Beer and the avant-garde took on an entirely new meaning at the Bang on a Can Marathon last summer, when Matmos, the San Francisco-based electronic duo, met up with So Percussion, a New York quartet with a taste for rollicking experimentation.

On an extended bill that featured a 100-tuba marching orchestra and a Siberian throatsinger croaking his way through Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the musicians collaborated on a unique piece of music. It required a stack of Budweiser cans, made more usefully percussive after the cold refreshment inside each was consumed. Not a mere novelty, the idea took on a life beyond the ping and thwack that the percussionists made, as Matmos looped and mutated the sounds into a kind of synthetic aural breeze.

The performers meet up again this weekend, on the stage of the Lincoln Center Festival, where they will continue to explore the sonic potential in unlikely materials. Some of these items have included amplified crawfish nerves, prickly cactus, tuned flowerpots, and duct tape. After several performances in an ongoing collaboration, the outfits met up recently to record a joint project, where they dipped back into the suds.

“I’m not sure the drinkers of Coors Light, which are the best-sounding cans, would feel encouraged to drink beer by us,” Martin Schmidt, who forms Matmos with his partner Drew Daniel, said. He was sharing a table with So Percussion’s Jason Treuting and Adam Sliwinski at the Café, not far from a Greenpoint rehearsal space where they have been preparing for the concerts. “We’ve done a lot of research,” Mr. Schmidt continued, his dry demeanor ideally suited for a future guest appearance on “The Colbert Report.” “It’s thinness of aluminum that makes the best chime. We recorded together in a studio in Montana for a week, and we had time to go to the supermarket with mallets and try every single brand.”

“Which happens in supermarkets in Montana all the time,” Mr. Sliwinski added.

“There was a beer distributor who was there,” Mr. Schmidt said, “and I asked him, ‘Do you have any of those little cans, those pony cans?’ And he said, ‘We don’t distribute those here in Whitefish. But we have them in the next county. Could you wait a week? He was into it.”

It’s not, the musicians are careful to explain, that they’re major beer drinkers. They just happen to like the idea of confounding expectations in the high-arts arena. Matmos, which has enjoyed a fruitful affiliation with the wildly idiosyncratic Icelandic pop star Björk, arrives from the left-field realm of electronic music, where an anything-goes aesthetic is almost mandated for groups to create a sensation. So Percussion, an ensemble of 20-something players schooled in the contemporary music canon, strives to make what is now a tradition sound freshly revealed — working up programs of Xenakis or Steve Reich that ratchet up the difficulty factor, while sustaining punch and urgency.

“We’re sort of noise guys who realized that some of the best noise out there is made by academics,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I literally was recommended a Karlheinz Stockhausen record as ‘the most f—ed up f—ing thing you’ll ever hear in your life.’ It was like someone was handing me a heavy metal album! It was ‘Mikrophonie I and II.'”

Mr. Sliwinski smiled. “I was assigned that piece in school,” he said.

As of mid-week, the performers were unsure exactly what they would present this weekend at the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall. There, the x-factor will be multiplied by film projections and the bonus contributions of two special guests: the jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas (tonight) and the electric harpist and keyboardist Zeena Parkins (Saturday).

Everyone cites the example of John Cage, who was revealed to a 1953 “What’s My Line?” TV audience as the man who was going to compose a piece for a kitchen blender. A clip has been circulating on YouTube, and the performers all get a chuckle out of recounting it, and how mid-century avantgardists like Cage and Edgar Varese could spend hours roaming Manhattan, drawing inspiration from street sounds and ordinary objects. In a way, it is not unlike Marcel Duchamp making art from a bicycle wheel or a urinal — just more melodic.

“The show will feature a bunch of stuff organized around a kind of material,” Mr. Treuting said. “There’s a song that’s all aluminum. There’s a song that uses ceramics. There’s a song with a lot of water sounds in it. When all six of us are together, we found that there were so many possibilities. It felt good to say, okay, we’re going to get everything we can get out of this kind of material and see where it goes.”

Fans can expect plenty of “hits” to balance newer material, such as excerpts from Matmos’s electronic version of Tim Rice’s “Aida,” commissioned by the city of Verona, Italy. But Mr. Schmidt seems eager to haul out some favorites — perhaps a few tracks from last year’s “The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast” album — in newly collaborative versions.

“Who wants to hear stuff from the new album when you go to see a band?” he asked. “When you see the Rolling Stones, you want to hear ‘Under My Thumb.'”

Played on an electric cactus, perhaps?