My favorite aspect of Friday’s performance of Songs About Books was how much the songs felt like concentrated soundtracks to their respective books. If a novel is a 12-course feast, these were perfectly balanced little sushi rolls. The translation from book to song was a surprisingly successful synesthetic experience.

The show started with Alex Guy/Led to Sea, whose songs about Nabokov’s Pale Fire were immediately enveloping (my notes read: “never heard drums sound that much like the ocean before”), surrounding the room with waves of strings, her spiraling voice, and some strange and delightful pops and clicks and taps from unexpected places on the sides of instruments.

Next up was Ryan Barrett (of the Pica Beats), upon whom Paul Constant had, with deliberate cruelty and for his own entertainment, foisted Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Paul worried aloud that Barrett might punch him in the face, but Barrett seemed pretty low-key, although he did let fly with my favorite quote of the night, on his reading experience: “Every page is like him [Houellebecq] pressing his prick ideas into my face.” My notes on his songs read: “dirty but exciting” and “sticky & angry.” (See Paul’s mash note to Barrett’s songs here.)

Joshua Morrison’s The Last Samurai–inspired songs were just as Paul told the crowd he’d expected: more specific, narrative pieces. (My notes: “snow/London/cold.”) Morrison brought a copy of the book to set on his keyboard and show us all how long it was (he had been disappointed to discover that his book was not, in fact, the book version of the Tom Cruise movie The Last Samurai, because, he joked, he’d wanted to write about “Katie Holmes and samurais”).

Johanna Kunin/Bright Archer had the nerve-racking task of writing songs about a book by a local author, Matt Ruff, who was sitting in the audience. She gamely thanked him, and when she confessed that she’d planned to write brighter, more poppy songs than usual for this project but received a pretty dark book (Set This House in Order is about characters with multiple personalities), Ruff was visibly amused. Her syncopated beats and Regina Spektor–like vocal flourishes felt appropriate for the fractured characters.

When, at the end, it was Fuller’s turn to perform (his songs about Bluets, a poetry book about the color blue, were fun and smart and it was entertaining to watch him set up a multi-instrumental loop to be his own backing music), he thanked the audience for coming out, saying it would be weird if the performers were onstage without an audience. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t be doing it, just that it’d be weird.” It was certainly believable that they’d be playing for friends in a backyard or basement if a church in Fremont weren’t available. These songs were for the books as much as for the audience.

(Levi Fuller, Joshua Morrison, and Alex Guy will be playing again in a “lo-fi/acoustic recap” of the show on Friday, September 9, at 5:00 p.m. at the Henry Art Gallery.)