The Bays don't rehearse, they don't make records; they just turn up and jam. So every gig is different - site-specific, if you like. What the Wardrobe gets on this occasion, part of Leeds's Fuse festival, is an hour and a half of bangin' house music. But here's the clever bit: it isn't boring. Nevertheless, it's a kind of musicians' music, played for the fun of it. Bassist Chris Taylor, explaining the band's "no records" stance, announces: "We don't want your money, we just want your support." And they get the Friday night crowd jumping. The Bays pull all the right levers: not too slow or funky; no melody to speak of; no complicated chord changes; no vocals, apart from some deftly repeated voice samples.
If the musicians were hidden behind a screen, the dancers might assume there was just a DJ with a bottomless supply of obscure white labels. Yet every note the Bays produce is played by hand, newly minted in the here and now before our eyes and ears. The pivot of the band is magnificent drummer Andy Gangadeen, who has a metronomic, muscular style reminiscent of Keith LeBlanc and Yukihiro Takahashi (YMO).
Gangadeen takes the lead, setting a tempo and feel that Taylor immediately matches with a rumbling bass riff. Over this, three keyboardists paste hypnotic vamps, portamento wails, Moog-like shrieks and slurps - a whole secondhand keyboard shop's worth of vintage sounds. In some respects it's like early minimalism, the relentless hammering you get from Louis Andriessen and Steve Reich. You can dig inside it or let it wash over you. But as immersive music goes, the Bays are not so much a warm bath as a power shower.
Earlier in the evening, the Fuse festival's artistic director, Django Bates, led his band Human Chain, augmented by the Smith Quartet, in a programme of bizarre "standards" (Alone Again Naturally, Life on Mars) and originals. Singer Josefine Cronholm is better than ever - funny, charismatic, tuneful and totally unfazed by Bates's meticulously orchestrated chaos. Drummer Martin France holds it together, switching between electronic drum pads and full acoustic kit as expertly as Andy Gangadeen. Yet where the Bays deliver a single-minded, ecstatic groove, Human Chain present a thesaurus of living, kicking musical possibilities, much like the magnificent Fuse festival itself.
