Folk tunes run like a ragged, bright thread through his music, but glints of minimalism peek through the woven assemblages, as do early music and electronic techniques pioneered three decades before the New York-based composer's birth in 1981.

Muhly is an even more highly developed polymath than he let on Friday night in a show he and a like-minded band of players brought to the First Unitarian Church at 22d and Chestnut Streets. There's a pretty, distressed, here-I-brought-you-these-things-I-found-by-the-side-of-the-road quality to the way he puts together sounds. And the folk element is knit together with more urban (electronic) influences in a particularly winsome way.

A good curatorial ear is among his most appealing talents. When he paired violist Nadia Sirota with the sanctuary's organ and other sounds in "Stay in Touch," he not only exploited a combination few others might brave. He also gave the piece shape and message apart from the novel medium - rises and falls in intensity, that discovery feeling of improvisation, the organized build of minimalism.

Muhly didn't bring some of his most interesting material from Mothertongue, the electronic manipulations of voice that are heavily influenced by John Adams' On The Transmigration of Souls.

Rather, from that release the group poignantly animated "The Two Sisters," a reworking of a folk tune about a girl pushed into the river by her sister, her body found by a miller who refashions her remains into a violin.

Anyone who thinks the story uniquely gruesome to our time has never heard Mahler's Das klagende Lied, in which a man kills his brother, whose bones are then made into a flute.

Sam Amidon's hardened consonants and matter-of-fact delivery kept contrived drama at bay.

You could strain too hard looking for anything Muhly and Mahler have in common. But both know the musical potentialities of a great story and share an unusual ear for the treatment of folk melodies.

And both know that tragedy speaks most powerfully when you give it a light touch and let the facts speak for themselves.

Read his blog at http://go.philly.com/artswatch.