Rhys Chatham + Ex Easter Island Head

To round off a weekend, you need a certain kind of evening. The kind that, even if you go out, doesn't strip the warmth of home from your clothes, that doesn't try to change the face of the melancholy that comes when the party's over, that doesn't end too late - or doesn't end at all.

Sunday evening in London's East End carries the smell of markets shut down in the rain and of petrol on shoes. Few people out on the street, and few behind the lights of the houses. Where does everyone go when a week dies?

Ex Easter Island Head, from Liverpool, have already been playing for a while when we step into the warm space of Cafe Oto and lose ourselves in the half-light among sofas and bar stools, small tables and the glow from the quiet street outside that shelters their interplay of sounds.

It's certainly no accident that a venue like this - relatively small and, fittingly, more like a café than a club - has for some months now been hosting the best of British avant-garde music and beyond. The atmosphere is just dispersive enough, the bar sits at the back, and the stage draws attention to itself, wrapping its sound around a boxy, spare, dark structure.

The music of Ex Easter Island Head grows out of the percussion of electric guitar bodies struck with timpani mallets. Occasional intrusions of wind instruments complete a musical picture built on melodic repetition, echoing the early compositions of Steve Reich, but more properly the experiments of George Antheil (a classic example being, of course, his "Ballet Mécanique") or those of Colin McPhee, albeit without the latter's splendid forays into ethnomusicology.

The percussion on the bodies of the atypically tuned guitars, together with the avant-garde lesson behind it, sustains a set of barely an hour, within which converge manifestations of a genre-less statelessness, a haphazard recourse to the dictates of an empirical - before musical - minimalism, in which experimentation bends to melody, the true connecting thread of the performance, leaving the listener adrift in a dreamlike disorientation entered through repetition and the benefits of drone.

The end result is an example of abstract, visceral musicality, still immature from a compositional standpoint but certainly fertile and interesting.

Rhys Chatham, on the other hand, has no idea what a Sunday is. Coming from someone who has always followed the dictates of inspiration, it's hardly a surprise. From one of the many tables, a man of enormous, fragile stature takes his seat on the small stage. He sets up his computer ("it's just an expensive stopwatch," he'll say, referring to the fact that the device's only function will simply be to tell him how much time has passed since the piece began), just enough time to congratulate the Liverpool ensemble, to deal with a false start, and the impromptu, brilliant "23 February 2011" begins.

The structure is simply a loop over which Chatham lays single trumpet notes, which pile up, overlap, and clash, creating a dynamic complex that shifts direction whenever the low or high notes begin to prevail, sketching new interweavings over sonic textures that are themselves dynamic due to the layering that came before.

One is reminded of Chatham's interpretation of La Monte Young's "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys" or of the trajectories of a rock aesthetic applied to a sensibility that, to put it plainly, could be called totalist: fragile in its balance, yet imposing in its execution.

Silence returns for a few minutes - just enough time to restart the pricey stopwatch and chat with the audience a bit more - and another recent composition develops, albeit less compellingly, the tonal shadings of the previous piece. The title leaves little room for questions: "29 February 2011" moves along the lines drawn just before, pushing even further into atonal territory, with the alternation of sustained high and low notes, yet still staying within the vital parameters within which the Chatham of the early 2000s seems to operate.

The last, fleeting piece is for guitar. "With a very special tuning," he says. And you can see him tightening and loosening the strings in a completely random way, the result being a couple of minutes of punk, strangely all in a major key.

Watching a Sunday die brings a sense of joy and vindication. It has the taste of light rain, of the few cars around, of the deserted city, of Pyrrhus and his victories.

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