“This piece isn’t about me, it’s about Binary System!” Roger Miller barks when I ask him to bring me up to date on his current projects.

I nonetheless press on to find that Miller, a keyboardist, guitarist, composer, and songwriter who’s been a sparkplug of the Boston music scene since he co-founded the influential rock outfit Mission of Burma in the early ’80s, is still a member of the silent-film-soundtrack ensemble Alloy Orchestra and has been busy making music for television clients including Nickelodeon and Universal theme parks. He recently played at the 20th-anniversary concert of another group he helped begin, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, at the Somerville Theatre.

But right now he’s focused on Binary System, his two-man band with Alloy Orchestra drummer Larry Dersch. The pair met in the late ’80s, when Dersch’s former group Common Ailments of Maturity opened for Miller on one of his solo piano dates in West Virginia. “I was blown away by Larry’s drumming,” Miller recounts. “He doesn’t play straight rock beats, he plays two or three rhythms at the same time. One of the things I like about small ensembles is that everyone gets to play to their maximum. In Binary System, we can use our abilities to put together a complex array of sounds. In some of our stuff the time changes in every bar, but it creates its own groove. It’s like a rock; it’s non-symmetrical, with bumps and divots, but still organic.”

Miller’s description holds up on Binary System’s new Invention Box (Atavistic), the group’s third album. It also applied live a week ago Wednesday, when Miller and Dersch started a five-date tour by taking the upstairs stage at the Middle East for a set that darted merrily between composed passages and improvisation. “The Initial Orbit,” the album’s third number, was especially beautiful live as Dersch — a sallow, sinewy figure perched over his drum kit on a very high stool — matched the notes of Miller’s bright electric piano melodies with precise drum hits and occasionally rattled a black box full of metallic junk for spice. The unrecorded vocal piece “Shem the Penman,” with lyrics borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, was also a charmer as it darted from a bold march into a tranquil open section where Miller’s playing had the softness of water drops and Dersch laid down a cool blanket of cymbal hiss. Then the tune jumped back to its feet as Miller ignited a blocky, chordal melody and resumed his singing, which he’s phrased with the staccato attack of a choked rhythm guitar since his Burma days.

That kind of interplay, as well as the slow-building modal textures Miller employs, is the lifeblood of Binary System, and it courses through Invention Box more than it did on 1999’s From the Epicenter (Atavistic) and their comparatively crude debut, The Binary System Live at the Idea Room (SST). Lately the duo have moved more into vocal compositions: the new CD’s “The Sound of Music . . . Today” features singer Liz Tonne darting between her usual improvised vocalise and some Julie Andrews warbling.

But it’s live where most of the thrills come in, Miller insists. “Sometimes our improvisations are the smokingest thing in our sets, sometimes not, but they always sound cohesive because we really know how to play together.” So stunning recorded sections like the atonal clusters of notes in Invention Box’s “Spiral” become springboards for bursts of unpredictable, exuberant creation on stage.

“To me, there are elements of Mission of Burma in Binary System, because of the chaotic rush of it,” Miller continues. But enough about him.

OR, NOT. When Jonathan LaMaster started his Sublingual Records label in 1998, it was at the instigation of, yes, Roger Miller. Miller’s music in part inspired LaMaster to begin his own experimentalist rock/jazz/improv band, Saturnalia, and it was Miller who suggested that LaMaster issue a compilation featuring some of the less conventional ensembles in Boston’s club scene. Thus Binary System, Saturnalia, Out of Band Experience, Andrew Newman, and others ended up on Sublingual’s first disc, Boston Underbelly: Music from the City of Revolution.

Since then LaMaster has kept turning up the heat on his various projects, and he’s become an important figure in New England’s avant underground. Within the past two years Saturnalia have toured extensively and appeared on their own Sublingual recordings and in collaborations with reedman Daniel Carter and others. LaMaster is currently a member of several bands, in which his violin playing ranges from complete improvisation to traditional folk styles. And in January he issued a CD tied to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Sonic Arts program called Acoustiphobia that blends student projects with a bold improvised performance led by New York City avant leader Elliott Sharp.

So its always good to get a briefing on his latest projects. He reports that negotiations for a second Acoustiphobia are in the works, with the bulk of the material drawing on a January performance by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, guitarist Nels Cline, and electric-harpist Zeena Parkins at the Museum School. He’s also got a memorial CD coming for the late local musician Michael MacDonald that would consist of the last studio recordings of MacDonald’s band Jupiter 88. In addition, a CD by Australian violin composer John Rose and a live recording of LaMaster and internationally respected improvisers Peter Kowald (bass), Daniel Carter, and Lawrence Cook (drums) are in the works.

The latter was made on stage at the Tremont Theatre on March 3. It was the first of a series of broad-ranging monthly performances that the International Society is sponsoring, with cross-cultural unity as a loose theme. LaMaster sits on the panel curating the series. Local musicians and performers are encouraged to submit an application package; details are available at www.sublingual.com/tremont.html.

FARTHER UP MASS AVE on the same night as Miller’s Binary System gig, Tim Catz was about to play a set with his outfit Bloodshot at the Lizard Lounge. But first, with his bass hung around his neck, he stepped to the microphone to read a short story about a thrill robber who gets caught and pummeled by two women. Then he turned up the volume and Bloodshot ripped into something that sounded like the Allman Brothers playing Pink Floyd with a guitarist flown in from Seattle.

For Catz, another fixture of Boston’s club-music scene who’s played in Seka, Strip Mind, Honeyglazed, Roadsaw, and a host of other tough and often slyly funny bands, it was a bon voyage party. He’s moving to LA, where he’ll switch his shingle from “rocker” to “writer.” He already has a leg up. The short story he read was from his second collection of them, Hangover Palaces; it’s published by local imprint Gato Loco, which also issued his raw and funny Horseshoes and Hand Grenades in 1999.

Actually, Hangover Palaces is more a novel, or at least a conceptual sequence of 35 very short stories that follow a struggling Boston rocker’s travails through flophouses, crappy jobs, petty crime, and lame relationships as he aims for the prize. “I come from the Pete Townshend school of songwriting,” Catz explains. “You’ve got three minutes to say what you have to say at the beginning, the middle is filler, and wrap it up with a good twist. That’s why the short-story format works for me. Every story is song-long. It’s something that’s not so good for a writer, because you have to elaborate, but for me it’s an instinctive thing. It made the first book a good toilet read. You leave it in the bathroom and can get through it in no time.”

I PROMISE this is the last time I’ll write about gifted Boston guitarist Johnny A. in this space for a while — if you all go to Copley Square at noon on Tuesday June 19 to hear him. His free hour-long outdoor performance is part of this year’s Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival, following the national release of his self-made Sometime Tuesday Morning album on hot-wired six-string god Steve Vai’s Favored Nations label.

A., the former music director of Peter Wolf’s band, is planning to record the follow-up to his solo instrumental debut, which got significant radio airtime and sold 5000 copies in the Northeast as an indie disc after its Y2K regional release. “I’ve got all the material ready, and of lot of it is being played live now by my trio. My aim is to bring back what I really like about instrumental music and have it be romantic in a way that has a sense of scope and isn’t retro. I did Sometime Tuesday Morning for myself. These days radio and the music industry dictate that everything on a record has to sound the same so it can be slotted into a really specific marketing niche. I wanted to celebrate rock, jazz, country, ethnic music — everything that’s important to me — because I figured I might not get a chance to make another record. And I found a guitar tone that glues it all together.”

A. will also play a national CD-release show at Harvard Square’s House of Blues next Saturday, June 16.

ANOTHER EMERGING GUITAR GREAT, spiritual steel player turned secular musician Robert Randolph, plays the Globe Jazz Festival stage in Copley Square at noon the day after A., on June 20. That night Randolph will also play a gig at Bill’s Bar, but before all that he’ll be performing tonight (June 7) at Lilli’s. He has recorded a beautiful instrumental CD with John Medeski and the North Mississippi All Stars called The Word (Rope a Dope/Atlantic).