Trouble for your ears?:An evening with Ectoplasm Girls and Leyden Jars.

I really ought to go to Cafe Oto more often. It's a great venue, a wonderful institution, a meeting place for like minded souls, and somewhere you could pretty much rock up any night of the week and hear interesting music. You can browse back issues of the Wire magazine, flick through old crates of vinyl, get a beer, a coffee (Persian food now too), and even the toilets are clean. It's to my shame I had, before Saturday, only attended twice. In 2014 to see Brazilian jazz/punk/samba/fusion outfit Meta Meta and then, two years after that, for the Egyptian wedding electronica of Islam Chipsy and E.E.K.

So I was pleased to catch up with Neill and Leonor in Tate Modern, after, at long last, seeing Christian Marclay's epic 'Clock' installation, and head up to Dalston for an evening in the company of Ectoplasm Girls and Leyden Jars.

Firstly though, we needed food and, on a friend's recommendation, we visited Andu Cafe, an Ethiopian vegan joint with friendly, prompt, unfussy service, Ethio-jazz playing in the background, and a BYOB policy (I, remarkably, went for a Coke). There's no menu as such, you just share a platter and then choose between Ethiopian bread (inerja) and rice. We had both and the platter contained a selection of foodstuffs all of which I had previously been ignorant of (yemisir wot, tikil gomen, ater kik, fesolia, and shiro wot) but, all (or at least most) of which were delicious. Following a tasty vegan pizza in Camden back in December, I really must eat at more vegan places. It makes sense on so many levels, no matter what tiresome Twitter trolls like Piers Morgan pretend to think.

Arriving at Oto we met with Neil, Mark, and Eugenie, I grabbed myself a schooner of Cwtch (a Welsh red ale I'd enjoyed previously) and Leyden Jars soon, unceremoniously (in the experimental music world it's really not cool to act the big star), took the stage.

Their sound is a slow building one, heavier on atmospherics than tunes, but not without beats, not lacking in rhythm. There are elements of dub, glitch, and minimalism and, in places, spectral visions of more upbeat electronic genres like techno and jungle. It's as if we're viewing these styles through a veil, squinting at them, or as if they've been revivified by some mad scientist and now have a life of their own.

You can get lost in the music or you can try and analyse it. I'd recommend the former but when I deigned to don my reviewer's cap during sections of their roughly half-hour performance I found myself mentally scribbling down words like 'ambient' and 'global'. Words that may well be serviceable in describing the sound that Leyden Jars make but have become moribund by overuse and misuse.

What Leyden Jars do, I think, is more interesting than that - and the fact they do it all out of a couple of 'suitcases' full of cables, wires, and contraptions unspecified (and not forgetting what looked like a Heinz tin can into which a microphone was attached and voices looped) makes it all the more curious. I enjoyed their chiaroscuro and, although I don't fully understand everything they're trying to do, I was, in the words of Ian Dury, partial to their abracadabra.

I'd actually, primarily, gone along to see Leyden Jars and had no knowledge of Ectoplasm Girls whatsoever. Oto's website informed me that sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne are "an audiovisual ongoing project" that  take "influence from punk, industrial and minimal wave" to create "distant and muted sounds for the unsettled sleeper" and that's as good a description as what they do as any so I won't add too much more. This blogging lark can be a right doss, I tell you.

Before they played, Nadine performed a solo set from the side of the stage. To my uninitiated eyes and ears it seemed pretty much in keeping with the main set, if a little bit lighter and the visual projection given more over to dance and the liminal space we experience upon first waking up. Ectoplasm Girls went for the more gothy skeleton/lithium fractal motif which seemed more in keeping with their music.

The Swedish siblings performed sat on the stage behind a reasonably small stack of electronic gizmos from which they coaxed caliginous chopped and crackling beats overlaid with ghostly disembodied voices, bursts of static, and, what to me (though I could be wrong), sounded like snatches of 'found' sound.

As with Leyden Jars their sound seems to have evolved out of what we once called dance music but, also as with Leyden Jars, you can't really imagine David Guetta or Steve Aoki dropping it into one of their sets. Perish the thought! It's all the better for that. Dance music lost its way when it started to become entertainment for the rich and beautiful and so it's no wonder that some of those who cut their teeth on it have taken off in other routes. That's how it's supposed to work. Keep moving things forward.

I, for one, am glad there are people unafraid to make dark and confused music for dark and confused times. Even if the people making that music, it turns out, are anything but dark and confused. In fact they're all lovely. As was my company for the evening. Thanks to Neill, Leonor, Neil, Mark, Eugenie, Mark, and Natalie. It was good to see that we could roll that deep at a relatively low key experimental electronica evening in January. We should do it again some time.