DAWN OF MIDI

Dawn of Midi doesn’t sound like a piano trio. The group’s second album, Dysnomia, starts with a simple, weirdly syncopated bass line. A piano enters, playing a single clipped chord over and over, suggesting a sampler. A kick drum sneaks in another rhythmic theme. New patterns emerge and recede, all in the service of rhythms and breakbeats, not unlike an Aphex Twin record. This is jazz fully suffused with, and even overrun by, beats.

The trioAmino Belyamani on piano, Aakaash Israni on bass, and Qasim Naqvi on drumscan make conventional jazz. Its first album is a great example of contemporary free jazz that occasionally points toward something more. These days, though, the solos, the riffs, and the extended melodies yield to repeated fragments and lockstep grooves. And while this music conjures a sequencer’s beats and a synth’s consistent attack, it has a decidedly human, expressive core that indicates a different kind of jazz future. (THURSDAY, 8 P.M., CAROLINA THEATRE) Dan Ruccia

SUNN O)))

So just how massive is the sound of Sunn O)))?

Moogfest originally slated the drone-metal titans for the Carolina Theatre, but the band’s armada of amplifiersfor which they are both named and knownprompted worries that they would actually start to shake the ceiling loose in the nearly century-old space. Instead, Sunn O))) will play in the parking lot of Motorco, a rare stateside outdoor appearance for the perennial festival favorites.

But Sunn O)))’s volume is only the essential spectacle of what they do, their emphatic and ecstatic method for making a series of important points. By slowing heavy metal’s riffs to a glacial pace, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson give themselves space to improvise and explore those themes, to add subtle textures and touches that practitioners of their ancestral form often leave untouched. Enhanced live by filigrees of synthesizers and horns and fronted by Mayhem’s Attila Csihar, a supreme costumed leader, Sunn O))) presses simultaneously at the crooked boundaries of metal and noise, jazz and classical. They prompt questions about the purpose of genre, and then play loud enough to drown out those who ask. (SATURDAY, 9:15 P.M., MOTORCO PARK) Grayson Haver Currin

GREG FOX

The drummer Greg Fox is barely thirty, but he’s already amassed a mountain of music. Though known best for the breathing blast beats he plays with black metal firebrands Liturgy, Fox has explored freedom and freak-outs in Guardian Alien, unhinged rock in PC Worship, bracing abrasion with Ben Frost, and long-form drumming duels with Oneida’s Kid Millions. He’s been the mentee of free jazz paragon Milford Graves, turning his thoughts on biometrics into oddly seductive music, and even joined baritone saxophonist Colin Stetson for a recent interpretation of Grecki’s third symphony.

Fox brings these experiencesas well as his time learning to play drum ‘n’ bass music and his ostensible interest in meditationto bear in his solo music, which rewrites the expectations of a solo drum performance. Linking his kit with electronics, Fox creates a teeming sphere of sound, where that heavy metal insistence and devotion to mantra-like repetition battles in real time with an impulse to rip it up and start again. You want to step into Fox’s world and learn how he interprets all the things he’s heard. (THURSDAY, 2 P.M., 21C HOTEL MAIN BALLROOM) Grayson Haver Currin