With apologies to my one-year-old nephew (who as far as I’m aware hasn’t RSS’ed this site yet) Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and Fennesz’s Black Sea were the two best things to come out of 2008. Hence if you were to stick those two artists on a bill together there would be no way I’d miss it, even if that meant sitting for four hours in church on a rock hard pew with no toilets. I’ve long been sceptical about the merits of St-Giles-In-The-Fields as a venue for such events, but after having experienced Fennesz’s sublime and powerful set in that space, I could be converted.

Adding the French duo Natural Snow Buildings to the bill really was gilding an already glistening lily. Their recent double album (plus comic, don’t forget the comic) Shadow Kingdom impressed with its short pieces of blurry folk music combined with epic slabs of psych-noise. Surrounded by a battery of enough effects pedals to take down a plane they patiently layered their guitars, mixing long drones and reverb with glimpses of half-melodies. This rose dreamily over the course of around twenty minutes before fading out for the arresting finale. While I’d read that Mehdi Ameziane and not Solange Gularte is the singer, so feminine are the vocals that I’d never truly believed it (much like I’ve never truly believed that the moon causes the tides, that just sounds ridiculous to me). Until now. When his fragile voice emerged from amongst red lights and delicate guitar, it was a heart-stopping moment.

Liz Harris’s Grouper project, both on record and on stage, combines pre-recorded and live elements to create a diffuse sound-world which is sodden with emotion. She began by pressing play on one of the many Walkmen scattered around her feet, filling the church with an ebbing cassette hiss, like a recording of traffic noise which had been left in the sun for twenty years and then played back underwater. Into this drifted looped Basinski-like degraded melodies, some muffled guitar rumble and finally Harris’s voice. That last instrument was more prominent in the mix than I expected initially – in fact at times her high-pitched, wilfully indistinct vocals reminded me of another Liz – Liz Fraser, no less. Over the course of the forty minute set, all these elements melted away and reformed continually, with whole slices of the set seeming to reappear as distant loops later, creating strange unsettling feelings of déjà vu. Ghostly emotions appeared condemned forever to remain trapped within the music’s haunted structures.

If I’d known beforehand that Fennesz had Sunn O))) ‘s sound engineer on duty, I’d probably have picked a seat that wasn’t three feet from the speaker. He opted to completely fill the cavernous space of St Giles, which meant a massive spectrum of frequencies at a punishing volume. I swear some of the paintings and statues of saints around the church put their fingers in their ears. Or maybe that was just the immense volume making me hallucinate. Fennesz shows often begin with him building an epic guitar figure which he can use as a launching pad for further sonic exploration, but tonight right from the beginning every note he played seemed come pre-entangled in shredded distortion, which in turn snared a further collection of sounds, from brutal pops and clicks to violent glitchy rhythms to altar-rattling bass rumble. Little here was directly recognisable from the Fennesz canon – even the brief snatch of the Barber-esque progression from “Perfume Of Winter” was slashed by some harsh shards of metallic guitar. This felt instead like Black Sea in excelsis, even darker and deeper with any hints of melodies buried so far below the surface they were by now barely perceptible, almost as if heard in a dream. As the set surged to a strangely euphoric crescendo, it even seemed to collect a crackly radio broadcast – I thought I heard haunted echoes of 80s dream-pop drowned deep down in the murk, but just as I tried to place it (I know he is an A-Ha fan…was it A-Ha? No, I’m sure it was a female vocalist) Fennesz blew up the world. Or a fuse at least. Or, perhaps, the guy who runs the church (you know, him upstairs. I mean him, not Him) took some sort of offence. As an invisible choir filled my ears with one long, ultra-high note, Fennesz did the internationally-recognised succession of sheepish hand and facial gestures which mean “I do not know what has happened. It is not my fault. The problem seems to be with the equipment over there. Does anyone at the back of the venue know what has happened? I do not know what to do now. I apologise”.

As I left the venue, all I could think about was that buried tune. “What was it?” I asked friends outside the venue. They hadn’t heard anything. There was no radio broadcast, no song. It was just him, they said. Just frequencies colliding, perhaps. Had I imagined it? I staggered dazed from church, not knowing who or what to believe in any more.