his is supposed to be dance music? We’ve got three men armed with turntables, a cassette recorder, percussion, a bass guitar, and a busted CD player all beating each other up for attention. There are no beats to move thy feet to, no melodies to sway thy arms and trot on thy tippy toes to, and no hook to somehow draw everyone on the dance floor. We just have a godawful racket that amasses to one hell of a cartoon soundtrack that can make the kids laugh, then sit quietly for a minute to look around, and finally run to their parents for help. OK, so all of my perceptions of what can technically make people dance are turned upside down. But then again, anything is possible with modern dance.

Event documents a 1998 soundtrack performance by avant-noise pioneers Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, and Christian Wolff for a dance piece by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The show features Marclay on turntables, Tone with his “prepared CDs” (i.e. discs with taped or knife-cut surfaces that causes the sound to skip), and Wolff’s mash of percussion, melodica, bass guitar, and a radio-cassette recorder. Each artist alone is worth exploring briefly: Marclay is a “turntablist” in every sense of that abused word, constantly reminding listeners that recorded music is nothing more than noises reproduced by machines—no matter what romance or spiritual qualities people ascribe to it. For nearly 25 years, he has remained a maven in the NYC noise/improv underground and visual art scene, where he has famously employed up to a dozen or more turntables at once for his works. Then there is Tone, a maverick composer in the Japanese noise underground and former member of the Fluxus art movement with Yoko Ono in the 1960s. Tone is best known for introducing the “glitch” element to electronic music a decade before Oval popularized the technique. Wolff is among the so-called “New York composers” of the 1950s, along with Morton Feldman and John Cage, who pioneered ways in which musicians can find room to improvise in compositions.

With such pioneers in found sounds and abrasion working in concert, the end result is, predictably, not “graceful” music built for dancing to. The three men’s soundtrack—given a 50-minute edit in Event—sounds improvised: there is no recognizable structure or narration, and there’s a nagging sense that these men are just messing around until they find something that sounds interesting. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating ruckus that possesses a raw energy with no climax or decline. Tone is the most recognizable here, with his prepared CDs exhaling splintered and mulched digital tones that interrupt any conversation that Marclay or Wolff try to make. Marclay, to his credit, doesn’t go unheard: he tweaks thrift store classical and jazz records with wrong speeds and scratches them like a child attacking his or her Fisher Price turntable. Wolff’s contributions, namely his more conventional instruments like the bass guitar and melodica, are difficult to detect as there is almost no way to know what is sampled and what is not.

Event is a brutal experience to sit through alone and can easily wear out a listener. But buried in the din and the clamor are truly radical ideas of where manipulated recordings can go and what the human mind can make of it.