LINE is the brainchild of Escapologists keyboard boffin Neil Wells; a one-man exercise in lo-fi hip hop lovelorn tales featuring a laptop and a guitar that's reminiscent in parts of Stuart David's Looper project and even a slightly lower budget Graham Coxon. When he ends his set, nervously eyeing up the sizeable audience through thick horn-rimmed lenses, most of us don't know whether to laugh, cheer or cry.

Which is more than can be said of tonight's "set" by The Telescopes.

As a long-time admirer of Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran's work, it pains me to say that this probably won't go down as one of their most memorable performances. The Telescopes are one of those acts whose music, both in its' recorded form and as part of a live setting has managed to both astound and baffle at the same time. When people like Thom Yorke and Chris Martin talk about experiments with sound, they'd might as well be discussing what they had for breakfast in comparison to Lawrie and Doran's adventures in creating revolutionary techniques that can be both pleasurable and downright excruciating on the ears at the same time.

Such as tonight, which sees an audacious 35 minute set consisting of just one outbreak of noise from the three piece, with Lawrie using various objects from a bow to his microphone lead to whip a guitar that lays inanimate on a table at the front of the stage, while the other two band members extract various levels of feedback and distortion from their instruments.

At times the whole concept echoes the score from a 1970s Hammer House Of Horror episode, mixing loud shards of noise with eerie, pulse-blistering scrapes and swoops. On other occasions it leaves people wondering why a band with such an exhilerating back catalogue as the Telescopes have feel the need to recreate such an undescribably eviscerate racket in public.

Tonight the Telescopes didn't just push the boundaries of what's listenable and what's not, they probably left the poor blighters with tinnitus as well.

Photographs courtesy of Ian Hales