The arrival of the 21st century had all sorts of connotations about the future. Eleven months into 2001, a year that had finally caught up with science-fiction, the first Instal festival of ‘Brave New Music’ opened its doors with an era-spanning statement of intent, as 100 metronomes ticked its audience into the unknown. As a re-enactment/tribute to Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s Fluxus movement-inspired 1962 composition, ‘Poeme Symphonique for 100 metronomes’, here was a nod to avant-garde and experimental music’s most arguably fertile historical period.

Almost a decade later, curated leftfield music festivals are commonplace, while micro-gigs of experimental sounds are a staple of art galleries and ad hoc venues. Yet, after a decade of Japanese noise artists and New York minimalist veterans, this year’s programme is unrecognisable. Organisers Barry Esson and Bryony McIntyre’s other iconoclastic events such as the sound and vision-based ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ and environmental-based one-offs ‘Resonant Spaces’ and ‘Shadowed Spaces’ may have seen them morph into the fully professional Arika organisation, but 2010’s Instal, marketed with the ‘Braver Newer Music’ tag, seems to question it’s very existence.

‘Maybe it was enough when we started,’ Esson explains, ‘to just put things on that, at the time, weren’t happening in Scotland. Since then, we’ve deepened our engagement with experimental music. I see it now as a fidelity to certain systems of thought through experimental music.’

Put simply, Instal has got political. Not in a dogmatic way, but in a more inquiring way that gels with a reawakening of social engagement borne of 1960s idealism among many contemporary cutting-edge artists.

At Instal, there will be performances, provocations and investigations by computer-based noise musician Florian Hecker, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra guitarist Neil Davidson and French improviser Matthieu Saladin. The opening event is provided by actor Tam Dean Burn, who with sound-art based radio station Resonance FM’s Radio Orchestra, will do a 48-hour walk around Glasgow, broadcast as it happens. Also key to where Instal is at right now is the presence of Basque provocateur Mattin, whose copyright-free book, Noise and Capitalism challenges the audience/performance relationship. Instal’s closing event will see Mattin collaborate with Glasgow Open School, a group based on self-determination similar to the Glasgow Free University that existed in the 80s, in which the ‘performance’ will be ‘led’ by audience members who’ve attended a series of workshops. ‘There is no-one that isn’t part of the system.’ Mattin acknowledges. ‘If you’re a performer you’re supposed to present something, but you have to go against expectations and see it more as a social gathering.’

‘All experimental art-forms come out of a desire for opposition,’ Esson says. ‘How you avoid being consumed is the hard part.’ The rest, it seems, is up to you.

Instal, Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 12–Sun 14 Nov.