The annual Triptych festival has been bringing an excellent mix of alternative acts from the worlds of jazz, electronica, rock and classical music to Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow for the last five years.

It's sometimes hard to escape the conclusion that the occasion is more of a collection of dates than a cohesive whole, but the acts on offer - this year including Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Herbie Hancock and the Fall - speak for themselves.

The festival's club showcases, where live acts and DJs rub shoulders until the early hours, are often as entertaining as the big names. So it is tonight, with breakbeat DJs Bugz in the Attic playing in the smaller upstairs room and Radio One's Gilles Peterson warming up for Plantlife downstairs. Peterson, alongside Kanye West and the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams, has been part of a chorus of praise for the LA funk band.

They certainly look cool enough. Several members of the collective wear shades and woolly hats, despite the fact that the Venue's main floor is swelteringly hot and dark. Singer and songwriter Jack Splash sports an afro, a single fingerless glove and an irrepressibly enthusiastic manner, and would not look out of place roller-skating his way through an early 1980s hip-hop video. "I don't rap and I don't sing," he drawls. "I do my own thing."

That's not to say that Plantlife don't have their antecedents: Sly and the Family Stone are influences, while Splash, with his lascivious lyrics and dirty falsetto, sounds like a rootsier Prince.

It's an infectious sound, with the bass dancing its way through sweet backing vocals, saliva inducing guitar licks and a horn section that enacts its own call and response routines. Several of tonight's songs feel higher on atmosphere than they do on genuine songcraft, but for the most part Plantlife's enthusiasm for the groove drowns any doubts. They may not be the new Outkast but they're not far off.