‘Catching Net’ is a huge dirty bomb of a double album that’s going to detonate right under everyone’s cosy assumptions of what it is to be a ‘new music’ composer. Brooklyn-based Eli Keszler, 29, describes himself as a composer, percussionist and multimedia artist. He began life as a creative musician lashing the beat in punk and hardcore rock bands; then it was off to the New England Conservatory, where he studied composition with composer/improvisers Ran Blake and Anthony Coleman, while developing ideas about visual art.

If Keszler’s story sounds familiar – you’re right, hardly a week goes by without some street-cred-starved composer talking up their punk ‘past’ to promo their latest mainstream marvel in The Guardian – he’s the real deal. His music is pathologically determined not to please and you just know he has spent some pretty sordid nights in CBGB and other New York palaces of punk.

Cold Pin is a sound-art installation around which musicians are asked to respond spontaneously. Strung-up piano wires are pummelled by a choir of automated beaters, unpredictable patterns reeling out from Keszler’s carefully composed engineering. Improvisation is usually, by definition, a profoundly social activity; Keszler, though, carves up the musical space differently. He drags living and breathing musicians – including his own detail-obsessed, busier-than-you-think-is-possible drumming – into the realm of machine music, a combination that finds vulnerable beauty within the surface ugliness by highlighting the age-old fear of queried boundaries between man and machine.

The music is most characterful when faceless; as trumpeter Greg Kelley, an exemplary presence otherwise, snugs slightly too closely to jazz phraseology in the live version of Cold Pin, the focus is noticeably diminished. Catching Net pairs the Cold Pin installation with a composed score for string quartet and piano but those ecstatic levels of energy and the basic sound world change not a jot. Which means Keszler has found ways of communicating the fantastical sounds inside his head with notation and with no notation. He’s on to something special.