Saturday night at the LMC Festival felt like Jazz Night compared to the previous evenings, mainly because two of the bands used a drum kit. The first such group was a trio of Peter Evans, Steve Beresford & Mark Sanders. Beresford and Sanders were familiar to me of course, but the American trumpeter Evans was unfamiliar - although he settled into the interplay of the two British players very easily. Evans started on long single notes while the English clattered about, before heading off into virtuosic but decidedly un-bluesy playing - superfast ostinatos and a tendency to reach for the highest notes in his register (which he accompanied by standing on tiptoe, something I found quite endearing). Steve Beresford played his mixture of old school electronic devices and found toys, but played on this occasion in a sympathetic supporting role to Evans as virtuoso, whilst Sanders is just Mark Sanders, simply one of the most continually inventive and swinging drummers around - something he makes look irritatingly effortless.

More new stuff to my ears followed with the duo of Margarida Garcia and Barry Weisblat. Garcia played one of those stick-like electric double basses, which are very difficult to love, although she did her best by playing in a relaxed and sombre style, eschewing theatrics. In fact their whole set was sombre, even melancholy in a smoky, dusty kind of way. Weisblat played his own self-made instruments which seemed to consist of fluorescent tubes and springs. From these unlikely sources he coaxed strange oblique melodies in a timbre somewhere between a mournful owl hoot and a glass armonica. Lit only by candles at first, they emerged out of the dark like a gloomy dream as Weisblat started stwitching on his little fluorescent tubes, the arco bass winding around the sounds. Their set finished with the surprisingly violent sounds of an amplified lit candle, and of it being extinguished; a rare theatrical gesture in this festival, but not unwelcome.

A solo laptop set from Helena Gough followed. Announcer Cecilia Wee prepared us by stating this was "music for darkened rooms and closed eyes". There's always going to be a problem with presenting this kind of music in a live situation, but when the music was as extraordinary as that produced by Gough then it ends up only really being a problem for those who lack imagination. Her music seemed to owe as much to the music of GRM electro-acoustic legends as Francois Bayle and Parmegiani as to the current generation of laptoppers. What it wasn't was reductionist in any way - a rich forest of sound, luxuriantly spread across the stereo spectrum, with sounds appearing and morphing before our ears before settling back into the backdrop. It's difficult to talk about such abstract music without resorting to clichés, but it was amazingly evocative- and I found my attention wondering vary rarely during a very long set, as I was moved like a traveller through some very exotic places.

In contrast the finale of the festival saw the drum kit brought out again this time for Tony Buck of The Necks to clobber alongside past and current members respectively of the fantastic Polwechsel, Burkhard Stangl and John Butcher. There was plenty to watch, from Stangl's occasionally hilarious no-wave jerks and spasms, Butcher's recent embrace of electronics and the astonishing drumming of Buck. Buck was a revelation, I'd seen him play once before in the minimalist funk trio Tipper Gore, but that didn't prepare me for his playing here - like Sanders he uses a lot of accessories to produce textures in the quieter moments, but also isn't ashamed to give the drums a good thwacking when the music deserved it - as it did in one memorable sequence with Stangl thrashing his guitar with a bow and Butcher playing a wild eastern-flavoured soprano over the top. Later Butcher indulged in some playful use of feedback- pulling sympathetic strands of noise in stuttering bleeps, whilst the other players splattered around him. It was a terrific performance that raised the heartbeat and brought the festival to an ecstatic climax. The applause that followed showed I wasn't the only one who thought so.

It would be difficult to enjoy everything at an LMC festival, to some extent it would have failed if you did - it exists to prod, provoke and intrigue. If the Festival was a little lopsided, with the least satisfying stuff on the first night, it more than made up for it on the following evenings. The fact that this year's big name, Charlemagne Palestine, gave a performance that bordered on utterly embarrassing, seemed to fit a festival that alternatively thrilled, baffled, bored me to tears and left me gasping in astonishment...