The final concert in the Barbican's Only Connect series sought to explore "the inspiration of the computer game on electronic music", or so it said in the brochure. "Will gigs of the future be played out in vast school playgrounds or SMS messaged across the globe in real time?" it wondered.
The audience probably hoped so. A bloke sitting across the aisle from me spent the evening alternately sending messages on his mobile and waving his arms in the air in time to the bleeps and crunching noises emanating from the stage.
During the intervals, the foyer was jammed with men with minimal hair, goatee beards and brain-drain glasses, wearing sweatshirts with hoods. The Barbican had been transformed into Geekworld.
Proceedings commenced with Plaid, alias Ed Handley and Andy Turner, who busied themselves at their computers in darkness while spindly shapes spun and receded on the big screen behind them. Their music - or their sequences of organised noises, at any rate - was sometimes rapid and staccato, and sometimes a goulash of blooping and gibbering noises. Their occasional lapses into melody may have been the result of a technical malfunction.
Coil have been grinding away for 20 years and have learned how to put on a bit of a show: they arrived on stage clad in spectral white druidic costumes. Alongside their array of electronica, they brought along a hurdy-gurdy and some bagpipes, and their electronic beats and tones blended surprisingly well with minor-chord drones and primitive wailing noises. Coil also wanted to go beyond merely toying with sounds and had a few points to make, especially in a powerful piece dedicated to "prisoners of the world", accompanied by a harrowing film of bedraggled inmates in the former Soviet Union. In a gesture to the computer-game theme, they had concocted some flight-simulator images, showing 1,001 ways to crash a British Airways jet.
Finally it was Mouse on Mars, or Jan St Werner, Andi Toma and a messy workbench covered in wires and electrical junk. "Their music is deceptively dense," it said in the programme notes, which I took to mean that just because something sounds like a twittering mess, that doesn't mean it isn't. Their "specially commissioned visuals" comprised a few scrappy snapshots from somewhere in Japan. No wonder some punters opted for the Playstation 2 games in the lobby instead.