Counterflows Festival, Glasgow: The review

Counterflows is a venue-based festival of weird and wonderful music. Straight in with a cliche there but, we're talking properly weird and (mostly) properly wonderful. When people talk in reverential tones about Glasgow's 'vibrant live scene' they don't mean events like Counterflows, though they probably should. All human life is here.

This is no more evident than on the first night. We begin with a blending of Indian carnatic music and percussion loops with Nandini Muthuswamy's violin taking centre stage, and rightly so. There are books and papers about time, physics and psychology strewn around the room. The next day, curator Mark Fell says he wanted us to read all this to engage more properly with the music. The word temporality is thrown around a lot in the literature, and by Mark himself. We're not sure the audience needed any help engaging with a thoroughly stimulating set in any case, and also not wild about using another traditional music form in a festival of experimental music, as if foreign and avant-garde are the same thing. That said it was a superlative gig and broadened the horizons of most of us there, and what more can you want than that?

We mosie on over to Garnethill Multicultural Centre to listen to Sue Tompkins, formerly of Life Without Buildings. Sue skips around the stage reading from a ring binder of poetry and lyrics with no accompaniment. The phase in which Tompkins read out material from the 1992 US presidential election got us going; squealing the word 'trees' over and over did not, but the crowd thought it was hilarious and we suppose it was, really. Ashley Paul closes the night with her full band, a central presence in total control of her sparse, ultra-concentrated blasts of noise and atonality.

It says a lot about Counterflows as a festival that it can draw a reasonable crowd for a panel discussion on the previous night's gig, which occurs in CCA at noon on Saturday. It's a crowd that are interested in the music they're presented with – listening intently to Mark Fell elaborate on collaboration – and always give it a respectful hearing.

Things only veer into the achingly hip when we are all shuttled – literally, they put on a bus – across the city to watch sets by The Modern Institute and Takahiro Kawaguchi under an empty railway arch for no clear reason. Elsewhere, Farmers Manual give a set at The Art School which is perfused with a genuine sense of humour. They drift in and out throughout their three waves of electronic; we bump into members of the band in the toilet, twice, during their own set. It's brilliant.

It's back to Garnethill for folk music, first from Glorias Navales. They sound like your teenage brother's band annoyingly practising in the next room, hesitatingly strumming acoustic guitars and going nowhere fast. We mention this to companions, and are met with scepticism. Now, Counterflows is a music of experimental music; everything we've seen here has been challenging, and no-one in the room is the type to moan at musicians for 'not being able to play their instruments'. But good and bad music still exists no matter where you go. There is punk – 'good' music played traditionally 'badly'; there is bad music played traditionally well, this is pop. There is good music played well, and then there is a fourth category, which Glorias Navales unfortunately slot into. This is one of the few moments during Counterflows when we feel the audience straining against boredom.

It doesn't matter though, because they're followed by Les Filles De Illighadad, who were featured earlier in the day in a brilliant documentary about the Sahel Sounds label. The first half of their set sees the trio performing a cappella, the yearning tone of their voices and their perfect synchronicity entrancing the audience. They lean into their mics and stare monotonously straight ahead without moving during songs, as if they are in a trance. For their second half, Les Filles bring on an electric guitar to get us dancing, and if they hadn't stopped playing we would all still be swaying with them to this moment. The overwhelming love for the group was palpable; moments like this are what festivals are for.

Nursing our fragile selves after Letitia Pleiades' Art School afterparty which kept the whole crowd up till 3am, our caravan of music lovers makes its way to the Southside for the final, loose-limbed day. Svitlana Nianio gives a series of Ukrainian folk songs on piano which, through anyone else could seem twee in their earnest folkiness. But Nianio looks and sounds like someone from another world, hunched over intensely, performing every song with the sense of someone who has perfected their delivery: the essence of folk.

What comes next sums up the essence of Counterflows: two hundred people, in the function room of a crown green bowling club, sitting on the floor listening to Mark Vernon's field recordings of a Portuguese market and watching a man spray sun tan lotion into a cup, and loving it. Ashley Paul follows with an extended duet with Rashad Becker, her sax and his electronic squawks washing over us blissfully. And then it all ends in a community centre with everyone losing it to Ndagga Rhythm Force's Senegalese techno. We go home laughing and smiling about everything we've seen.

If you want a festival that genuinely exists in its own little world and shows you something you don't expect (or maybe even want), go to Counterflows next year. Everyone who came this time will be there, ready to welcome you in.