Roundhouse, London
It's not that the London Snorkelling Team don't take music seriously. Their squiggly compositions, inspired by the characterful jazz of Raymond Scott, 1950s/60s lounge exotica, and the "library music" used for TV, film and cartoon soundtracks, are impressively taut. But they're also repetitive, in structure and mood, and require breathing space for their quirkiness not to pall.
The self-effacing musicians create this space by splitting the focus of the show. There are two comedians, Ed Gaughan as their cheerful MC, and Will Adamsdale, whose hapless magician Braeburn Valmont threatens to upstage everyone. Plus, there are two projection artists, Mark and Tom Perrett, who accompany each song with daft, childishly drawn images: a pixelated camel for Arabic Emotions; cartoon stabbings for Norman Bates.
A disclaimer: Pascal Wyse, who plays trombone, organ bass pedals and coconut shells, is a Guardian colleague. Most visibly, he authors the foodie cartoons in Weekend magazine. The silliness of those cartoons is scant preparation for the absurdity of Wyse's contributions to this gig/fantasy radio broadcast/old-fashioned variety show, which include summoning God via toy electronics, conducting a voodoo seance to discover why Mick Hucknall is "such a dreadful beast", and making his trombone sound like a horse.
Each contribution has its merits, but when music, image and comedy fuse, it becomes priceless. For Monotone, the projection is of a mixing desk, with four volume controls, one for each musician. The players respond to the manipulations of these controls with thrilling exactitude – and when the Perretts flick sound-effect switches called "echo", "weird" and "horse", the results are as brilliant as they are hilarious.