In one corner, Vladimir Ashkenazy, a one-time Soviet defector, legendary pianist, redoubtable conductor. And in the other, an “audio-visual collective” with one mighty computer and a plan to remix the maestro’s Bristol Philharmonia concert 20 minutes after a performance of one of Shostakovich’s most gruelling pieces. No, I can’t imagine the meeting going particularly well either.

And yet it was the guys from the lugubriously titled Iamthemightyjungulator who prevailed — reason enough to seek out anyone capable of convincing Ashkenazy that remixing — or “reimagining” — his performance of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony was a good idea. How did they do it? “Well, I told him I felt I was out of step with the modern world,” says the group ’s garrulous frontman, Nathan Hughes, 38. “And I said that all the things that speak to me and give me something meaningful seem to be getting marginalised and eroded and replaced by something empty and facile. So that pacified him a bit.”

It’s enough to hint that this Bristol-based group aren’t planning to turn Dmitri S into a shiny disco-pop anthem — but then the jungulator crew aren’t “just” a band. Hughes says: “If you wanted to describe us on a posh, gleaming website, then we’d say we were a multiplatform production hub. But we’ve decided the best thing to do is to say we’re a band and everything else has fitted into that.”

At the core of this collective are Hughes and his colleague Matthew Olden. Hughes, whose background is in fine art, is composing the video projections that will accompany the “remix”; Olden is the inventor, full-time acolyte and technical operator of the Jungulator — a “granular synthesizer” as he describes it. “I wanted to make music by cutting it up into little bits and then rearranging it. And I found you could do it very easily in this programme.”

Put even more simply, 20 minutes after Ashkenazy’s performance in Colston Hall, Bristol, the Jungulatorwill have chopped up the live recording into bite-size chunks, and Hughes and Olden will be ready to start remaking the pieces in the concert hall’s roomy bar. Naturally, this is with the permission of both the Philharmonia and the publishers of Shostakovich: anyone seeking commercial gain from remixing the classics would need to give a slice of the pie to the producers of whichever recording they used.

When I track down Hughes and Olden, Reimagining Shostakovich is still very much a work in process — the different techniques that Olden is devising to rearrange the symphony are still themselves in the mix. But I’ve come armed with Mozart’s Magic Flute — what can they turn it into? Something rather haunting, it turns out. “This is a great sample,” says Olden of the Queen of the Night ’s revenge aria, which soon floats around the room in a mystical, incantatory haze. It’s distilled, repetitive, but strangely appealing — and that’s after only five minutes of fiddling at the Jungulator’s controls.

It’s not a million miles away from the kind of sounds that the classical composer Iannis Xenakis churned out in the 1960s and 1970s, but that’s not so surprising: he was also using a computer — along with many others writing for a classical orchestra. “I got into music by going round charity shops and picking up any record I could find,” says Olden. “One day I got some John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. I realised that the way they put music together was very similar to the way jungle and techno music has been put together.”

Classical, pop or techno: it’s all just music for the band, even if their usual audience are the drum’n’bass crowd rather than the blue-rinse brigade. “I’ve always been interested in pop music but the cultural side rather than the detail,” says Hughes. “Whether it’s an electronic piece or not, I think it just comes down to: is it a good story?” In the case of Shostakovich’s Sixth, ostensibly a tribute to Lenin but almost certainly composed out of hatred of the Soviet regime, Hughes has done his homework. “There’s a diary of an acquaintance of Shostakovich, and he wrote that where they lived backed on to a prison and every night people were being shot — but they had to carry on as normal. So there’s a whole double meaning thing going on.” These are the kind of themes that will inform both the remix and Hughes’s accompanying visuals.

What the project is not, however, is another attempt to hook “young people” on to the classics. “We would do it very differently if our object was audience development,” says Graeme Howell of the Colston Hall, “but we thought: ‘Let’s really present classical music in a new way — and not pretend that it’s classical music.”

That said, one of the most encouraging aspects of the Jungulator gig is that more than 90 per cent of those coming to the remix are also attending the concert proper. So, I ask Hughes, is the maestro among them? “I hope we’ve piqued his curiosity — but the compromise was ‘OK, so long as I don’t have to attend.’ ”

Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts the Philharmonia on Sunday at Colston Hall, Bristol (0117-922 3686). Reimagining Shostakovich follows at 9.45pm

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