Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet at Montclair State Yana Paskova for The New York Times Landfall Laurie Anderson, far right, with the Kronos Quartet, performing their new multimedia collaboration about the destructive force of Hurricane Sandy, at Montclair State University in New Jersey. MONTCLAIR, N.J. - The idea of a collaboration between the idiosyncratic New York multimedia artist Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet, a musically omnivorous San Francisco ensemble, seems so obvious that you wonder why it never happened before now. "Landfall," a new 70-minute piece Ms. Anderson designed to perform alongside Kronos, came to Montclair State University here on Friday night, as part of that institution's reliably invigorating Peak Performances series. Why obvious? Ms. Anderson and Kronos emerged from the avant-garde fringes during the early 1980s, blazing unorthodox trails that would prove durable and unusually popular. Eager and apposite collaborators, both are fascinated by language, whether literal or compositional, and concerned with situating music within broader artistic and cultural contexts. And both have always appreciated a good yarn. Explaining the genesis of "Landfall" in an interview published by The Guardian of London in February, Ms. Anderson said that the Kronos members declared, "We want to tell stories." Taking their request literally, Ms. Anderson and Liubo Borissov, a digital-media artist, developed a computer program that translates the quartet's sounds into bursts and streams of text projected on a screen behind the performers - an effect most distinct during a sputtering solo by the violinist John Sherba. In common with most of Ms. Anderson's best work, "Landfall" has a topical facet: Hurricane Sandy's arrival in the New York area last October. The storm, which flooded Ms. Anderson's Lower Manhattan basement, looms from the start of the piece. It arrives near the end, when she describes seeing old keyboards and stage props floating, ruined. "I thought, look at the good side: this way, you don't have to sort through any of this old stuff ever again," she says in her familiar singsong cadence. A similar sense of loss was palpable throughout much of "Landfall." The quartet, illuminated from above as if caught in sunlight streaming through a high window, repeatedly played keening laments, at times joined by Ms. Anderson's keyboard or electric violin. Ms. Anderson's narration included a rumbling, digitally altered rumination about a book that enumerated countless species of animals now extinct - their names subsequently flooding the screen. Her wry humor was duly represented in observations about dreams, digital trickery and distant stars; and in puckish instrumental vignettes redolent of Morricone film cues and Middle Eastern dance tunes. Even among the quips, though, dissolution was only a step away. "I was in a Dutch karaoke bar trying to sing a song in Korean, and I was just getting the hang of things when the software crashed," Ms. Anderson said, noting that the program soon righted itself "for no reason." As the text coursing across the screen increasingly grew pocked with holes, pictographs denoting unrelated notions - restrooms, recycling, radioactivity - filled in the gaps. The results suggested logic while defying sense. Things fall apart, Ms. Anderson seemed to confirm, even as she showed how dogged we can be in trying to put them back together. Laurie Anderson performs at Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan, on June 18 and 19; rivertorivernyc.com. The Kronos Quartet will be featured at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival on July 24 to 28 at various times; lcoutofdoors.org.