If Warhol’s unblinking Empire was stubbornly about the minutes you passed watching it, or the minutes you watched passing it, Empire II evokes the feeling really good real estate gives you: being completely impervious to time. Poe’s idyll is unmolested by the pedestrians he occasionally deigns to film, the cars that zip by them, the clocks that turn in a nearby tower. Clouds race by, their shadows with them, but the view remains eternal.

Preempting what for the ages will supposedly be “a richly layered soundtrack of songs and city noises” are, tonight, Thurston Moore, Matt Hayner, and Tom Surgal, improvising accompaniment directly in front of, and a little bit below, Poe’s film. They seem to be present mostly to alleviate boredom, which they do: Moore’s cunning abstractions match perfectly with the hexagonal lights of cars that cross the screen, the band’s improv keeping time with Amos’s cut-for-cut-for-cut eye on the motion outside. Surgal, facing forward, isn’t even watching the film. As it speeds by behind the trio, they appear to be working in slow motion, another ironic reduction in scale—if the Empire State building can play prop, why not three grizzled no-wavers?

Empire II plays on Friday, May 2 @ Pace University and Saturday, May 3 @ Village East Cinema.