Rune Grammofon, an independent record label based in Oslo, traffics in music of unconventional detail and assiduous design. Its stable of artists, almost exclusively Norwegian, includes electronic programmers, jazz-tangential confabs and some curiously captivating vocalists. What they seem to have in common, besides the endorsement of Rune Kristoffersen, the label’s founder and operator, is an ethos of attraction. However opaque or experimental their music becomes, they want to draw you in.
That much was clear on Thursday night at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side, in a showcase for two groups on the Rune Grammofon roster. Throughout each set — by Opsvik & Jennings, a creative partnership, and Huntsville, a trio — sound was organized in layers, with purposeful streaks of improvisation. Beyond the surface, though, the two performances offered an instructive contrast.
Opsvik & Jennings consists of the bassist Eivind Opsvik, a Norwegian turned New Yorker, and the guitarist Aaron Jennings, who hails from Oklahoma. On their serenely engrossing recent album, “Commuter Anthems,” they weave in parts for banjo, lap steel guitar and theremin, among other things. The compositions rarely exceed the lengths of pop songs, which their hooks can offhandedly suggest.
The album’s intricate atmosphere is naturally difficult to transport to an outside setting, and it didn’t quite get there on Thursday. Mr. Jennings played his chords and arpeggios with quiet confidence, and Mr. Opsvik, focusing mainly on electric bass, was concise and clear. But their introversion, so appealing on record, felt a bit too cloistered onstage.
And the outside help they had enlisted — Brian Drye on Farfisa organ and trombone, and R. J. Miller on drums — seemed hemmed in by certain predetermined roles. On a sun-dappled tune called “Silverlake,” they struggled to lock in with a recorded track, electronically cued by Mr. Opsvik. Elsewhere they simply sounded ancillary, like cogs in service to the songs.
Huntsville didn’t have this problem, if only because the band, based in Norway, was working in its usual mode. With Ivar Grydeland on guitars (including pedal steel), Tonny Kluften on upright bass (and electronics) and Ingar Zach on percussion (and electronics), it favors a deeply hypnotic strain of thematic development. “For the Middle Class,” an album released last year, consists of four long tracks, with barely a melody to grasp.
The set, which formed a continuum, led off with what sounded like the first of these partly improvised tracks, “The Appearance of a Wise Child.” Hazy and drone-based, with a sampled undertow of tabla drumming, the piece assumed gradual mutations: new harmonic frequencies, produced by Mr. Grydeland, or static hissing noises, set off by Mr. Kluften.
There was subterranean logic to the performance, which skirted monotony but never succumbed to it. And there was a fulcrum: Mr. Zach, whose percussive rig included an upturned bass drum, two snare drums and some kind of auto-gyroscopic meditation bowl. For much of the set Mr. Zach played a shuffling pattern with brushes, projecting a furious intensity. It was weirdly arresting, perhaps because it was so integral to the whole.
