Demdike Stare / Nate Young @ The Art School, 14 June

There’s a point in Wolf Eyes alum Nate Young’s set where he seems satisfied with the unearthly, feedback-drenched howls of static and the rumbling thud of funereal bass drums – slowly and calmly, he takes out a set of smoked black shades and puts them on. Completely improvised, his set comprises looped and processed feedback gathered from contact mics, delay units and foot pedals, tied together with omnipresent, thudding bass.

Throughout the heavenly static, he is utterly indifferent to the rapt, statue-still crowd, or any mainstream notions of form or structure. It’s self-indulgent, perhaps, and arguably lacks musicality, but in its sparseness, its harshness, there is an undeniable beauty. Young sits reverently before his machines like the organist in some infernal industrial church.

By contrast, Demdike Stare would go down a treat in any main-room techno environment, twisting the often abstract, minimal bass-scapes and textural tone poems of their Test Pressing series into energised slabs of shuddering, towering dub techno. There are hints of fractured dubstep, brooding skeletons of rhythm inspired equally by Detroit and Berlin’s aesthetic legacies, and towards the end, brief but rousing excursions into proto-jungle and hardcore rave.

Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker brood over obscure monoliths of analogue sequencers, glimmering MIDI devices, and a turntable spinning specially-cut dubplates. Propulsive, kinetic and darkly euphoric, they are still as remorselessly experimental and as surely improvised as Young, but their move towards the centre of the dancefloor is thrilling. [Bram E. Gieben]