Maria Minerva and Ramona Gonzalez, in Separate Performances Ramona Gonzalez, the singer of Nite Jewel, at Bowery Ballroom, showed off her retro-reverb style in New York this week. The singer Maria Minerva - tall, imposing, underselling herself in a Boy London T-shirt and black leggings - stood behind, next to, around and in front of two laptops and a small keyboard. She seemed to have no fixed relationship to her gear, and her act didn't involve much articulated, worked-out body language; when she wasn't playing melodies on the keyboard, she sang and danced to hazy, anachronistic electro beats from her laptop, projecting absent-mindedness as if she were alone in her bedroom. "Set your mind free, and come with me," she intoned through valleys of reverb. Come with me to a new life. "That was a track called "New Life," from my first-ever tape," she told the crowd at Glasslands on Sunday night. She meant "Tallinn at Dawn," released a little over a year ago on cassette; more recently she made another record, "Cabaret Cixous" - on vinyl and CD this time - of roughed-up, feel-good sound from a generation ago, dance-pop made sallow and creepy, its tempos intact but its sheen wiped off. She sings about desire, but it feels disembodied, recontextualized. At the end of her set she performed a bit of a Kinks" song, unmoored and laid over her own music: "Boy, you really got me going, you got me so I don't know what I'm doing." She's Estonian, born Maria Juur, and now based in London, studying aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths College. The title of her recent album refers to Hélène Cixous, the feminist philosopher and literary critic, and her music could be described as "academic," in that the process and presumed intent are generally more interesting than the results. Her Glasslands set, during the final concert of the Unsound Festival, was her second performance in the United States. The first was only a few hours earlier, also in Brooklyn, at the Issue Project Room, where she collaborated with the electronic musician Mark Van Hoen on cover versions of songs by Fleetwood Mac and Grace Jones, among others. Like her recorded music, her later set was extremely knowing and only of flickering interest: she let her songs do the work, occasionally finding a beat or a vamp on which to rest the general project of being garbled and evocative. To a certain way of thinking, this is music between stations, avoiding its destination. It's all right for now, but it wants to go somewhere. Nite Jewel, the project of the singer-songwriter Ramona Gonzalez, has dealt with that problem. Ms. Gonzalez used to make music not too far from Maria Minerva's. From the start, three years ago, she gave more attention to traditional songwriting - melody, hooks, vocal harmony - than Maria Minerva does, and her songs have been smoother, more settled. But she used to record her work - including her 2009 album, "Good Evening" - with a portable eight-track cassette recorder, hiding out in outmoded sound; like Maria Minerva too, she troweled on the reverb. "One Second of Love" (Secretly Canadian), her new album, drops the murk. Critics have already called it "hi-fi," but that's only in relation to lo. This work is clean but not spotless. Here and there, Ms. Gonzalez's dramatic, confiding voice - not far from Madonna's ballad tone - lands a microtone to the side of a note; here and there the group sound needs thickening or streamlining. This is a kind of liminal music too, fascinating because it's so much closer to credible pop. At the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night, Nite Jewel played in its current form, a quartet with keyboards and live drummer, with Corey Lee Granet switching off between clean-toned guitar and bass. It was an intense, joyous little set, full of precision, engagement and life force. Ms. Gonzalez did a fair amount of bedroom-mirror dancing too: like Maria Minerva, Nite Jewel draws on freestyle and "80s R&B, and it's still at some level a record collector's utopian project, a fantasy trip. But she also looked directly at the audience, and it responded. The house was small and rapt, locked in to her melodies, dancing out the rhythm of the new songs" gapped bass lines and crisp down strokes. Ms. Gonzalez did justice to some of the best of her older songs, like "Artificial Intelligence" and the stately "We Want Our Things," singing in the appropriate word blur; the new songs were sharper, more purposeful, and still not without positive mystery.