“That’s a really hard question,” says drummer Frank Byng when asked to describe Crackle’s sound. “We wanted to explore playing other instruments. It’s kind of a strange, slightly twisted world music. But I usually leave it to the critics to make those kind of comments.”

The leftfield duo’s debut album, Heavy Water, was released in April and its atmospheric, otherwordly textures earned favourable comparisons to everyone from dub pioneer Augustus Pablo to Miles Davis.

“I think the dub reference with Pablo is quite interesting because some of the strategies we used in the studio were dub-related but obviously the music is definitely not reggae-based,” says Byng, before going on to cite Brian Eno and Can’s Holger Czukay as further sources of inspiration.

The other half of Crackle, bass player Nick Doyne-Ditmas, taught Byng at music college and the project began as a series of informal improv sessions. These loose sketches began to coalesce into an album after the pair found inspiration in the novel Stone Junction by Jim Dodge.

“He’s a maverick American writer who writes what I suppose you can best describe as strange road novels,” Byng explains. “Thomas Pynchon referred to Stone Junction as an ‘analogue novel’, which I really like. It’s just about giving yourself a direction and ideas when you’re making sounds in the studio.

“We consciously wanted to keep the ideas analogue, to explore that live-instrument sound. A lot of the sounds on the record are things such as guitars played not really like a guitar and amplified to bring out a slightly different notion of what a guitar might sound like, or percussion recorded in slightly oblique ways to get a different feel.” Crackle was conceived as a studio project but shortly after Heavy Water was released Barry Adamson, who Byng had worked with in the past, offered them a support slot on his UK tour. Performing live necessitated the introduction of a third member, Ben Cowen, the synth player in Byng’s other band, the Afro-Kraut collective Snorkel.

“He can cover a lot of the ground we couldn’t recreate ourselves. We’ve also brought in some new ideas to adapt it,” he explains. “We couldn’t do faithful versions of tracks on the album so we take the energy of the album and a few ideas we can lock down, with an improvisational area around it to keep it interesting.”

Doyne-Ditmas’s career began in the 1980s with acclaimed avant-jazzers Pinkzi Zoo and he has since worked with Tackhead’s Skip McDonald and This Heat’s Charles Hayward, while Byng studied traditional African music in Ghana and was later tutored by the legendary Sun Ra drummer Clifford Jarvis.

“Clifford’s sadly no longer with us,” he says. “It was a fairly eccentric experience – he was a phenomenal drummer, quite inspirational, but perhaps not the best straight-ahead teacher, partly because cans of Special Brew would be included in the lesson.”

  • 7.30pm, £5, 01273 647100
  • John The Savage, Sooks, Grasscut and DJ Darius Akashic also appear. Visit myspace.com/johnthesavagemusic for full details.