Far from the mud, the hype and the discomfort of Glastonbury, Faster Than Sound staged its third annual programme of events under sunny Suffolk skies. With a mission statement to “join the dots between musical genres and digital art forms”, this experimental offshoot of the long-running Aldeburgh Festival consisted mostly of specially commissioned collaborations between classical players and laptop techno-boffins.

It began with a late-night performance of Stockhausen's 1968 vocal work Stimmung at the magnificent Snape Maltings concert hall on Friday. Dressed in white robes, Ben Parry's London Voices group hummed and droned a mix of English, German and Klingon for 70 minutes. The effect was hypnotic, sometimes comic and mildly soporific, but never dull.

The main event, however, was on Saturday evening at Bentwaters, a decommissioned US Air Force base in nearby Rendlesham. A sprawling complex of hangars and bunkers haunted by the ghosts of the Cold War, the location added greatly to the festival's science-fiction ambience. The performances were in Hush House, an acoustically sealed chamber once used for testing jet engines.

Among the stand-out performers was Oliver Coates, a cellist with the London Sinfonietta, who played electronically mangled yet attractively dissonant pieces. Sarah Nicolls, another London Sinfonietta veteran, took a similarly iconoclastic approach to her piano, sounding like a cross between John Cage and Les Dawson. Meanwhile, the experimental drum'n'bass artist Tim Exile combined gentle choral arrangements with cacophonous hardcore techno.

Punctuating the gaps between bite-sized performances, the short film Natures offered a mesmerising mix of botanical footage and computerised animation by the Italian multimedia artist Quayola.

Previous years have benefited from bigger names and multiple stages, and there were certainly a few lulls in this five-hour bill. But this is a young festival, with room to grow. For its magical location and adventurous musical menu, it beat a weekend in the Glastonbury mud.

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