Never again will I be so foolish as to overlook such obvious warning signs: When I arrived Monday night for the late set, the Jazz Standard was packed with people who had liked the music from the first set so much that they stuck around for the second. A good sign. What I failed to notice was that the first six or so rows were empty — apparently nobody wanted to get too close to the bandstand.

This was the opening night of a weeklong series called “Cryptonights at Jazz Standard,” a minifestival of artists and bands from the Venice, Calif.-based Cryptogramophone label. Although none of the Cryptogramophone groups that I have heard sound much like one another, they all share certain qualities: Each concocts an original combination of sounds by juxtaposing electronic instruments with traditional acoustic ones, and incorporates musical elements from different parts of the world while maintaining some of the familiar jazz template of varying pre-written ensemble music with solo improvisation.

Monday night’s group was the Jeff Gauthier Goatette, which might be considered Cryptogramophone’s flagship band since it’s led by the violinist and composer who also runs the label. Even having played and enjoyed the group’s new album, “One and the Same,” several times, I was unprepared for what I heard at Jazz Standard.

The band on the recording is considerably more nuanced and varied, but the music at the club was pure, relentless distortion and dissonance, only occasionally relieved by a fragment of conventional melody or tonality. It was also unbearably loud (the latter complaint may be the fault of the club on the series’s opening night). The acoustic players— Erik Friedlander on cello, Joel Hamilton on bass, and Alex Cline on drums — and the electric ones — the leader on electric violin, David Witham on keys, and Nels Cline on guitar — ganged up to produce some of the most disturbing sounds I have ever heard. After a few minutes, I wanted to storm the stage with a pair of wire-cutters.

Moving to the back of the club helped considerably, and I was able to enjoy Mr. Gauthier’s thoughtful last piece. Here, he depicted the sensation of listening to discordant church bells in Mexico while a record of Billie Holiday singing “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” played. The number had a properly Koyaanisqatsis feeling of time being out of balance, using snippets of the Richard Rodgers melody as a condiment.

Throughout the first night, Nels Clines’s playing was particularly severe, as he continually banged and manhandled his guitar strings while manipulating an electronics kit that produced sounds capable of destroying a human nervous system. Yet on the next night, when Mr. Cline was featured with drummer Scott Amendola’s band (co-starring John Shifflett on bass and the marvelous violinist Jenny Scheinman), the guitarist played much more melodically, kinder, and gentler. I can scarcely guess how he’ll sound on Friday, when he brings his own sextet, featuring the free jazz pioneer cornetist Bobby Bradford, to play the music of Andrew Hill — which, though unconventional, is more a part of the jazz mainstream. (Obviously, there are substantial hints in Mr. Cline’s current album, “New Monastery — a View Into the Music of Andrew Hill.”)

Mr. Amendola’s quartet adds an element of Celtic music, which lends a New Age feel to the overall sound. Even on the opening tune, “Bantu,” on which the leader put his hands on his traps and played them like a conga, the group sounded more Irish than African. Like the Goatette, Mr. Amendola’s band also makes use of chaos and confusion, as in a free episode at the start of the third tune, “Shady” (heard on the band’s recent album, “Believe”), in which the four instruments skitter and scatter and chase one another around. But with this group, even the dissonance seemed suitably organic — a large patch of distortion suggested a thunderstorm over Nantucket.

I enjoyed Wednesday night’s band — the keyboardist Myra Melford’s Be Bread — best of all, but I must confess to certain biases. Not only was this the most purely acoustic group of the first three (only bassist Stomu Takeishi plugged in), but I have long admired Ms. Melford’s playing and compositions. Still, I never thought I’d see the day when she was the most traditional bandleader in a given lineup. Her recent music, played superbly on her current album, “The Image of Your Body,” is highly influenced by Indian musical techniques, which she studied in Calcutta on a Fulbright Scholarship several years ago. Ms. Melford’s current quartet is a fusion of Eastern and Western ideas, co-starring the fine Vietnamese trumpeter Cuong Vu, the Japanese-born Mr. Takeishi, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg (who switched to the Dr. Seuss-like contrabass clarinet), and the drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee.

Ms. Melford, whose work is deeply inspired by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi (an increasingly frequent point of reference in contemporary jazz), switches between piano and harmonium. She spins melodies with her right hand and pumps with her left, while Mr. Takeishi fills in with the bass line. Her solo piano passages occasionally suggest the vintage free jazz of Cecil Taylor, but her harmonium solos have all the intensity of a whirling dervish — thereby introducing yet another element of Eastern culture to the mix. For the last number, the guitarist Brandon Ross made Be Bread into a septet, and the group played a funky number that seemed anticlimactic compared with the Eastern-style frenzy the group had just served up.

The Cryptonights series continues tonight with Nels Clines’s Andrew Hill presentation and concludes Saturday and Sunday with a rare NYC appearance by one of the founding fathers of this brand of acoustic-electro-jazz-rock-world fusion, the versatile multireed player Bennie Maupin. Mr. Maupin’s recently released “Penumbra,” in which he showcases his well-known bass clarinet technique over a comparatively straightforward rhythm section, is the most enjoyable Cryptogramophone album I’ve yet heard. May the label’s catalog continue to grow and prosper.

wfriedwald@nysun.com