"Are we supposed to be enjoying this?" On stage, Eddie Prevost - a legend to readers of magazines like The Wire - was scraping a violin bow over a cymbal, which in turn was grazing nylon strings stretched over a gigantic wine barrel. Meanwhile, Tom Chant was using his saxophone to recreate the sound of two pigeons killing each other very slowly. The pair had been on stage for two minutes and already my the friend on my right was feeling fractious. During the next 10 minutes, five other men meandered to their instruments and began wringing sound from them the way a dentist might extract a wisdom tooth: precisely and painfully.
David Toop - another seminal figure in certain avant-garde circles - drew eerie screeches from his pedal steel guitar, drawn-out notes that were like the ululations of a musical saw, only less tuneful. He even made a waifish flute sound like a blender grating ice. A keyboard clattered; a radio/cassette player dating from roughly 1971 hummed; electronic twiddling occurred; and melodies hovered tantalisingly within view, yet depressingly out of reach.
One name made this night of "sonic exploration" irresistible: Squarepusher. Under that name, Tom Jenkinson has produced several fantastic albums of demented experiments in drum'n'bass: his music is rhythmically mind-boggling but shot with gorgeous tunes and infused with a sense of humour. Perhaps conversing with nearby punters while tapping randomly at his bass is his idea of a giggle, but this time I didn't get the joke. The moments when you could click with what he was doing were disappointingly few.
Fewer still were the times when it felt like these musicians were listening to each other; instead they were engaged in simultaneous but separate quests to challenge preconceived notions of musical boundaries. Only Richard Thomas, an electronics fiend whose collocation of skewed squiggles suggest he could happily be the next Aphex Twin, seemed to be paying any attention, recording snatches of Chant's decreasingly interesting sax then distorting them. So it was impressive, if ironic, when, after 52 minutes of nonstop noise, the seven briefly glanced at each other and, almost exactly in unison, stopped - to muted applause and a discernible sigh of relief.
"Apparently, the degree definition of music is structured sound," remarked the friend on my left. He reads The Wire and even he didn't enjoy himself. With no melodies, rhythms or hooks to cling to, few could.
