NO mud, no tented bedlam, no Portakabin toilets!

Futuresonic was a festival with a difference: a wholly urban affair, which settled gently on the city of Manchester for three days in July.

Rooted in Manchester's mid-90s dance scene, and now in a celebratory 10th year mode (signature balloons floating in clusters on street corners), Futuresonic has broadened from niche event to a fully eclectic urban festival, guided by a genuine thirst for the unexpected, be it audio, visual or an ingenious blending of both.

The ethos of the festival is no longer provided solely by the ebb and flow of electronic genre but by a reputation to stretch into lonely areas of innovation, where art installations and social issues are both built into the festival's unique framework.

It's a delicate balance and the organisers' greatest challenge is to contain a distinctive flavour in a two-strand festival which saw disparate artists scattered across myriad city venues, from chic cafe bars to sullen jazz cellars, from canal boat trips to Castlefield's Museum of Science & Industry.

The opening event featured Toshio Iwai, less a musician and more a rolling concept multimedia talent. Iwai provided a keynote talk laced with charm and an impish attitude towards his own distinctive mix of techno-naivet.

Even with the city cowed by a cloying humidity not the perfect climate for indoor electro-talk his carefully constructed tale of his own journey from the simplistic flick-book animation of his schooldays to life as superstar Nintendo game creator superstar and electronica artist remained mercifully within the realms of entertainment.

The conclusion saw him performing with his own invention the eletroplankton, a matrix board, which pumped, pulsated and glowed with joy-pad manipulation.

This preceded his actual musical performance', 24 hours later at Academy Two, where he took his place among a Music For The Beep Generation' event. His flamboyance was here flanked by New York quartet Battles and Austria's Fennesz.

To the bafflement of many, the conventional boundaries of concert were fabulously crashed.

Battles are aptly named, as their complexity provides instant challenges to all but the most openly receptive of audience members; a postulating crack and snap based on mathematical equations, they built to a thunderous climax, where light and sound wove to a dizzying extreme.