Members of The Exploits of Elaine take their positions in the performance space, gingerly stepping over a myriad of sound-making devices. They’re here tonight to provide a live soundtrack to a visual piece by film maker Sarah Wood, entitled The Book of Love. The film is composed of ‘found footage’, with a kind of overarching narrative provided by recurring footage of a girl as she is guided through various stages of hypnosis.

As the opening scene depicts the girl being led into hypnosis the band tentatively begin to build waves of swirling timbre. So gentle is the introduction that it immediately brings to mind a field recording I once heard of a Tuvan harp being consecrated by its maker, in a ritualised practice which involves holding the instrument aloft for the wind to play.

The volume steadily increases, and the texture broadens, as the musicians find their place in the soundscape. Structure is provided on a macro level by the stark, chiming tones of a guitar line, which adds atmosphere and tension through the introduction of a shifting melodic landscape reminiscent at times of Middle-Eastern Maqam modes or Indian Rag structures. Other musicians respond by depicting a heavily-improvised micro-structure which responds closely to the dynamic of the film. A bowed mandolin creates sweeping, elegant lines which sometimes work in loose heterophony with the guitar line, and veer off at other times into sonorous ambience. The rest of the band uses their instruments to scribe a seamless continuum between pitched sounds and agglomerative percussive scree: guitar bodies are knocked, chimes are struck and zither strings are scraped. The timbre is further expanded by long feedback tones and electronically-reprocessed sounds.

What with the recent spate of interest in ‘free folk’ music, The Exploits of Elaine will probably engender comparisons with Sunburned Hand of the Man, No-Neck Blues Band and their contemporaries. In my mind there’s a clear distinction between the faux-naivety often employed by these bands and the Exploits’ more considered absorption of indigenous folk idioms. The more heterophonic moments recall at times the disturbing sounds of The Third Ear Band, but there’s also a contemporary flavour reminiscent of early Black Dice records or the less cacophonous moments of Wolf Eyes and Smegma’s split LP. Merely to state this band’s influences as I perceive them doesn’t really do justice to their combined effect. Put simply, it’s like indigenous folk music from a continent which doesn’t exist on this Earth.

Parallel narratives of tonality and timbre are employed to create a sound which is dense and cohesive but preserves a degree of separation and lucidity. The choice of instruments helps to emphasize these distinctions and prevent the musicians from treading on each others’ metaphorical toes. The effect is of a sonic landscape with complex yet defined layers of perspective, which brings to mind ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s description of the spatial-acoustic sensibilities of Papua New Guinea’s Kaluli people. Their musical concept of Dulugu Ganalan can be interpreted as a description of how seemingly unrelated timbres and tones can co-exist in temporal and spatial sound dimensions to contribute to a unified whole.

This process is especially evident at the dynamic climax of the Exploits’ set, as each musician seems to be ploughing their own furrow in the soundscape, intensely involved in their individual activity but also aware of the complex panoramic parallax they are creating. It’s pretty breathtaking, and at this point I close my eyes, lost in the complexities of the music. It’s like looking out over a vast ocean and simultaneously being able to focus on individual waves. Not to pronounce upon the quality of the film in any way, but when sound stimulates synaesthetic processes to this degree, there’s little need for accompanying visuals.