Mr. Sorey’s ability to devise lengthy, spontaneous improvisations with the tautness and logic of a composition was on display last month during a residency at the Stone, in the East Village. On his final night, he gave a solo performance, stalking around behind a massive setup of bells and drums and other mallet instruments. He stroked a gong, then struck it forcefully, putting his shoulder into it. He tapped and pounded two close notes on the glockenspiel, drawing out its overtones. Things reached a climax about an hour in, when he swept across his electric keyboard in a violent crescendo, using a host of toneless sounds he’d programmed into it: shrieks, crashes, what sounded like dogs barking.

On “Verisimilitude,” that abundant energy hardly ever breaks through completely; it lingers just under the surface. It’s not rare for recordings of improvised music to give a sense of the physical space between instrumentalists, but with Mr. Sorey’s trio, that air seems to be in a state of charged collapse, packed with magnetic density.

Maybe what all this mystery and forbearance is about — where it derives its power — is a struggle to contain something more, something bright and physical. When Mr. Sorey is drumming in more high-action bands, like Mr. Iyer’s, there’s a bursting architecture to his playing that he simply won’t allow into his own trio.

Mr. Sorey isn’t one of the many jazz drummers now who imitate the rhythms of hip-hop or electronic dance music; the negative spatialism of his trio’s work is more obviously affiliated with Mr. Lewis’s electro-acoustic compositions, or the indeterminate music of Morton Feldman, or the ghostly drumming of Milford Graves. Still, there’s an undeniable resonance with the foreboding depths of trap, or the heavy, cavernous sounds of rap experimenters like Shabazz Palaces and Moor Mother.

But Mr. Sorey remains particularly invested in his own self-defined tradition. This summer, ECM Records released “Bells for the South Side,” by Roscoe Mitchell, also a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. It featured contributions from Mr. Sorey, who had studied Mr. Mitchell’s percussion music at Columbia; Mr. Mitchell’s vast percussion “cage” — an assembly of bells and cymbals and drums — had inspired Mr. Sorey’s own arrangement at the Stone.

During the album’s recording, Mr. Mitchell spontaneously invited Mr. Sorey to play from within his old cage, a rare honor. Mr. Sorey’s eyes went dewy as he recalled the occasion. Mr. Mitchell, reached by phone a few days later, called it “a special moment.”