Stevens' 75-minute set with his six-piece band was notable for more than just its intimate setting. (Last time through town, Stevens - who brought the indie-music world to ecstasy with his 2005 folk-baroque album Illinois - sold out the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, roughly 10 times the size of Johnny Brenda's.)

Coming on stage in a Zoo York skull-and-bones T-shirt and camouflage cap, Stevens was backed by an able and adaptable ensemble that included a trombonist who played guitar and a trumpeter who switched off to French horn and keyboards. Finger-picking a banjo, and singing in a tremulous voice, Stevens began by conveying a sense of spiritual wonder with "All the Trees in the Field Will Clap Their Hands" from 2004's biblical-flavored Seven Swans.

Then the 34-year-old multi-instrumentalist - he also played guitar and keyboards on Monday - explained what he was up to. Since he has two albums coming out on Oct. 6, you might have thought the Brooklyn singer was out to promote his own work. But that would have been too predictable. (His new works are The BQE, an instrumental live set drawn from a 2007 performance of his mini-opera about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and Run Rabbit Run, a reworking for string quartet of his 2001 electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit.)

Instead, the show revisited the luminous and largely overlooked Seven Swans, and also tried out new songs that had rarely if ever been performed in public. "This is a bit of a live workshop," Stevens told his reverential, quiet-as-a-mouse audience. "So bear with us."

What followed was a playlist that alternated between hushed and lovely Stevens tracks such as "In the Devil's Territory" and "Size Too Small" and new, multipart songs that were much noisier and digressive than his familiar work.

The arrangements aimed for the musical precision that Stevens is known for - though on this opening night, many a musical cue was missed. Stevens' clear vocal lines were often accompanied by a countermelody sung by keyboard player Nedelle Torrisi, whose band Cryptacize opened the evening with a set of mildly charming indie-cabaret songs that were ultimately uninvolving.

Stevens' electric guitar was frequently corrosive and distorted. And in songs like "Impossible Soul" - in which his voice cracked as he sang, "All I want is the perfect love, though I know it's wrong" - the interplay of his guitar, gurgling keyboards, and rapid-fire trumpet runs begged to be described with the rock-critic term skronk. (That's an intentionally chaotic racket, like you might hear on a Sonic Youth or Sun Ra record.)

Before one new song, Stevens joked, "This is a little like The Gong Show. If this song isn't working, you'll probably leave." The tune that followed, though, a pop song built around a repeated piano figure that moved on to interludes of Steve Reich minimalism and Pere Ubu-style avant-noise, worked wonderfully. But a couple of numbers later, a new song called "The Age of Odds" was pretty much a messy miasma of sound.

In neither instance, however, did anybody walk out. They might not have been getting to hear Stevens' best-known songs; he played nothing from Illinois. But they had the rare privilege of hearing a major artist struggle with challenging new material in public - for better, and for worse. And their patience was rewarded with a solo acoustic encore of "Romulus," a song about memory and shame from 2003's Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State that ended an uneven evening on a hauntingly beautiful note.

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