FORMER Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith presents an unusual musical spectacle. He plays guitar flat on his lap, either patting and rubbing its strings with what looks like a clothes brush and an empty tuna tin or with a bow or a towel laid along its length.

He’s accompanied by Lotte Anker from Copenhagen, who plays caustic notes on a rasping soprano saxophone, and drummer Samuel Duhsler. He creates tinny sounds on his cymbals or what resembles the griddle of a barbecue and drums a long chain that he has dropped onto his snares.

The sounds seethe in front of Heike Liss’s fluid, improvised visuals of daybreak, dissolving mists and snowstorms at sea.

It’s an uncanny provocation of the senses and yet the combination of Anker’s abrasive breath-sound, the pile-up of Frith’s staccato notes and Duhsler’s percussive conflagration creates a startling amalgam.

This is truly ensemble music, with each performer carefully listening and responding to others, while stimulating them in turn.

When Anker switches to a wailing alto saxophone or Frith, picking and strumming, returns his guitar to a conventional position with Duhsler striking out with his mallets, the sound is an ongoing adventure for the listener.

So much so, that towards the end of the first set, out of this frequently jarring sonic mission, moments of sudden and unexpected gentleness and quietude arrive, as if another new timbral frontier had been crossed and musical discoveries accomplished.