Beginning with an incorporeal RnB piano loop, which bobbed rhythmically for under the first half of the set, Inseminoid guided the worm's turn quickly into aggressive noise. A duo comprised of Mutant Ape and Culver, both established label runners (Turgid Animal and Matching Head respectively), they created a canny merging of power electronics' drive and drone's ability to fully internalise an idea, and themes seemed to run the length of their set without losing their clout. Brothers Yemen, having long since ditched the didgeridoo vibes of the past for something a little more queasily energetic and digital, chose to entrench themselves in a stage-left corner. After the brief surging of inactive noise, the pair moved through a series of sounds torn from various subgenres - exploring bowed mini-guitar, box guts, jabbing feedback and split second sun births.

Things kicked off in a relatively traditional manner with local folk players Cath and Phil Tyler; Cath's vocal warming up into a tenderly defiant instrument. Bringing together narratives reminiscent of early American and Scottish folk, cracked harmonies and all, their instrumental banjo cuts bring out a hrasher sound in the duo's set. The latest incarantion of Alex Neilson's Directing Hand saw him team up with Vinnie Blackwall on harp and improvised vocals, casting asdide his drone/folk creative streak. Here a heavier improv exploration was at work, Blackwall taking the lead to go where she chose. Her voice veered from honeyed to guttural through a moment of Ono-esque balladeering; there was somehting startling about hearing a trained voice let utterly loose. While her disctinctive vocals may have taken a few minutes to settel in, she was soon dispensing melodies like a fairy dust powered Theremin. Neilson's drums flitted between the swathes of harp and voice, touching at points like an unplugged, raw and delicate take on Taurpis Tula's most beautiful moments. Taking a path on the other side of sweetness, the vocal gutteresses of Polly Shang Kuan Band took their sound to the wrong edge of sanity. These perfect proponents of the Chocolate Monk label's style gnawed the air leaving audible teeth marks. With unsettling loops and murderous vocal intent, this trio built an asylum ward on the stage with only a handful of boxes and a couple of mics as collateral. Their thoroughly unclean atmospehere was an easy one to enjoy, the retching moans building into melodic firmament that they regurgitated again and again.

Feeling like the early days of electronica when anyone with a rack of software was peddling their version of the future, Colin Potter's set was a poor reminder of the past. Even his horrendous accompanying visuals looked like a bargain bin Warp video from mthe Artificial Intelligence series. Bets known as a backroon technical guy and engineer to the post-industrial royalty, his set appeared to be a case of too many LED peppered boxes and not enough concrete ideas. Vibracathedral Orchestra on the other hand sounded like they had ideas to spare while stillmanaging to look unconventionally dapper. Playing with the kind of structure and assurance not normally seen in this era's improv collectives, Vibracathedral built a story that touched Middle Eastern melodies and good ol' hoe down drones. With Mick Flower's violin leading the charge, breezes of melodica and wildman profiteering vocals created the very singular Vibracathedral air of a melodious detonation. Saturday headliners Wolf Eyes stepped back from the road to structure and did their tension session thing. Forsaking grizzled Sub Pop noise for the soundtrack to Stalk Me Til I Like Totally Freak Out Dude: The Movie, they closed the night with a sinister vision. Despite a hundred copyists, scenester sycophants and full-time side projects, this trio can still crack tundra without the need to stamp their feet.

Unwrapping Sunday's line-up at an amp boiling 20,000 feet, Jazzfinger set loose an outbreak of bowed feedbacks. Forcing the PA to flare out gulf streams of radar countermeasure drone, the duo coated the room with clusters of secondary melodies. French duo Vialka took panto to post-punk and let them do what comes naturally of over-enthusiastic and drunken genres, letting them energetically 'breed'. Their bouncy, rhythm-led gypsy left the audience both happy and a little puzzled, especially whe the drummer in a Little Miss Muffet outfit went skipping out into the audience. Vocal maltreatment duo Dylan Nyoukis and F. Ampism make the kind of sounds that normally only the RSPCA get to hear. Keeping the Chocolate Monk flag flying for Sunday, they rasped out the sound of rust and red throats, poking out layers of sound like a liposuction pancake stack. The clarity of the sound system revealed every little upsetting meat-sourced vocal nuance, Nyoukis' terrifying embouchure delivering full of dread nightmares.

Playing as a trio, Hush Arbors expanded to burn a mile-wide hole through the still waters of Keith Wood's mumbling psychedelic folk solo gigs. With the addition of Alex Neilson on drums and the equally impressive Leon Dufficy on firelit guitar, Wood's soungs were utterly transormed. Peforming a set that grabbed the venue's attention like a downpour of flaming butterflies, the trio were an unexpectredly bright shining highlight. Like hearing My Bloody Valentine produce Neil Young's country songs during his feedback soloing Weld era, their performance was that good.

There was a definite sense of keen expectation around Skullflower's set, the floor quickly filling up with cross legged acolytes awaiting audio overdose. Burning fossil fuel since the early 80s, Matthew Bower's latest manifestation of this project is aggressively jagged and rootless noise using guitars as source material. Joined by Lee Stokoe (Culver, Marzuraan) on bass feedback, he and Bower sounded like they venerate the same saints and worship in the same ruined churches. This might even be the best Skullflower line-up to date, the music completely loose from moorings and cloaked in ragged scarlet and black. While Bower switched between mic and guitar, Stokoe remained eep-rooted to a bass that looked like its used to dig unmarked graves on its days off. Manipulating great dents of air and vocal, Skullflower summoned an undulating stationary wave with the audience swaying in its clutch.

Metalux's MV Carbon saws through the bones of her cello, her ecstatic, convulsive death gurgles suspended in Culver's sticky web of drones. Evan Parker is a stoic silver bear, his eyes closed as he follows the divergent currents. His free-flowing sax contributions - an entrqancing peotic melody here, a dizzying blast of free skronk there - are judiocious, elegant, exhausting. Solid granite slabs of guitar and intestine violations from yellow Swans provide visceral punch. Together they explore treacly quagmire and thrashy skree, industrial decline and gravity-defying thrum.

With 10 notoriously deafening players struggling for air, the potential of a shapeless, nihilistic mess was limitless....but depsite the disorientating, abrasive abstraction, the focus is not on simple-minded force and brutality, but instead on listening, responding, moving as one to explore the spaces between the players.

Ears, of course, were already ringing by this point. The set-up for this tour was in line with its mission statement, to revela the DNA shared by free jazz and free noise: rather than split it into a series of short sets and collaborations, the whole cast amalgamated into a single supergroup for two long improvisations, which ebbed and flowed as people dropped in our out of the action. The first set sketched out an ambitious arc of busyness and intensity, from the looming torrents of the full ensemble to near-solo sections. C. Spencer Yeh's violin laserbeams lit up one of the loudest sections, while John Edwards delivered an awesome demonstration of the double bass's full acoustic properties and potential, jamming an old kitchen towel tube between the strings, while slapping, scraping and sawing it until, eyes closed, you could have sworn it was being played by four hands. Evan Parker stepped forward for the opening of the second set, his circular breathing hypnotising the room with an unending spirla of sound. Parker's sax had previously struggled to compete with the sheer volume of John Wiese's laptop vortex, Yellow Swans rewired circuitry or Metalux's amplified cello, and volume was one of the two areas in which the tour had perhaps misjudged the noise/free jazz balance, the other being numbers, with noise outnumbering jazz seven to three. As Parker stepped back into the shadows, the sound slowly thickened into an impressive miasma of shuddering dissonance, which the collective struggled to bring to a finale once the abrasion and volume had been maxed out.

Abstract duo Yellow Swans bring shock-and-awe guitar and crowd-control subsonics. Paul Hession and John Edwards are an understated but powerful rhythm section. Hession spends most of the evening silent and immobile, holding back his dextrous polyrhythms until they're 100% appropriate and necessary. Coaxing unfeasible, unimagined sounds from a double bass, Edwards is upfront but non-linear. Skullflower's Culver holds everything together with bouyant, sensuous six-string drones. The front line is held by the Metalux duo, M.V. Carbon's hellish cello and vintage reel-to-reel tape locked in with J. Graf's electronic brutalism and sinewy vocals.

But it's Yeh and Parker who dominate. The former's mesmerising vocal incantations - growling, throat singing and deranged chattering in diabolical tongues - are terrifying, intense, incomprehensible. Parker is often silent, brooding, immersed in the sounds around him. When he does play, his wildly inventive lines, as lyrical as they are abrasive, as chaotic as they are precise, make it immediately obvious why he's such a respected figure.