Three nights after the Ether festival devoted a concert to the music of Julia Wolfe, it turned its attention to Wolfe's husband and fellow Bang on a Can founder, Michael Gordon.

Conducted by Nicholas Collon, the Aurora Orchestra gave the UK premiere of Gordon's "environmental symphony", Decasia, first performed in 2001, alongside a screening of Bill Morrison's film of the same name.

Though it has subsequently acquired an independent life as a cult classic of experimental contemporary cinema, Morrison's startling collage, assembled from remnants of disintegrating celluloid film stock, was first designed as a counterpoint to Gordon's work.

Reversing the normal process of combining music and film, Morrison tailored his parade of images to Gordon's score: its incessant pulses – by turns buoyant and threatening – support a sound world in which the amplified instruments, carefully tuned microtones apart, create layers of fiercely dissonant harmony, punctuated by beats and difference tones.

Like Morrison's film, in which newsreel footage of vanished worlds and long-forgotten events is constantly teetering on the edge of being lost for ever, with decaying images falling apart or being swept away before our eyes, so Gordon's work seems to present simple musical objects – melodies, harmonic progressions and cadences – through an aural haze, as though covered in dust and cobwebs.

The disjunctions between the aural and the visual are sometimes startling and disturbing – one of the most massive climaxes in the work, with shrieking dissonances and pounding rhythms, is matched to a clip of young children filing into what looks like a convent school. But film and music combine in a compelling way: as you watch and you listen, you wouldn't want to miss a moment of either.