Dawn of Midi Plays New Songs at Le Poisson Rouge Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times Dawn of Midi This band, at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village on Tuesday, includes Amino Belyamani, left, Aakaash Israni, center, and Qasim Naqvi. Their sound features rhythmic traditions of West Africa. Dawn of Midi is an instrumental trio from Brooklyn that makes something like minimal dance music using piano, acoustic bass and a drum kit with a high-hat but no other cymbals. Its music is all rhythm, more or less, and all composed. The individual contributions can be small, as little as one beat or note per bar, but they are cumulative, and constructed in tandem. One player completes another's rhythmic phrase, or one player's precise rhythmic cycle produces friction against another's. The music keeps growing and changing, through distinct but unbroken episodes; it becomes a network of bones with very little meat. The arid charm of its new record, "Dysnomia" (Thirsty Ear), is in the monomaniacal refinement of a fixed idea. When you see the band - it played at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night, but the record tells you all you need to know - what you're seeing is a concept: preformulated, weighed, measured, nailed to the floor. The music on the band's previous record, "First," from 2010, had all been improvised, and you get the sense that its next one could be categorically different again; the group seems to be interested in format as much as sound. Dawn of Midi descends from a lot of sources - classical minimalism, early-1970s German progressive rock, minimal techno, rhythmic traditions of West Africa and the Antilles - but it's not wholly indebted to any of them. As a kind of instrumental translation of electronic music, this music feels different, too, from the wave of live drum-and-bass in the late "90s, which was far busier, denser and invested in advanced but ultimately mundane technique: a monster drummer is nothing more than a monster drummer. Dawn of Midi, by contrast, can confuse you slightly with sound, especially live. Qasim Naqvi's drumbeats were weirdly small and clipped; Amino Belyamani's single piano notes, damped with his free hand inside the instrument to create muted sounds or harmonics, could suggest a drum or a ngoni, the West African lute; the bassist Aakaash Israni sometimes played a repeated two-note phrase with a great dynamic shift between one and the other, as if traded between two people. And it looks like a new jazz group, but aside from a linking interest in cross-rhythms and multimetrics, this music has little to do with jazz. There's no swing, but more to the point, there's no emphasis on soloistic expression, melody, depth and variety of tone; there's no dialogue. That's all fine, and smart, and perverse in a good way. It also makes you remember, through the absence thereof, what's exciting about all those things. The improvising bassist Mark Dresser, who was one of Mr. Israni's bass teachers, opened Tuesday's show with a powerful 30-minute solo set that supplied much of what Dawn of Midi leaves out. Jad Abumrad, a serious admirer and the host of public radio's "Radiolab," described "Dysnomia" in a recent podcast as a kind of deep trance music. Give him that! No two trance states are alike. There is a kind in which real life's conveyor belt vanishes, a door opens and you think you know what infinity means. And there is what I think of as Dawn of Midi's kind, which amounts to nearly the opposite: it brings you to an explicit awareness of the particulars of the present moment, or the slow linear progression from one rhythmic idea to the next. This is hyper-responsible music. It's on a grid. Unfortunately, it's always going somewhere.