First a fist pounds on a big metal door. The fist sounds small, nervous, and urgent. The door sounds daunting and impenetrable. Then a bell rings. Then a door creaks. Then a clock chimes. Then a glass breaks and boots walk slowly over crunching gravel. Then there are more clocks and more doors.

Raz Mesinai, an Israeli-born and New York–based electronic composer and percussionist, makes this all happen in 36 seconds that he names for a two-page parable by Franz Kafka, 'Before the Law.' Kafka’s tale of a man who spends his life trying to get past the doorkeeper guarding the gate of 'the Law' doesn’t mention any of these sounds explicitly. There certainly are doors (we see only one but the doorkeeper tells the man that there are many, with 'one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last'), and we can never avoid the presence of clocks that tick away the time left in the waiting man’s life. But Kafka gives us no audio cues, no hint as to what any of this might sound like.

Mesinai’s flicker of a composition is less a soundtrack to 'Before the Law' and more of a sonic impression of it, one rich with the man’s desperation and persistence, his frustration with his own powerlessness — the fleas that invade his collar, the blindness that afflicts him. Mesinai’s piece, which opens his entire Before the Law (Tzadik) album of Kafka compositions, captures Kafka’s psychological violence, the fierce, insistent pounding of the fist on the door as the pure sound of being refused at the gate of power, of being locked out of a fate you want to be yours. In the parable, the man waits at the door where he dies. In the song, he pounds at the door and all he gets is broken glass and shrill reminders of his own mortality.

As a writer, Kafka is most synonymous with monstrous images — the cockroach of The Metamorphosis, the mole of 'The Burrow,' the death-sentence apparatus of 'In the Penal Colony' — and the debilitating psychological states those images have come to symbolize since he started dreaming them up in 1913 under the watchful eye of his father and his Workman’s Accident Insurance bosses: shame, alienation, fear, disgust. 'A picture of my existence . . . would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow,' he once wrote, 'stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.'

But Mesinai’s project reminds us of a crucial fact: Kafka’s writing about his useless existence, his revulsion at his own humanity, was also saturated with sound and music; the tests and trials of his characters were often riddled with noises that never let them forget that there was no escape. Gregor Samsa never feels farther removed from the human than when his roach ears pick up strains of his sister’s violin. The flaw of the 'Penal Colony' death-sentence machine is the sound of it creaking.

The playwright Christopher Drobny recently adapted Kafka’s stories — 'Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk' principal among them — as sung and performed stage daydreams in his musical Kafka Songs. But on Before the Law, Mesinai is after something else: not the adapted musicalization of plot and character but the distillation of Kafka into collaged sonic landscapes that evoke the emotional anguish of his work through interpretive instrumental abstraction and digitally constructed psychological terror. Mesinai’s three-part 'In the Penal Colony' slices violins into percussion crashes and oboe squeals until Kafka’s apparatus goes haywire — its smooth writing on criminals’ bodies becoming bloody jabs — and we’re sucked into a noisy tornado of mechanic malfunction. His 'The Metamorphosis' is 11 tracks of cold mental spooking, moaning and grinding battles between violin-plucked calm and processed species-changing anxiety.

Before the Law’s most successful treatment is of Kafka’s 'The Burrow,' his story of a mole who, using his forehead as a sledgehammer, digs an underground tunnel system where he can live in safe isolation from an army of enemies he can only hear. The mole experiences his terror and his fear through sound. He cannot escape their scratching and clawing, and he clings to his burrow as an exit into a silence he never finds. The noises are always there, sounding the same, getting louder.

Mesinai turns Kafka’s earth and sand into urban sewer pipes coated with gurgling refuse. The turn-of-the-20th-century underground of the Prague ghetto has become the turn-of-the-21st-century underground of downtown New York. The trap is now made of metal, the tunnels are now made of concrete, and there is ceaseless — almost deafening — clanging and rattling, scurrying and tumbling. The feeling is as powerful as when you first experience it in Kafka: the noises you fear most, even in death, will never leave you alone.