Is it sound? Yes. Is it art? Check.

Reveal for yourself what "sound art" means when New York-based experimental musician Andrea Parkins unpacks her laptop computer, her souped-up accordion and her bag of amplified found objects at the Wood Street Galleries on Saturday for a performance titled "Faulty (Acts)."

Parkins' concert is another installment in a series called "Radical Riffs," which is the first time since the mid-'90s Three Rivers Arts Festival -- when Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton performed at Point State Park -- that any upscale Downtown arts organization (in this case, the Cultural Trust) has allotted dedicated funding for a regularly occurring series featuring experimental and free-improvised music. "Riffs" is the brainchild of local musician and poet Eden McNutt, who programs it in conjunction with Wood Street director Murray Horne.

There's a good reason why Parkins (who lists quite a wide spectrum of influences on her MySpace page, from Sun Ra and Morton Feldman to Sonic Youth and Vashti Bunyan) was included in this series. "Eden was in an art history class at Rutgers that I taught as a grad student," she recalls. "Since then, I ran into him a couple times, and when I played in Pittsburgh before, he's come to the concerts. I found out he's also gotten involved in music."

Parkins' roots run deep in the Pittsburgh region, having grown up in Murrysville with her siblings, Lisa and Roland, who are also musicians. She's notably the cousin of famed electric harpist Zeena Parkins. As a serious classical pianist, she studied with teachers in town but then decided to switch to jazz and shipped off to Boston's famed Berklee College of Music at the age of 17. "That led me to learning about improvisation. But the styles they were doing felt limited, because at the same time I had been listening to punk and R&B and what was local in Boston. There was a band called Busted Statues that I was in, which was connected with Mission of Burma."

Finding her way into art school instead, Parkins made avant-garde films and multitracked musique concrete pieces ("I was doing a lot of old-fashioned quarter-inch tape cutting on the splicing block") and acquired her first synthesizer in 1989. That was when she really discovered her primary musical interest -- timbre.

"I always listened to music timbrally. I was drawn to Stravinsky orchestrations, Renaissance music with early instruments, and Thelonious Monk -- things that had a particular timbre. So I began this exploration with electronics. I still play the piano, but I think electronics are my main instrument. I'm an electronicist, really."

Yet adding an accordion to the stew (which only a few other experimental musicians, such as Guy Klucevsek, have fully utilized) would seem to be a bit incongruous, no? Not for her. "In the late '80s, somebody handed me this little accordion," she says, "but I didn't grow up listening to polka parties so I wasn't into the genre music. The way I approach the accordion, it's a sound generator, and has a beautiful potential for sonority and density. The big story is about sound."

How does that all of that translate into a live setting? Two sound strains emerge and commingle, drawing on her experience in both the music and art realms. "The accordion runs through a setup of guitar effects that I've found over the years. I treat it very much like a guitar, where I'm thinking more about Jimi Hendrix than klezmer. Not to exclude rhythm and line, but I'm into it more for the texture. As far as my writing, it's about atmosphere and architecture, not so much dynamic as it is internal. I think about drones and stasis. The connection between performance and installation is important to me in my solo work, and it's taken me years to figure out how to do that."

All the electronic music that Parkins originally created on tape, and later moved to samplers, is now contained on her laptop, from which she does live sampling and mixing. "I use a program called Max/MSP, and I work with a programmer on a particular piece of software that does random generative sound processing."

Despite the high-tech gadgets in her setup, Parkins also emphasizes raw physicality. "I'm a small person doing several things at once, so there's always been this feeling that what I'm doing is nearly beyond my capability to control. That used to bother me, but now I think this whole physical awkwardness provides content to what I do. There's a gestural aspect in the way I improvise and address my instruments that I'm trying to work into what I'm composing. I started to realize that there were wonderful things happening that were the result of the wide range of tasks I had to fulfill."

Parkins has been equally busy for the past two decades participating in the downtown New York music scene -- the realm of free improvisors and avant-garde jazz. She's best known for her well-documented and quite formidable trio with saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and drummer Jim Black, with whom she's amassed a discography on the Hatology label (though their latest disc, a double effort called "Quiet Music" is out on Prime Source) and released a live DVD that documents their 2003 tour of Europe. Her name has shown up on Wilco merchandise tables thanks to her collaborative trio ("it's close to my roots in rock in a way that's just pure joy") with guitarist Nels Cline and drummer Tom Rainey, which has been issued on the Atavistic and Victo labels.

And that's not all -- Parkins has a new CD called "Quick-Drop" out on the Creative Sources label with two Swiss musicians: clarinetist Laurnet Bruttin and bassist Dragos Tara, as well as an upcoming album with France's Jessica Constable, who combines vocals and electronics. Parkins is composing a piece for premiere at New York's Roulette, which involves bagpiper David Watson and a young New Music cellist named Alex Waterman, and she's also in an "unintellectual" duo with Ches Smith, who plays with Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog band and with indie-rock darlings Xiu Xiu. "He's using analog electronics on his drum kit," she explains. "It's very obstreperous and surprisingly fun. Hopefully we'll record that some time."

Living in "the rich little sauce we stew," as she lovingly dubs the New York music scene, Parkins emphasizes that it isn't so easy surviving as a progressive musician in a city with an incredibly high cost of living. "If someone wants a viable career," she admits, "they shouldn't be in this business. I actually have more gigs in New York in the next couple of months than I've had in years, but they're all at places with limited resources. I know that if most of us [in the scene] were only playing in New York, we wouldn't be able to make a living -- we have to tour and teach, and almost all of us are traveling around the world."