Tonight promises "a night of quality collaborations" from "some of today's leading exponents on the electronic scene". So a night of chin-stroking it is then. But, when Chicks On Speed appear in front of a seated Royal Festival Hall it isn't long before people are, with flagrant disregard for the unwritten rules of these types of events, dancing.
But no-one is dancing when Jim O'Rourke, Kim Gordon and friends take to the stage. O'Rourke, looking as dishevelled as is befitting of the first gentleman of experimental rock, shuffles onto the stage hunched in contrast to the tall and slightly maniacal Kim Gordon. Illbient decksman, DJ Olive, and Ikue Mori, staring near-motionless into a G4 laptop, complete the quartet. Having decided that the stage is too big for their ramshackle grouping they've created a little rehearsal room of their own down one end.
Tonight Kim Gordon is playing the guitar - or, rather, taking measured jabs at the guitar - and O'Rourke is on bass. He plays the bass like a dream. Literally, it's like you're having a dream and things aren't quite as they ought to be. The sounds emanating from it during the evening's opening track appear to have no relation to those that are traditionally associated with a string instrument. It makes for something of a surreal vision as the thrumming of his right hand simply produces a narcotic, pulsing electronic warmth.
Gordon and O'Rourke leap from peddle to peddle twisting the gain, the reverb, the flanging. O'Rourke pushes and pulls his bass guitar in and out of the magnetic fields around his stack of amps, never appearing to lose control of the feedback for long. Gordon lies prostrate blowing discordant notes from a trumpet. Donald Byrd wouldn't approve.
In fact, there are times this evening when the assembled hipsters resemble nothing more than a creative music lesson getting out of hand in the psychiatric wing. There are times when the sounds they make are considerably worse. It's like Alice Coltrane without the tunes.
"Jim, your Mum's on the phone," shouts one of the many disaffected punters hilariously, conjuring an image of kids messing around with guitars in their bedroom. Others get up and leave. The Wire subscribers tut and shake their heads. Perhaps a few stifle a laugh as Gordon throws her guitar around the stage with a theatricality not seen since sound was introduced to moving pictures and O'Rourke crouches at his amp like Dr Frankenstein.
The music is only ever momentarily engaging - when the semblance of a rhythm from Ikue Mori's laptop or a melody, again from Ikue Mori's laptop, appears and then just as quickly as it came is cast out by another shriek of feedback from the guitars.
So, are we looking at the real avant garde? Probably more like one of its more belligerent - and better funded - extremes. The real avant garde still resides on the council estates and suburban streets where kids turn technology and a lack of formal training into exciting new musical shapes. In trying to escape his classical training, O'Rourke finds that he can only stamp his feet whilst he stares it in the face.
