I am really curious about this music, so this is just a quick reminder to myself to download some of it later. We shall see.

By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: June 26, 2009
The Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson writes music that sits at the border of classical Minimalism and indie pop. His last two recordings — “IBM 1401: A User’s Manual” (2006) and “Fordlandia” (2008) — were concept albums with a symphonic patina. Each had recurring musical themes as well as overarching narratives about mythology and archaic technology. And each leaned heavily on lush, dark-hued string timbres and simple, slowly cycling themes. Around and within those textures, though, Mr. Johannsson wove electronic bass lines, beats, feedback, buzzing timbres and, occasionally, heavily processed vocals.

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Mr. Johannsson, who played the piano and oversaw some of the electronic sound, and Matthias Hemstock, who handled electronics and percussion, were joined by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, better known as ACME, at Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday evening. The concert was Mr. Johannsson’s first in New York, and in ACME he had flexible collaborators who understand (and individually dabble in) the stylistic alchemy that underpins his work.

Nearly half the music that Mr. Johannsson offered was drawn from his 2002 debut album, “Englaborn.” He began with the melancholy title track and ended with “Odi et Amo,” a soaring recorded soprano line nestled into a glacial string score. “Salfraedingur,” a hypnotic four-minute tornado driven by percussion and synthetic bass, and “Joi & Karen,” a graceful rumination on a sparkling, gradually morphing five-note piano theme, also represented that early CD.

The rest of the program touched briefly on Mr. Johannsson’s recent evocations of technological dystopias. “The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black,” from “IBM 1401,” sounds as you would expect of a work with that title. Not that any of Mr. Johannsson’s music is especially cheerful. And from “Fordlandia,” Mr. Johannsson and the ensemble performed the plaintive, shapely “Fordlandia: Aerial View” and the texturally dense “Rocket Builder.” Also included were excerpts from two of Mr. Johannsson’s theater scores, “Corpus Camera” (1999), arranged mostly for strings, and a beat-heavy, dancelike section from “Viktoria og Georg.”

The ACME musicians — Caleb Burhans and Keats Dieffenbach, violinists; Nadia Sirota, violist; and Clarice Jensen, cellist — produced a sweet, refined sound with a rich vibrato, both in Mr. Johannsson’s music and in its curtain-raising performance of Gavin Bryars’s String Quartet No. 1 (“Between the National and the Bristol”).

Mr. Bryars’s 24-minute piece, composed for the Arditti Quartet in 1985, begins with a two-note Minimalist seesaw and moves stylistically backward (at least, for a time), toward the sumptuousness of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Few composers are as adept as Mr. Bryars at taking a promising notion and wearing out its welcome. As this quartet grows increasingly episodic, and takes to swooping from a “Verklärte Nacht”-like ardor to its Philip Glassian opening figure and back, you begin to wish that Mr. Bryars would either find the thread and tie it up or just throw on a double bar and cut his losses. He chose the second option.