The Community Gallery at Museum London filled up on Friday night with a crowd of young and old experimental jazz fans and ambient noise enthusiasts alike.

London Ontario Live Arts hosted the first show in its 2010 concert series and left an audience divided between contentment and contempt. What began as an evening set in a beautiful venue, complete with new wave jazz-fusion background music and a cool lights production, eventually became an avant-garde three set concert which may have been a little out of step with some members of the audience.

SWEET LIGHTS. The LOLA concert series had an avant-garde feel Friday night at Museum London, complete with Australian-based experimental jazz trio The Necks who headlined the show. (Pat Martini/Gazette)

LOLA — best known as the arts organization that hosts the popular September festival — has garnered a reputation for showcasing upcoming and established acts constantly on the vanguard of cutting edge music and art. Friday’s concert provided a familiar dose of such entertainment.

The first act was London’s own Transmorphous Sound Ensemble. This experimental noise duo sat at the opposite end of a table and exposed the crowd to their unique blend of amplified vibrations, feedback and ambient noise. The table, which looked like something out of a laboratory at first glance, was adorned with trinkets and turntables and several other modified instruments.  Wires cascaded down from the many machines placed in front of the two quiet musicians.

The table may have been the most interesting part of this set. After about a half hour, the lone sound of what could have been a jumbo jet taking flight had not ceased, nor had it been joined by any contending sounds.  They were undeniably provocative, which is essential to a pair of this genre, but it felt as though the sounds kept building up to a climax or point of stimulation that just never came to be. The casual conversations going on among the crowd marked a lack of interest and made it seem that a visit from Transmorphous Sound Ensemble may warrant use as background music if anything.

After a brief intermission the show saw a bit of brilliance in the classical piano of Toronto’s Todor Kobakov.  His latest album, Pop Music, is a haunting piece of fantastical concert piano charged with making classical music accessible to the alternative music fan.

Kobakov connected to his audience not only through his beautifully haunting songs, but also through his banter between numbers where he’d set the context for his works and joke about the melancholic nature of his music in a truly sardonic fashion.  This gave the crowd something tangible to hang on to during his set. His four-minute numbers complete with bold cadences and arpeggios that swelled in a circular motion showed a beginning, middle and end to each tune.  The rapt and motionless audience sat captivated by his performance of songs like the stark “Toronto Stories” or “Carpe Diem” which is accompanied by Metric’s Emily Haines on Pop Music.

Headlining was the Australian experimental jazz trio The Necks.  Consisting of Chris Abrahams on piano, Tony Buck on percussion and Lloyd Swanton on bass, the minimalist nature of their music was intriguing but once again failed to hold many members of the audience. The Sydney natives delivered a trance-like set in their own notable style wherein one musician began  a simple rhythm and the others eventually join in leading to a wall of sound which can be both beautiful and disturbing.

Having released over a dozen albums included on almost 200 more, there is something important about The Necks as they constantly push the boundaries of harmonics and dissonance, but the restlessness and frustration of some in the crowd showed that something in their experimentation was not speaking to some members of the London community.

We all know LOLA aims to please, and in this respect they almost hit its target — but perhaps Museum London may not have been fully ready for the noise parade that was the first LOLA concert of 2010.