Hauschka @ The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, 16 May

With the International Anthony Burgess Foundation intimately curtained off and laid out in the round with a piano in the centre adorned with oddities like ping pong balls and ticking pendulums, sitting down to watch Hauschka feels more like watching an eccentric professor at work in his office than a classical recital. Such is the imagination of Volker Bertelmann, the Dusseldorf composer whose boundless experimentation takes us on an evening into unexplored mental alcoves.

First up, though, is Elizabeth Preston, the Blackpool songwriter who offers us a “Western sandwich” of a set made up of loops on her trademark cello. There is some of Bat for Lashes’ mysticism about her; her smoky Lancastrian voice hiccups playfully through animalistic lines about weaving spiders and wounded lions, and all her songs creep with the cello’s sonorous menace. Preston’s alliterative lyrics and bare instrumentation expose her true warmth every so often, and her last song keep our minds moseying with its hand-clap horse clops.

As Bertelmann plays in support of his latest album, Abandoned City, the crowd leans forward in curiosity as he takes knick-knacks from a duffel bag at his side and places them atop various parts of the piano. Over the course of the night his one instrument is transformed into an astounding array of others: a creaking floorboard for Pripyat, a swampy guitar, a full percussive section. The result is hauntingly tactile electronica, effortlessly evoking subway tunnels and apartment buildings that soon vanish into the ether.

Bertelmann is generously chatty throughout, expressing his desire to communicate as a way of counteracting the loneliness and ritual loss intrinsic to his creative process. Fittingly, he closes with a funereal dismantling, methodically picking up all his piano props and throwing them to the floor, causing one ping pong ball to bounce down the aisle. When the spirits of these objects die down, what we’re left with is one musician and his remarkable ingenuity. [Chris Ogden]