,” Robair said. “When I got into high school and college, I started learning about more unusual kinds of music like avant-garde and things that were unpopular.”

As an undergraduate, Robair founded a record label named Rastascan Records to promote music and different projects he was involved in. After almost 30 years, the record company has approximately 70 releases in the form of casettes, CD’s, LPs, flexi discs among other formats, he said.

“(Rastascan Records is) more a promotional tool then anything else,” he said. “If you want to promote yourself to radio stations and in the press and to get performances in festivals, they like to see you have a hard copy of something.”

In the mid ‘80s, Robair began working on a book of improvisational structures in the form of an opera. Named “I, Norton,” the opera follows a man named Joshua Norton who declares himself emperor of the United States in an effort to clean up lawlessness and corruption in the government, he said.

To challenge political ideals, Norton sends proclamations to newspapers. Robair uses these proclamations as the opera’s libretto, he said.

As creativity is important to Robair, each performance is meant to use different platforms so people can improvise and meet their own personal talents to perform the opera in various ways.

“The idea is to have five performances that could all be radically different,” he said. “For me, as a composer, it is more interesting than seeing the same thing over and over again. I like to see people challenge. I like to be surprised.”

Throughout his career, Robair has done works on a variety of different platforms in the music industry. Outside of his work as a drummer in bands like The Splatter Trio and Pink Mountain, he has created music for dance, theater, radio, television, silent film and gamelan orchestra. He also served as the music director for the CBS animated series “The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat.”

As an innovative artist, Robair offered up advice for aspiring young musicians.

“Never give up the craziest idea you have because people will tell you it’s crazy, but if you really believe it’s possible, you should pursue it,” he said. “There are no rules in music.”

Kyle Sutton can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @KyleSuttonDE or by phone at 536-3311 ext. 254.