Meditation and ritual meet the tools of the electronic rave in Aisha Devi’s songs. At Moogfest she sang Asian-inflected melodies in English and Sanskrit over sporadic stretches of hefty bass tones and larger-than-life drums. She also used the throbbing sustained tones known as binaural beats, hints of Buddhist chants and bell tones, while her video showed images from alchemy, Eastern religion and surreal modernity. The music veered dramatically between tense anticipation and the promise of serenity.

Caterina Barbieri and Upper Glossa

Caterina Barbieri, an Italian composer based in Berlin, performed solo and in Upper Glossa, her duo with Kali Malone. Her solo pieces were built around a vintage synthesizer capability: the sequencer, repeating a series of notes ad infinitum or making changes as the repetition continued. Her pieces were pointillistic and dizzying, defining odd meters and adding and subtracting notes to make the patterns endlessly flex and realign. Upper Glossa was both more somber and more enveloping. Performing at the First Presbyterian Church, Ms. Barbieri played an introductory church-organ piece. Then she and Ms. Malone created a rich, buzzing, steadily tolling electronic drone and topped it with inexorable electric guitar chords; amid all the resonances and overtones already in the room, the arrival of each chord seemed to change the light and air.

Suzanne Ciani and Layne

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” the 1920 German expressionist horror film, got a live, surround-sound score by the pioneering synthesizer composer Suzanne Ciani and her recent collaborator, Layne, performing with a small ensemble including a flutist and a singer. The foundation was a minor chord and a recurring sequence; above it were ghostly whispers and sporadic, three-dimensional whirlwinds of dissonance.