"I've played a lot of gigs in my time," said Dave Okumu, lead singer and guitarist of the Invisible, "but I've never stopped after two songs for a sit down and a chat." Okumu, one of the two principal artists behind Stars Align, one of 20 new works exhibited at the inaugural New Music Biennial, was trying to respond to a question that he couldn't remember. His collaborator, the effervescent Shingai Shoniwa, looked equally non-plussed. But then she hollered to the sound guy, who had nodded off, to play a clip of some Zimbabwean mbiri music – which had partly inspired her and Okumu's new Afrobeat anthem – before they returned to centre stage to play the piece again.
The episode summed up the weekend: a good idea on paper. It was a great idea, for example, that each of the 20 new pieces around which the biennial was centred should be performed twice, with a short interview in between each. But some artists can talk, others can't, and then there are those who just aren't in the mood.
Shoniwa and Okumu's ground-shaking but hardly groundbreaking piece did benefit from repetition. Samuel Bordoli's Grind, for skateboard-tapping choir and performed in Hayward Gallery's car park, did not. Gwilym Simcock's On a Piece of Tapestry, set around two George Santayana poems and featuring Michael Collins' effortlessly floating clarinet alongside Simcock's flowerlike piano motifs, made for a beautiful oasis. Composer Matthew Herbert's 20 Pianos involved a little table, inlaid with a short piano keyboard, on which Sam Beste manipulated samples from pianos around the world, including the defunct instrument on which John Lennon composed Imagine and the beaten-up Joanna languishing in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. The comparison of instruments and atmospheres was fascinating, but the mixing had an artificial, rather botched flavour, highlighting the poverty of the musical ideas. Indeed next time, the biennial's backers, the PRS for Music Foundation, might remember that there's more to new music than new.
• Repeated at Glasgow Royal Concert Halls from 1-2 August. Festival: New Music Biennial.
