Electronic music - What do you get if you cross an upright bass with a chainsaw? Tom Armitage heads for the Placard Headphone Festival to find out

It's a grim, dark, damp autumn day and I'm wandering up Brick Lane in search of the State 51 Warehouse and a music festival. There won't, however, be any sound spilling from the venue to guide me. At the Placard Headphone Festival, the only way to listen to the music is, as you might guess, through headphones.

The 96-day festival takes place all over the world, and is broadcast continuously over the internet. On this, the penulti-mate day of the festival, 39 acts will play a 16-hour London event. It's a far cry from Glastonbury or Reading.

I arrive at the East End warehouse well prepared, with not one but two pairs of headphones in my bag. About 40 people are sprawled on the floor, or on an array of battered chairs and sofas. Along one wall is a row of desks and tables, behind which sit a handful of unshaven young men, backlit by Anglepoise lamps, fiddling with laptops, mixing desks and a wind-up shortwave radio. Naturally, I can't hear any of it. So I sit down at a table and try to plug in my headphones.

And here my troubles begin. You see, the jack socket on the cable is a large (6.35mm) socket, but both my pairs of headphones have a small (3.5mm) jack plug on them. Everywhere I look, I can find only big sockets. I decide to improvise: listening to all the background noise is surely an equally valid experience. I can hear fidgeting and shuffling against the concrete floor and a faint bass drum from the bar area. Over my left shoulder, there is an irregular drip of water. There is also a scratchy humming, much like white noise, that rises and falls as I move my head about. I quickly realise that this is, in fact, spill from open-backed headphones, and that the humming is the "music" I have come to hear.

Eventually I manage to scrounge an adaptor for my headphones, and plug myself into the festival. I crash into a barrage of swelling, ebbing static, courtesy of Walker and Nigel Samways from Unked, the Brighton-based label. The next act, Empty Quarter, offers "found sound": a recording from the middle of a field overlaid with choruses of chainsaws and what sounds like bodies falling downstairs.

Next up is Pete Marsh, the first act sans laptop: instead, he plays an upright electric bass and a wide selection of electronic boxes. His work is based on loops that build up into low drone notes intermingled with delay-swathed harmonics and distortion. By now, I'm enjoying myself a great deal. I would like to hear more, but the sets are kept to a strict 20 minutes, and Marsh is cut off in his final phrases.

Unfortunately, the next act returns to previous form with a haphazard, stuttering gamelan melody accompanied by, of all things, more noise. I decide that I have spent long enough in a warehouse and make a quick exit.

By doing that, I miss out on later acts described in the programme as performing "extra slow gabba" and "ambient gothic homemade synths & GameBoy sounds". To be honest, I'm not sure this was such a great loss. Placard describes itself as "headphones music for headphones people". Now, I own a great many pairs of headphones - some really rather nice sets, too - but I suspect, judging by this festival, that I'm not a "proper" headphone person. And that's just fine by me.

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