These two record­ings, com­ing from oppo­site direc­tions, hit the sweet spot where con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal and pro­gres­sive rock meet, a place fairly broad, ami­ca­ble and res­o­nant. There’s a lot of con­fir­ma­tion bias at work, but the discs tell me that my view of the impor­tance of prog-rock on the con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal scene is just grow­ing deeper and firmer roots.

Nei­ther of these record­ings is fully clas­si­cal nor fully prog, but each is more heav­ily one than the other. Zuck­er­man (who I pre­vi­ously wrote about as a mem­ber of Exis­ten­tial Pilot) is a young com­poser in the Post-Minimalist vein, using repet­i­tive struc­tures and sys­tems that con­nect to the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass but as a means to an end, not a process in and of them­selves. He’s releas­ing a new CD this April 11, a large scale piece titled Music in Plu­ral­ism.

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing record, it’s got an aes­thetic that makes it a sym­pa­thetic instru­men­tal com­pan­ion to William Brittelle’s great Tele­vi­sion Land­scape, itself a disc built on gen­res that some­how becomes it’s own genre. Call this an unin­ten­tional sequel, a sec­ond brick in the devel­op­ing edi­fice of the new clas­si­cal con­cept album. Zuckerman’s music is fully inte­grated as a whole, but sep­a­rate pieces and tracks would stand on their own just fine.

His elec­tri­fied ensem­ble sounds like a smaller scale ver­sion of the large ensem­ble on the Mahav­ishnu Orchestra’s Apoc­a­lypse album, the mix of strings and wood­winds sound­ing right in place with the elec­tric gui­tar, bass and drum set. Zuck­er­man empha­sizes the audi­ble beat, but it’s never too heavy, like in rock, or stiff, like it can be in a lot of com­posed music. One of the sur­prises is how per­fect the light drum part sounds in his “Pas­sacaglia,” a cre­ative riff on a Baroque theme with a sax­o­phone solo that makes the piece an aston­ish­ing mix of cul­tural his­tory, new music via Bach, jazz, Ennio Morricone’s film scores and, of course, prob­a­bly a touch of John Zorn in there some­where. It’s one of the high points of the piece, which begins with a “Pre­lude” that rises from som­no­lence to mus­cu­lar strength and is a clear state­ment of the direct­ness and clar­ity of Zuckerman’s think­ing and writ­ing. Every sec­tion of the piece has, though not pop music itself, has a cog­nate in the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to and lov­ing pop music, includ­ing bal­lads, touches of Stan Ken­ton and Suf­jan Stevens. The final stretch is some­thing of a self-contained suite, the six part “Sub­cu­ta­neous Sal­va­tion,” which is one of the best exam­ples of a com­poser think­ing like both a clas­si­cal musi­cian and a rock song writer that I’ve heard. Enjoy­able in the moment and fully sat­is­fy­ing at the close.

Zuck­er­man will be lead­ing his ensem­ble in this music at Merkin Hall on Wednes­day, as the open­ing per­for­mance in this year’s Tribeca Music Fes­ti­val. Buy tick­ets here.

Loop 2.4.3, the duo of Thomas Kozump­lik and Lorne Wat­son is an ideal exam­ple of what you get when musi­cians hone their skills in the clas­si­cal man­ner and then go out and play what they want. And what these guys want is a refresh­ing com­bi­na­tion of rigor, com­plex­ity and force. They have a great sound, the com­bi­na­tion of the skill­ful, res­o­nant per­cus­sion play­ing with crunchy gui­tar is attrac­tive and excit­ing, and the band clearly has a lot of power that they keep just under the sur­face, giv­ing them a slight fla­vor of threat that there should be a hell of a lot more of in rock and pop music.

Their songs are well bal­anced between lyri­cal expres­sion and the open space that purely instru­men­tal music needs to develop and expand and leave its mark. The first full cut, “Sakura (We Must Love),” has the purring lope of a pan­ther, an involv­ing, steady for­ward flow. With two per­cus­sion­ists at the cen­ter, the band excels at feel, pulse, beat and rhyth­mic struc­ture, and they also have a great ear for tim­bres and mov­ing from untuned to tuned per­cus­sion. The heavy use of marimba and steel drums gives every­thing color and an emo­tion­ally rich expres­sion. Their musi­cal think­ing and play­ing is intel­li­gent and full of care­ful lis­ten­ing and judi­cious choices, and that makes their purely instru­men­tal track, “Amer­i­can Elder,” the best thing on the disc, grip­ping and mys­te­ri­ous, with both an omi­nous atmos­phere and a dif­fi­dent stance (there are many moments that would be com­fort­able along­side some of John Cage’s early per­cus­sion music).

Where the disc is flawed is in the vocals. The male singers, one of whom is Kozump­lik, are not strong and they don’t have well cul­ti­vated tim­bres. Shara Wor­den appears and her voice stands out for its qual­ity, but her and the other voices fit uneasily into the mix. The instru­ments sit slightly back in the sound field with some air around them, as they would in a live per­for­mance, but the voices are uncom­fort­ably up-front and sound close enough to each other that there is the uncom­fort­able feel­ing of being ser­e­naded by sev­ered heads. It’s dis­tract­ing, the mind keeps try­ing to fig­ure out why the singers seem to be in a dif­fer­ent part of the world from the instru­ments, and it’s at times hard to fight through them to hear both the words and the rest of the music.

That qual­ity is very much a mat­ter of taste, though, and any­one may react dif­fer­ently to the mix than I do. And in that case, they will clearly hear and impres­sively made, imag­i­na­tive record from a unique and intrigu­ing band. Amer­i­can Dream­land hits the streets April 24.