What was started 25 years ago by composers David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon as a one-day festival in New York is now one of the most vital forces in US contemporary music. Bang on a Can has celebrated its silver jubilee in the best way it knows: by commissioning an evening's worth of new pieces.

Nine composers, including the three founders, have come up with short works that use pre-recorded material, whether specially created or extracted from archives, as their starting points to create Field Recordings, an hour-long sequence topped and tailed with electronic sounds and turntable effects, which the musicians of Bang on a Can All-Stars played for the first time at the Barbican.

Such collective projects are almost inevitably uneven, but Field Recordings has no total duds. In Reeling, by Wolfe, a recording of a French-Canadian singer pulls all of the instrumentalists one by one into a tumbling, whirling dance. Lang's Unused Swan unravels a mysterious, beautiful, hymn-like melody over the sounds of rattling chains and knives being sharpened. Florent Ghys's An Open Cage creates Steve Reich-style speech melodies from John Cage reading his own writings. Later, Evan Ziporyn uses a Balinese singer recorded in 1928 as his point of departure, while Mira Calix employs cabin and cockpit recordings made during air flights as the backdrop for some gentle, ruminative instrumental solos.

Three pieces involve video images. Michael Gordon's Gene Takes a Drink provides a sonic background to mostly pastoral images by Bill Morrison, while Christian Marclay's Fade to Slide assembles a collage of clips from Hollywood film to which the instrumentalists provide punctuation. Wittiest of all is Nick Zammuto's Real Beauty Turns, a collection of cheesy video samples "collected over the years at thrift shops all over America", illustrating a whole range of beauty treatments and matched to equally cheesy music.