The Boxhead Ensemble

Scene: a house in the countryside. Black-and-white interior. A girl sits by the window, perusing a magazine, looking slightly bored and uncomfortable, as if waiting for somebody to arrive. Next, we see her standing in the kitchen, her diaphanous blouse half open. Then we see her topless, stepping through the back door. Fin.

This is just one of the grainy, 8mm and 16mm scenes from Stories, Maps And Notes From The Half-Light, the closing performance at the Doclands documentary festival on Sunday night. The focus, however, is not on the 10 short films on show, but on the six onstage musicians who provide the soundtracks for each short.

The Boxhead Ensemble are led by keyboard player Michael Krassner and feature members of Dirty Three and Willard Grant Conspiracy. They're a strategically oblique supergroup, occasionally coming together to create loose, atmospheric sounds to complement - and sometimes transform - the random images on screen. This was the final night of their European tour, and it attracted an appreciative crowd, who sat attentively through two hours of offbeat sound and vision. All that was missing was the popcorn.

The ensemble are careful not to synchronise too closely with the visuals, preferring to feel their way around a film in the hope of discovering something new. A fragmented bullfight scene gets abrasive sweeps of cello and viola, while a psychedelic collage of images from the Louvre gets the scary Kid A treatment. Most powerful - and somewhat disturbing in the wake of events in the United States - was a film of aircraft swooping low over the streets near Hong Kong's old Kai Tak Airport. The ensemble's rumbling, discordant soundtrack gave crushing weight to the enormous metallic shadows as they glided ominously over the teeming cityscape.