Fennesz

There's a palpable sense of excitement in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's Southbank this evening, as the time for more-than-a-record-label Touch's contribution to the Ether 09 festival approaches. With a roster that includes sculptors of sound as distinguished as Biosphere, Philip Jeck and BJ Nilsen, and a line-up tonight of Sweden's CM von Hausswolff, New Zealander Rosy Parlane and Austria's Fennesz, it doesn’t matter in the least that we have to quit the crowds drinking on a sun-drenched riverside Festival Hall terrace and file into a dark auditorium. They can keep their beer in the sun: we're here to get droned into the middle of next week.

With the stage bathed in oppressive sulphur yellow, red and orange light, CM von Hausswolff's set stretches out his '130 HZ + 147 HZ', a 30-second track on his 2006 album The Wonderful World of Male Intuition, to 40 minutes; the minimal granulation of its introductory section building into a punishing drone, the frequency of which warps and remodels itself whenever you turn your head in a different direction. All around the auditorium people are doing the same thing, looking as though they've just been hatched. My girlfriend has her fingers in her ears, but rather than signalling disapproval she's just checking out a different part of the sound.

Watching a man standing virtually stock still behind a table turning knobs and pushing buttons is usually pretty tedious. Boredom doesn't get a look in here, however. Probably because everyone's thinking that there's only one button on Hausswolff's array. A very big red one that says: 'DESTROY AUDIENCE'. God knows how the piano recital going on in the neighbouring Purcell Room is turning out.

Following on from this austere, muscular performance, the humid drips, echoes and chirrups of Rosy Parlane's hothouse sound-world feel distinctly more organic. Glimmering little pinpricks of melody appear around the perpetual central note of 'Odessa', the piece eventually collapsing into a mush of twisted, addled sound so moist-sounding that it's all you can do to resist removing strands of it from your clothing. The treated organ rush of 'Dawn' is more expansive still, and is probably what would result if you compressed every shoegaze album ever made into five minutes. He closes with last year's ‘Willow’, which weaves its way out of hisses and buzzes towards a moving coda of chimes so resonant that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’d done the QEH a structural mischief.

The headline act of the evening, Fennesz, is here to perform his last album, 2008's superb Black Sea (one track of which, 'Glide', was co-written with Parlane), from beginning to end. Running a guitar through a laptop and sequencer array he shovels effects over strong melodic hooks, one hand alternately stroking chords from the guitar while the other adjusts levels and gets busy with his MacBook Pro. This is a more abrasive take on the album, tracks such as 'The Colour of Three' testing their own melodic borders, seemingly keen to break away and warp into bursts of pure white noise.

This tension between the recorded versions and their live reproduction – which is hardly unexpected, given Fennesz's lack of interest in repeating himself – continues throughout the set, with the soft edges and acoustic strummed chords of 'Perfume For Winter' remodelled to fit into a harder, colder aesthetic, and the hissing, euphoric flow of closing track 'Saffron Revolution' sounding at once more abrasive and more epic. Its towering drone spirals in every direction from the stage, the hall's superb acoustics performing as an echo chamber. It's a transcendent conclusion to a triumphant performance.

For the encore all three artists return to the stage and perform a joint work that simply and effectively combines Hausswolff's brute force, Parlane's crowded atmospheres and Fennesz's airy majesty. The piece is entitled ‘The Missionary Position’, and we’re all more than happy to lie back and take it.