In a Variety of Music, Seeing Is Hearing Images of strange and startling beauty percolate through Squonk Opera's "Mayhem and Majesty," a small spectacle of a show occupying that hard-to-classify intersection where live music meets visual art. "Don't worry about finding a story," the audience was advised in a preperformance announcement the other day at 59E59 Theaters, and this was wise counsel. Squonk, the Pittsburgh ensemble whose 1999 Off Broadway hit "Squonk: BigSmorgasbordWunderWerk" became a Broadway flop in 2000, does not engage in conventional musical theater. By some definitions, its current show is not theater at all but rather a performance by a five-piece band with unusually ambitious production values. The question "What does music look like?" is what the company says it's trying to answer in "Mayhem and Majesty." With video screens and flashing lights, pounding drums (Kevin Kornicki) and wailing electric guitar (David Wallace), the show feels at times like an arena-rock concert, drastically compacted. But Squonk's music, most of it written by the pianist Jackie Dempsey, dips into classical and art-rock, too, with Steve O'Hearn - who is also responsible for the production design - on flute. Anna Elder's ethereal voice is a unifying force. When she sings through the horn of a gramophone, the white light shining from its narrow end seems the wrong color for a voice that has blues and reds and purples in it. And then there are the indelible tableaus: a quartet of microphone stands that become kinetic sculptures, slowly revolving; umbrellas sprouting like flowers from a wall, blossoming and wilting and blossoming again; long silver coils that Ms. Elder, in a hypnotic duet with Ms. Dempsey, whirls into a horizontal blur that might as well be sound waves. A couple of blinking eyes, projected on a pair of circular screens, make for one of the cleverer uses of video. But for the most part, the video and projections don't feel particularly fresh, or especially illuminating. They can be superfluous, even distracting. Often it's more fun to watch the band, especially Ms. Dempsey, a placidly elegant and unfailingly pleasant presence in long red skirt and long, fingerless red gloves. She and her band mates appear to be having fun up there. Sometimes, that's what music looks like.