When Jeffrey M. Robinson brings his music to New York this weekend, don’t expect just another rock band on the stage. Yes, he will be joined by some recognizable names from independent rock, namely guitarist Mark Shippy and drummer Pat Samson, formerly of U.S. Maple and currently in Miracle Condition, along with their Miracle Condition bandmate, Matt Carson, on guitar. Fronting the band will be ex-Jesus Lizard vocalist David Yow, who currently plies his unmistakable throat for the Los Angeles noise-rock outfit Qui. But that’s where the similarities between the customary rock concert and Mr. Robinson’s show end.

Instead, Mr. Robinson is collaborating with these musicians so they can completely reinvent his sound work of recent years. Mr. Robinson, a 41-year-old audio and visual artist based in Chicago, has been visiting museums around America and Europe and recording sound templates of their gallery spaces. Think of the process as similar to sonar, for which reverberated sounds are used to position objects when visual recognition is impractical. Instead of translating sonar’s single tone into a visual analog, Mr. Robinson varies the frequency of the tone as it bounces off a museum’s interior to offer a sonic envelope representing the space in which the tone is being recorded.

“Each individual space gets its own template because each individual space is unique,” Mr. Robinson said recently via phone from Chicago. “Each museum has its own acoustic signature that I’m trying to capture. I like to get an idea of what the space is like, and I try to choose the spaces based on how they look and how they architecturally come off.”

One such space was New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, whose sound template appeared in Mr. Robinson’s 2007 installation “East West.” “It’s an old public school,” he said. “It’s really compact and really compressed and the sound that you get in there, I was able to use these lower frequencies because I knew the lower rumbling sound was going to be caught in this tight area. That’s the ‘East’ version. When I went out to the Getty [Museum, in Los Angeles], it’s this huge, sprawling place, so I pitched a bunch of high-end frequencies because it was able to fill up that space more. So you examine each setting and try to come up with a template that’s going to match the particular architectural environment.” Samples of “East” and “West,” available on Mr. Robinson’s Web site, reveal crackling, textural sheets of sound and rippling waves of noise. The works describe spaces in the same way that spacious, minimal techno music often feels as if it’s mapping out a series of nesting dolls, where beats and rhythms open up into new rooms with each and every tempo change and break beat.

For Mr. Robinson’s upcoming shows at the Glasslands Gallery and Union Pool, he will first present a sound template taken from Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and combine them with projected images from the personal collection of film art of the Sacramento, Calif., video artist John Seden. Then Mr. Robinson will be joined by Messrs. Carson, Samson, Shippy, and Yow for who only knows what.

“This is going to be the first time that we’re going to do it,” Mr. Robinson said of this project, which will make its premiere today at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum before arriving in the city this weekend. “We’ve rehearsed it and they’ve been going great. When I posited this idea to these guys they were just like, ‘This is kind of interesting’ — taking these large sound templates, these expansive things, and then throwing on their own kind of disassembling take on it.”

All the musicians involved have spent their careers taking music apart. In the case of Messrs. Samson and Shippy, such an idea was their previous band’s entire gestalt. It’s an approach best represented by U.S. Maple’s 1999 album “Talker,” a quiet bomb of a document. Over a mere nine songs unwinding in 33 minutes, almost every classic rock cliché is attacked, turned inside out, and refashioned into some newfangled beast; every time a seemingly familiar gesture, sound, or attitude starts to feel too self-aware, it falls to chaotic pieces. Picked notes suggesting a guitar solo suddenly wander off — not so much like the regular pattern of rippling water as like a dazed passenger walking away from a car accident.

To many listeners at the time, “Talker” was yet another deliberately incomprehensible post-rock album from a band that specialized in deliberate confusion. To others, it was a room-clearing blast of fresh air. Yes, on some basic level “Talker” is a concept album as overtly intellectual as anything from the inflated egos of the 1970s. But on a much more visceral level, it was a project that obliterated the idea of a concept album by becoming something else entirely — something closer to a piece of sound art that one happened to get at the record store instead of a gallery.

Where “Talker” turned the rock band into something like a sound installation, Mr. Robinson is tapping into these musicians to turn a sound installation into something like a rock band.

“When I think of U.S. Maple, I think of those guys as the forefront as far as music deconstructionists,” Mr. Robinson said. “[This show] is going to be pretty much along those lines.”

Mr. Robinson performs at the Glasslands Gallery on Saturday at 10 p.m. (289 Kent Ave., between South 1st and 2nd streets, Brooklyn, 718-599-1450) and at Union Pool on Sunday at 8 p.m. (484 Union Ave., between Conselyea Street and Skillman Avenue, 718-609-0484).