SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE William Brittelle, center, borrows pop-music iconography in a video for Mohair Time Warp.

Photograph: Stephen Taylor

Lip-synching in a live setting is almost always bad news, regardless of whether it’s Mariah Carey or Luciano Pavarotti who gets busted. But for composer-performer William Brittelle, miming his own songs in concert is not just for show; it’s the means by which he was able to relaunch a promising career cut short by injury. And in Mohair Time Warp, Brittelle’s new rock opera–slash-performance-art piece, lip-synching actually adds one more layer of irony and meaning to a work crammed with distorted snatches of pop culture. A CD of the music has just been issued by New Amsterdam, the adventurous label Brittelle codirects; he’ll perform it live…er, in person at Joe’s Pub on Thursday 8.

On record, Mohair Time Warp is a cycle of ten vibrant songs that mix new-music rigor, jazzy riffs and electric-guitar power chords. Backed by a versatile group of indie-classical musicians, Brittelle spouts fractured poetry littered with mass-media references, and munches on words for the sheer joy of their sound—such as the delirious repetitions of chimichanga in “Hieroglyphics Baby.” Live, Brittelle mouths his lyrics with the charismatic moves of a seasoned rock frontman.

Mixing high and low culture comes naturally for Brittelle, who studied composition at Vanderbilt University, then came to New York in 2000 for graduate school and promptly got involved with postpunk band the Blondes. Two mentors had a hand in his development: David Del Tredici, a Pulitzer Prize–winning neoromantic composer, helped him hone a personal voice, while Richard Lloyd, guitarist of influential art-punk group Television, taught Brittelle how to front a band with ecstatic abandon.

The Blondes were gaining momentum when the singer seriously injured his vocal cords during a 2004 performance at the Knitting Factory, leaving him unable to speak, let alone sing. “I had to quit the band and move back to the middle of nowhere, and I was like, What am I going to do with my life?” Brittelle recalls. “I sat down at the piano and started writing again. All of a sudden, this music that was 100 percent me—not me filtered through rock music or me trying to be an academic composer—came out. Gradually the Mohair stuff emerged out of that.”

While slowly rehabilitating his voice, Brittelle returned to New York to resume his studies with Del Tredici, who deems his student “a funky original with a keen ear and a New York edge.”

“With Bill, I sensed immediately that he had a very strong sense of his own path,” Del Tredici explains via e-mail. “As much as I could, I taught him to trust that innate sense of direction. Though, as his teacher, I was occasionally puzzled by his work, invariably as he clarified his own vision about what he wanted, the work became comprehensible to me.”

The key burst of inspiration came one evening on the subway. “It was just, Fafafafafafa bambambambam!” Brittelle recalls with excitement. That rush of syllables—the first words Brittelle sings in Mohair Time Warp—helped him write music that offered the cathartic feeling of favorite cuts by Michael Jackson, Prince and Def Leppard. At the same time, he was discovering kindred musical spirits. For the Now Ensemble he wrote Michael Jackson, a wry but affectionate tribute that solidified his ideas about using collage techniques. Brittelle also composed pieces for the edgy composers’ collective Anti-Social Music, several members of which now play in Mohair Time Warp.

As to who his ideal audience might be, Brittelle is as curious as anyone. “When you look at the piece through the eyes of a new-music connoisseur, there are things that people are going to see as challenging,” he says. “There’s some profanity in it. It’s very sexual. My singing is certainly not classical at all. There’s part of me that’s interested in being confrontational in that context, and also in being intellectual in a rock club.”

William Brittelle presents Mohair Time Warp at Joe’s Pub May 8, 2008.