Tarentel play a music that might be the soundtrack to a slow-moving film. It's dense and moody, full of false starts and odd lurches, and you can't quite shake the notion that they probably met at art school.

A surly bunch whose natural terrain takes in the farther reaches of the San Francisco underground, they don't go in much for audience participation. If you're in Tarentel, what you do is you mooch morosely about the stage, swapping a guitar for a hulking old Roland synth, say, or fiddling with a laptop, as you help your scowling collaborators engineer these spookily obtuse symphonies from the base elements.

This type of thing has been going on for many years, and we can identify the usual godheads: Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and various other Germans. It's generally an attempt to take dull old rock music and strip it to its parts, adding some techie tricks, crossing your fingers and hoping the concoction takes wing and soars.

Tarentel's version frequently does. These aren't songs, as such, but long, involved experiments in the twists of protean melody, with occasional snatches of impressively operatic vocals bursting in while the synths hum and doodle and the squealing guitar lines scurry away down the rat runs of wilful dissonance. The drummer is terrific. I imagine much of the material was taken from their new record, From Bone To Satellite.

They were respectfully enjoyed by an intimate gathering at the Triskel, but perhaps they aren't ideally experienced live. I suspect that truly to appreciate Tarentel, you should play them on a Walkman in the woods some overcast afternoon as you sit beneath the trees and gently photosynthesise.