The Notwist / Jel @ Mono, 16 March

Watching Anticon founder, Themselves and cLOUDDEAD beatmaker Jel play the MPC and sampler is like watching a gifted classical pianist attack the ivories – his fingers an impossible blur, playing each note, drum beat and sample, and challenging the 'push-play' approach of mainstream electronic musicians, and the tired notion that a single human pushing buttons on machines will always require less skill than three retro haircuts wielding guitar, bass and drums.

Pieces from Soft Money have become turntablist-like displays of beat dexterity, while cuts from the more recent Late Pass are stripped of some of their fuzz and grunge, Jel's devastating lyrics emphasised. He's a prodigious talent, criminally under-rated, and searingly intelligent on the subject of the music industry – as he says in the lyrics to a blistering Romantisch: "They get us all romantic, before they fuck us..."

The Notwist, a German avant garde and experimental group who have undergone countlesss transformations and genre shifts in their career, build thrilling passages of brooding post-rock, pulsing electro and freaked-out jazz to bear on the catchy, fairly standard indie-pop that constitute the core of the songs – tracks like They Follow Me, from this year's Close To The Glass, become much more than the sum of their parts. Old favourites like Solo Swim are greeted rapturously, and the band deliver three encores, including a blistering Gravity. With immaculate musicianship, a strong stage presence and over two decades of hook-driven songwriting to their name, their quality is undeniable. [Bram E. Gieben]