Sounds from the Other City, Various Venues (Salford), 5 May

A caravan of blazers, fixed-gear bikes and iPhones held aloft for directions snakes its way west out of Manchester city centre towards Sounds from the Other City. The Northern Quarter is emigrating to Salford.

Joining the snake of tweed slipping into Islington Mill, the hub of the festival, we collect our wristbands and have a look around. There are books on tax law along the walls of the staircase. Downstairs, there’s a room with a man playing house music while a modified version of the old TV test card is projected onto four white walls. The central courtyard has a stall selling baked beans cooked in treacle, which tastes as you’d expect. All fittingly bohemian and alt, then.

In the central gig space, Rozi Plain plucks gently at her guitar and sings plaintively as her dimly-lit band play diminutive and mesmerising folk rock. As opening sets go, it’s perfect, and the walk over to St Philip’s Church to watch Leeds-based Fun Adults is conducted with a smile and a spring in our step. The band, meanwhile, meander hesitatingly and mumblingly around the stage, perhaps daunted by what to do with such a huge space.

In the subterranean hall of the United Reformed Church, Waiters are performing a set of grungy guitar hiss and growl, backlit by a single blue light, which well-suits the minimal austerity of their music. In The Salford Arms, The Cosmic Dead are churning out psychedelic rock as, in the next room, pub regulars watch the United-Chelsea game. The latter’s chants about Man City blend seamlessly with the wah-wah guitar and rumbles and gurgles of bass.

Heading back to St Philip’s via a side street, we bump into Drum Machine, who can only be described as a goth samba band. A mix of ages and genders united only by their love of black clothes and percussion, they go at it hell for leather, with kids flitting around handing out flyers asking us to join the group. The spirit of Sounds from the Other City can be summed up in this moment: eclectic and eccentric, disarmingly earnest and inclusive, and full of local enthusiasts just enjoying themselves.

Back in the church, singer-songwriter Ofei bemuses the congregation as he belts out piano-led soul numbers, turning occasionally to a second microphone, duplicating his voice and sending it up to heaven, becoming his own choir. By the end of his set, everyone is mesmerised: he’s so unlike anything else at the festival.

In The New Oxford pub, Hiss Golden Messenger blends his set with William Tyler’s, as the schedule is becoming squished, and together they play beautiful Americana as the lights – and the amps – intermittently switch on and off. The raptly attentive audience is completely unconcerned – they just want them to keep playing.

Outside St Phil's, there’s a guerrilla gig being performed by a brass band; a few minutes later, they lead Stealing Sheep down the aisle for their headline set, handing over to them with all the pride and ceremony of a loving father. The Liverpool trio start falteringly, but the audience don’t care, and they soon hit their stride, closing the festival in an atmosphere of smoky, dreamlike carnivalesque whimsy.

Sounds from the Other City is a lovely way to spend a bank holiday, and, more importantly, an antidote to the bloated corporate music festivals that loom on the horizon at this time of year. There are no burger vans or opportunities to win T-shirts with the name of a lager company on the front. There are no merch stalls. You can carry your own booze around. The bouncers are the least intimidating we have encountered. The entire day is marked by the feeling that, as you’ve paid your (very reasonable) £18 for your wristband, you aren't expected or pressured to spend any more money: just turning up and having a good time is your job for the day. Roll on next year. [James Hampson]

 

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As anyone who has ever attended it will know, Sounds from the Other City is a much-treasured event. People pore over the schedule and draft up itineraries in a vain attempt to bring some order to the proceedings, their plans invariably discarded on chance recommendations and a reluctance to walk the entire length of Chapel Street for the fifth time.

Starting somewhat shakily with what could have been Mumford & Sons dressed for a funeral playing an acoustic set in a windy courtyard, the day promptly gets much, much better. With the festival falling, as it always does, on the holy day of rest, it’s only fitting that St Philip’s Church should act as its unofficial axis. Promoters Now Wave are in charge, and they’ve done a good job. G R E A T W A V E S and Deptford Goth deserve respectful reverence, but are faced with pews and pews of been-drinking-all-afternoon lost souls. Nonplussed, the former deliver their offerings with striking precision. They’re getting really good at this. You could acknowledge the guitar/synth duo’s penchant for aqueous references and infer a similarly blue musical disposition – but it’s not quite that easy. They summon swathes of big, dizzy, complex emotions and harrowing lyrics that tend to register in the positive more than the negative.

With just one voice and one cellist in his arsenal, Deptford Goth, aka Daniel Woolhouse, struggles to commandeer his fidgety, boozy congregation. “He’s not from Deptford, and he’s not a goth,” is the bad joke of choice. More fool the jokers, though, as Woolhouse weaves effortlessly between sparse orchestral and synth-centred rhythms with the sort of vocal that can handle a venue of such incongruous grandeur.

Post War Glamour Girls are successful in provoking a rare excursion beyond St Phil’s. Another beloved local music institution, Underachievers, have given them a platform at The Crescent pub. This pairing has to have been made with a wry sense of humour: The Crescent, for all its charm, is miles away from ‘glamour’ anything. Nevertheless, the band embrace the occasion wholeheartedly with complex, feverous indie pop songs and a particular sort of post-9pm bank holiday Sunday enthusiasm.

Queer’d Science provide the incendiary yin to the Now Wave lineup's meditative yang. In a thoroughly packed-out Angel Centre, they up the day’s overall level of discordance and disorder, playing a set that’s best described through the chucking of adjectives. Explosively maniacal, Queer’d Science have established themselves as the most batshit crazy of Manchester’s current cross-section of bands. They’re punk at heart, but in the flesh, it’s all adorned with hardcore vigour and limb-flailing.

This seems remarkably normal, mind you, in comparison to the afterparty, which produces as much confusion as it does dancing. The SceneSkype space (run by Manchester Scenewipe), which has been hosting live sets from around the globe via the World Wide Web, has been transformed into a Chatroulette Disco. If there’s anything that sums up the weird majesty of Salford’s finest musical endeavour, it is webcam strangers doing unspeakable things projected onto the walls, purely for the entertainment of disco-embracing revellers. [Lucy Holt]