The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has always been an exuberant November celebration, a dance along a cultural “cutting edge”, or perhaps, this year, a bike ride along it. The 31st festival, ending today with a re-creation of a John Cage retrospective given in New York in 1958, opened with the extraordinary spectacle of a naked man poised on a bicycle and taking about 25 minutes to cover some 30 feet of the floor of Bates Mill. This was the British premiere of The Graphic Method: Bicycle, by Dick Raaijmakers (b 1930), little heard of here, but considered the pioneer of electronic music in his native Holland, and apparently an early influence on David Bowie.

Various parts of the performer, Bart Visser, were wired to a computer so his exertions could be rendered as sound. The way he altered his posture by degrees, not so much pedalling as being pedalled (the bike was drawn by a cable), and forced into harsh balletic positions, was truly arresting; and as a visual experience, evoking photography by Muybridge, the piece was memorable. As a musical one, it was not.

This is the third HCMF under the direction of Graham McKenzie, who seems inclined to favour theatrical experiment over honest-to-goodness musical discourse, although this year’s programme was certainly diverse. Another featured maverick was the Israeli-born (1951) Dror Feiler, who is a noise artist and a rubbish artist. His piece, Basura, mixed an ensemble of garbage-collection lorries with a marching brass band on the forecourt of Bates Mill, while inside the mill the players of Klangforum Wien, under Rolf Gupta, gave the British premiere of Müll (Garbage), a solid block of cacophony lasting 50 minutes, its surface as uniform as any real rubbish dump, except for the hysterical prominence of vocal parts contributed by Meira Asher and Martin Winkler, the latter sitting inside a garbage lorry someone had driven indoors.

Feiler believes that “music is castrated noise” and supports his work with Walter Benjamin quotes. Rather surprisingly, Müll appears to be a fully notated score and one could, for example, pick out bass lines. It was a nice symmetry, or maybe a coincidence, that Klangforum Wien’s other appearance — a Town Hall programme of three works by the German Enno Poppe (b 1969), who conducted — involved them in music of considerable notational complexity, but which had a tendency to venture into noise. The dominant sounds of Knochen (Bone) are the rumpling of metal sheets and the banging of hammers on the floor. In Salz (Salt), wind-players tap keys without producing tone. In Öl (Oil), there was a noisy interlude that was not part of the piece, but fire-works from Huddersfield’s popular Festival of Light. Poppe suspended the performance while this went on, but one could well believe the irruption was an off-stage clatter intended by the composer.

A contrasting quietude was represented by Bryn Harrison’s new work, given at St Paul’s Hall by ensemble plus-minus. Repetitions in Extended Time is another of his Calder-like mobiles, and at 40 minutes’ duration perhaps the most ambitious, though its fanatically sparing use of material did make a minute seem a long time. Christopher Fox’s comme ses paroles, premiered at St Paul’s by the Exaudi choir under James Weeks, with Anton Lukoszevieze as cello soloist, proved an intriguing response to love poetry by Machaut. The cellist’s fingerboard pizzicati at the start sounded like an Indian tabla, and dramatised encounters between singers reminded me of the phonetic experiments of Luciano Berio, but quasi-medieval chant and polyphonic melee supervened. At 60 minutes, the curiously inventive score was by no means brief, but not too long, either.

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