NATURAL SELECTION From DNA to elaborate multimedia projects, Ikue Mori has flourished in the downtown-music scene for 30 years.

Photograph: Heung-Heung Chin

New York City has long been a magnet for aspiring artists, attracting creative souls from around the globe in search of fame and glory. But Japanese electronic musician Ikue Mori, whose central position in the city’s downtown-music avant-garde is being celebrated with a two-day festival at Japan Society this weekend, never set out to pursue a career as a performer. A Tokyo art student who left home at 18, Mori knew that she wanted to experience life in a foreign city when a friend, guitarist Reck, invited her to join him on a trip to New York in 1977, to explore the Lower East Side’s burgeoning punk-rock scene. “I told my mother, ‘I’ll be back in three months,’ ” she says, laughing.

The rock scene in Tokyo was a man’s world, Mori explains during a conversation in her cozy East Village apartment. “I was surrounded by musicians, but it never occurred to me to be one,” she says. “You needed to be desperate to perform in front of people.” Through Reck’s involvement with No Wave act Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mori got to know that band’s vocalist, Lydia Lunch, as well as other strong women performers such the Contortions’ Adele Bertei and Pat Place and Mars’s China Burg. Hooking up with poet-turned-guitarist Arto Lindsay, Mori became the drummer for the last of the seminal No Wave acts, DNA.

“It was easy for me to get in because everybody was just picking up instruments and mostly came from the art scene,” Mori explains. “Even though I didn’t speak that much English, we could really connect. And it was more fun to play in a band than to support your boyfriend!” Mori’s untutored, occasionally barbaric beats were the perfect pulse for the chaotic, incandescent DNA, which was ultimately as much a performance-art ritual as it was a rock trio.

After DNA ended in 1982, Mori briefly played in Sunset Chorus, a song-oriented, all-female trio that was never officially documented. (She still has some tape of the band’s work: “Maybe for my 50th anniversary,” she teases.) It wasn’t long before John Zorn, an acquaintance Mori met via Lindsay, initiated Mori into the improvisation-oriented avant-garde scene developing at Studio Henry, Roulette and other downtown lofts. At first on drums, and later on her signature drum machines and effects pedals, Mori became an integral part of projects led by Zorn, electric-harp player Zeena Parkins, trombonist Jim Staley and others.

“Ikue Mori is the real deal: 100 percent pure music,” Zorn declares via e-mail. “For 30 years she has been challenging, creating and breaking through new musical frontiers, forging some of the most uniquely original electronic music in the world. She makes the digital world sing, sigh and howl with emotive passion.” Zorn’s testimonial underscores the evolution of Mori’s art: Where her early efforts were those of an auxiliary percussionist, she steadily incorporated new instrumental colors and even melodic contours in her drum-machine work. On her own recordings, especially since the 1996 solo disc Garden, Mori has fashioned vivid soundtracks for nonexistent films.

In Mori’s latest work, now created on laptop, she has actually started to create those films with computer animation. Friday night’s program includes Bhima Swarga, a dazzling project that sets ancient paintings from the ceiling of Balinese temple Kertha Gosa dancing to a score Mori created with Matthew Welch and a gamelan ensemble. Also on the bill is a new collaboration with Japanese vocal improviser Makigami Koichi, featuring animations based on Edo-period cartoons. On Saturday night, Mori will showcase Phantom Orchard, her painterly duo with Parkins, and Mephista, a hard-hitting improv trio with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and percussionist Susie Ibarra.

Both concerts are being presented under Zorn’s Tzadik banner, but Mori notes that her shows are also part of a series devoted to Japanese women artists who’ve made an impact here, including singer Akiko Yano and choreographer Yoshiko Chuma. “I’m always a Japanese woman, even though I’m so Americanized when I’m in Japan,” she says. Still, she admits to some surprise: “How could I have believed 30 years ago that I would be featured at Japan Society?”

Ikue Mori plays Japan Society Mar 21, 2008, and Mar 22, 2008.