Preview: Yo La Tengo – The sounds of science, Royal Festival Hall, London

The silence of Jean Painlevé's legendary underwater films has been broken by an evocatively epic score written by the American indie-rockers Yo La Tengo. Performing alongside French film-maker Painlevé's alluring insights into what lies beneath, Yo La Tengo will deluge The Royal Festival Hall in an audio-visual amalgamation of fantasy and science.

It may seem impossible to muster a musical match to accompany such a captivating seascape of buried beauties and foreboding eeriness. But not for Yo La Tengo. The three-piece band and Painlevé were always heading in the same direction; they say "most of the music originated before we saw the films".

One can get just as lost, scared or inspired in the deep blue sea as one can in Yo La Tengo's mysterious melodies. The collaboration came about when the band was asked by the San Francisco Film Festival to perform live to a film. Ira Kaplan, the spokesperson for the band, says, "we were not familiar with Painlevé's work until someone at the festival suggested it".

Just as Painlevé embraces the sense of the unknown in his films, Yo La Tengo are not only equally content with a sense of inscrutability ("we're happy with our music being difficult to define") but are also unsure about what lurks around any corner. They say: "Our songs start spontaneously. Sometimes it results in a song, sometimes a kernel for a song, and sometimes just a way to while away the afternoon".

Painlevé's films possess not only scientific splendour but a touch of comedy too, for his editing allows his subjects amusingly human characteristics, and it is this quirky combination of science and entertainment that appealed to Yo La Tengo. "When we saw the films, we were intrigued by the unique combination of beauty, science and humour. I think we took it on faith that we could do something interesting with the movies. It presented us with an exciting challenge."

9 September (0871 663 2500)

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