Ensemble Dal Niente. Photo courtesy of Liquid Music and the artists

Tuesday’s Liquid Music performance in (Knight Arts grantee) Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s intimate St. Paul Music Room was packed, and for good reason: Chicago-based new music collective, Ensemble Dal Niente, was on hand to perform a sampler of multimedia experimental sound works, including the world premiere of Twin Cities composer Noah Keesecker’s new piece, “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” commissioned by American Composers Forum.

Keesecker’s work is a fluid patchwork of densely layered sounds, mood and color. For your eyes: a video montage, featuring a riot of vividly patterned rubber balls bouncing in slow motion: pouring out elevator doors and down stairs, off an upper floor balcony and into an office-building atrium, where they spill onto the leaves of the decorative plants below. The ball sequences are interspersed with rhythmic light patterns: diffuse globes, like Christmas lights seen through a frosted window; a bright, narrow line, pulsing in time, cutting across a field of black. For your ears: a rich mix of instrumentation and intermittent electronic whirs and jangles, sweeping phrases and almost-melodies by turns melancholy and frenetic.

Noah Keesecker, composer and multimedia artist. Photo: American Composers Forum

In an interview about the commission with American Composers Forum (a Knight Arts grantee), Keesecker says, “This electro-acoustic chamber work with video is a love/hate relationship between analog and digital sound; a sibling rivalry that hugs as much as it hits.” When asked about integrating the work’s various audio/visual elements, he explains that the video comes last, that the visual pieces are integral but, ultimately, at the service of the sound: “I imagine video as a kind of auditory antimatter and I try to think of the eye as an ear. It’s not quite narrative, it’s not entirely abstract, but it is very precisely cut and edited to the audio.”

The night started with “Piano Hero #1” by Stefan Prins, for which a single performer manipulates a keyboard, webcam, found video and midi-player. The piece involves remixing various audio/visual elements of a video clip – showing a pair of hands manipulating the raw elements of a piano, its keys removed and bundled, then thrown like sticks against the exposed strings of the instrument in a percussive crash. The movement and sounds of hands on keys – both the live performer’s hands on an electronic keyboard and those of the hands seen projected in the video clip shown behind him – stutter and flow capriciously, any nascent melodic phrasing caught at its inception, interrupted and redirected, sometimes doubled back on itself. The work is a playful exercise in frustrating the easy expectations of the ear and eye, a witty deconstruction of what it means to play the piano.

The rest of the evening’s lineup included a clever John Cage radio static-as-instrument bit sandwiched between a pair of especially crunchy Rebecca Saunders chamber works. And Ensemble Dal Niente concluded their performances with a nuanced rendition of Enno Poppe’s bombastic riff on the soundscape of the Hammond organ, “Salz.”

Together, the works were rife with unexpected juxtapositions of sound, image and rhythm, mixing live performance and unorthodox instrumentation with a/v material – all of it bent, sampled, shaken up and remade into something singular and new.

For more on Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, visit www.thespco.org/concerts-tickets/liquid-music.