Roulette has been in the same SoHo space for around for 30 years, but was new to me when I went there Thursday night for a concert of music by composers Larry Austin and Annea Lockwood. The place was full of aging hippies and weird eccentrics with bad hair; I'd entered a hermetically sealed biosphere dedicated to that most endangered species: art for arts sake.

Case in point: Lockwood's Jitterbug for "ensemble and aquatic soundscape." The piece, which combined recordings of insects and windchimes with guitar and electronics, lingered on for nearly 20 minutes, without any apparent structure or theme. After it was over, I went over to look at the score and there were only pictures of rocks.

Austin's work, which dominated the program, was somewhat more complex and engaging. Austin has been a leader in the field of electroacoustic and computer music for nearly 50 years, having collaborated at length with both Cage and Stockhausen. At Roulette, he surrounded the audience via eight single-channel speakers, laying a surreal foundation for a series of live musicians to perform over. Redux (2007) and ReduxTwo (2009) had a violinist and pianist, respectively, performing collages of past compositions, distorted and enhanced via computer processing. Tableaux (2004) had saxophonist Stephen Duke playing a melodic riff on Mussorgky's Pictures at an Exhibition in front of a video projection of fast moving clouds. And baritone Thomas Buckner, who I saw last month in Robert Ashley's Made Out of Concrete, sang haunting poems about death and justice by Guantánamo Bay prisoners in the brand new In Our Name (which Lockwood and Austin composed together.)

So, was all this music? Or, was it sound art? Where's the line, anyway? (More pics below.)