Some might feel disappointed that the touring edition of Food, the long-running collaboration between English saxophonist Iain Bellamy and Norwegian percussionist Thomas Strønen, doesn’t include their frequent playing partner Christian Fennesz. The Austrian guitarist and laptop wizard plays a pivotal role on the group’s most recent releases, Quiet Inlet and Mercurial Balm, thickening the sound with his processed textures and contributing some surprisingly expressive solos. But those who think he’ll be missed need only open their eyes: replacing the Austrian musician will be the still and moving images of British visual artist Dave McKean.

It’s a good fit: few improvising acts sound as cinematic, and McKean is such a fan of Food’s work that he started his own Feral Records imprint in order to release its self-titled debut in 2000.

“We’ve always talked about doing something together,” says Strønen, reached at home in Oslo. “So I asked him this time whether he’d be interested in making some images that we could add to the concert, and the way he did that was actually by creating a 45- or 50-minute-long soundtrack, with music from us—different pieces that he liked. He put that into one big suite, just to have something to work from, and then he made different images and some film. Everything’s slow-moving, and really, really beautiful. That was just his proposal, and now he’s made some more, which is actually coming from England on the Net as we speak. It’s such a big file that it’s taking two days to get to Norway, so that I haven’t seen.”

Strønen’s clearly not worried that he’ll barely have time to view the new images before hopping on a jet to North America: trust and collaboration have been Food’s hallmarks since its beginnings, circa 1998. For years, in fact, the band functioned without written music or rehearsals, magically creating fully realized “compositions” while retaining the spontaneity of free improvisation. Of late, though, and especially since moving to the ECM label in 2010, Strønen and Bellamy have adopted a more structured approach.

“For the audience, it won’t feel like a big difference, because we always work in a compositional way,” Strønen says. “But trust us: it’s exciting to actually start something knowing that this is a tune and we know where it’s going!”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the percussionist’s blank-slate approach to the electronic touches he generates in concert. “I go on-stage with two samplers,” he explains, adding that he captures acoustic input from Bellamy’s horns as well as from his own drums. “But everything I do—and this is sort of a principle, to me—is live. I’m not sitting at home making my samples and then firing them off on the gig. I’m entering the stage with empty samplers and creating all my sounds in front of the audience—sampling, recording, editing, and adding effects.”

The result is music that happily marries the acoustic and the electronic in ways that will speak to jazz aficionados and 21st-century modernists alike—and that’s often just plain beautiful, too.

Food plays the Ironworks on Thursday (January 15).