The mid-point of Incubate in 2015 began with a band who, instrumentally at least, share an idea with Royal Blood. Youff are a drums and bass noise duo from Belgium and what they possibly currently lack in originality they more than make up for in energy. Although sparsely lit too the effective strobing amply shows up the speed at which the drummer has to hammer away at the kit to set the frenetic pace, his hands looking Wolverine-like as the light fires.

Old school Dutch grindcore in the shape of Kru$h came next at Little Devil. Bringing to mind such legends of the scene as Doom the dual-vocalled five piece growled and screeched their way through a set of tight, short numbers without a dancer in sight, ably showing up the differences in temperament between this and the hardcore audience despite the shared weight and pace of sound.

Over at Extase Beasts were tonight's third bit of entertainment. Only unfortunately they weren't that entertaining. The Metallica t-shirt was maybe a giveaway. Straightforward rock saw me make the second quickest decision and exit of the night. A walk back up the road to Hall Of Fame was in order for some more hardcore to hopefully invigorate the night but, although certainly loud, Vvovnds were curiously unengaging. True they were hampered by a mysterious crackling coming from the speakers but despite the battering they gave their instruments they seemed to just be going through the motions.

Three Trapped Tigers were tonight's opening act at Midi and were received well by a crowd who clearly knew who they'd come to see. Playing mostly new material they were a bit let down in the vocal department but otherwise were note-perfect and clearly happy to be back on a European jaunt after a few years away. Next door at Extase Spectres also had a bit of a vocal issue in the mix but their powerful, overdriven music more than made up for anything they were failing to convey by singing. A real tour de force.

Unlike Daggers who proved to be yet another loud but unengaging hardcore act. There's something a bit awry when such bands resemble hipsters until they take to the stage. Hard to take them seriously when that's the case. The UK was getting a lot of look ins tonight as next on the list were London's Yak, who as well as playing some very heavy & well paced indie had one of the better designed t-shirt images of the week so far. A trio who should hopefully be progressing steadily in the future.

Free jazz is a term bandied about a lot at Incubate & Dead Neanderthals are proponents of this inextricably linked to the event. What they mainly did at Midi was quality test the lifespan of a set of guitar strings when the insrument is battered, kicked, pounded and has all sorts of other physical abuse heaped upon it whilst a large sax is wailed away on and the drums thunder along. Fascinating like a car wreck and a good example of where jazz greys into hardcore but more theatre than music. Pretty self-indulgent too. Full Of Hell were perfoming sans Merzbow tonight so finally some absorbing hardcore was a possibility and they didn't fail to deliver this time around. As with the previous two acts at Hall Of Fame their singer took to the floor rather than confining himself to the stage, giving the early pit starters something else to avoid. "You guys sure like mayonnaise huh?" isn't maybe the greatest attempt at interaction with a crowd and at least one bloke seemed intent on being injured or causing the same when the pit got larger but the band were utterly convincing on all levels.

The bill at Dudok started quite late on tonight and first on it were the fun & laidback Jeff The Brotherhood. Top marks for actually having a good bit of chat with/for the audience and also obviously engaging with other elements of the festival. Their new album's out in October & from that they played 'Melting Place' as well as an unnamed track that, contrary to their more doomy paced songs, sounded not unlike some thing from an early Smashing Pumpkins album. They were so refreshing to watch in fact that I lost no time in going to catch the end of their set when Norway's Shining (not to be confused with Sweden's Shining) left me utterly cold at Midi. The least said about that experience the better.

Richie Dagger got to play at their own segment of the festival down in the Stadskelder and cranked out a nice line in Scandinavian-like garage rock, putting the seal on a really well curated few days that could easily have had a 3rd more bands of the consistent quality they'd programmed in. Rounding off the night was Sterling Roswell and his drone-heavy material over at Paradox. The accumulated experience of the man & his band was highly evident in their drawn out playing and ability to keep repeated phrases sounding as fresh as when first embarked upon. New song 'Ballad Of A Civil Servant', featuring such subject matter as David Cameron's brain being kept alive in a jar by US scientists, provided a light-hearted note of protest at the day's end.

Jazz theatre is not something I'd previously experienced but Vonk do it with aplomb. The Marquis de Sade had something to do with the early part of their show and once their numbers had beefed up to six from three the bible got a look in as well as theories on the need to tell stories. The rest of my notes on the show are as follows:- Pythonesque, the Duchess of Cambridge, The IT Crowd so make of that what you will. Picture also such diverse elementsas clay flower pots, machine parts scraped with screwdrivers, a length of hose with a funnel, a mouthpieceless clarinet and an apple all being used alongside the more conventional cello, guitar, xylophones etc. and you may gain some idea of the experience.

Happy Meals opened the night at Hall Of Fame and their set recalled early Sugarcubes along with a distinctly Eighties dance edge hovering around in the midst of the heavy drum machine beats. A world away from Lewis Cook's work with The Cosmic Dead.

Merzbow and Full Of Hell were pretty far from hardcore at the time I chose to see them. Sax, drums and noise noodling so again one for the aficionados, of which a fair sized number had turned out.

Los Piranas, over at Dudok, provided some welcome light relief with their engaging and utterly upbeat modernisation, via psychedelia & free jazz, of traditional Colombian styles. There closing number was a thoroughly unexpected but playful & uplifting version of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. A very fun act to catch.

Local boys Radar Men From The Moon need no introduction to their hometown crowd and so just launch into their hypnotically entertaining set of overdriven and spaced out instrumental wonders back over at the Hall Of Fame, which is slowly taking on the role of favoured mid-sized space.

Back to a skewed version of the Sixties next in a Stadskelder that thankfully has the air con on this time around. The Glockenwise share territory with the likes of the Black Lips but the Portuguese quartet bring their own thrashed-up style to the party too. A fine warm up for what was to appear here later, especially the supercharged rendition of 'Leeches'.

Dudok definitely seems to be the party & feel-good venue tonight as Dengue Fever had some good crowd interaction as well as bigging up Los Piranas and Sun Araw who was playing across town later on. They came over live like the fun party band they've always sounded like on record with their unique reimagining of south east asian Sixties rock. On the way round the corner there was just time to stop in to Extase to catch a number by eclectic Spanish duo Za!. Mixing looped tribal chants over a funk/thrash metal base the pair were clearly having a ball on stage and the decent sized crowd were clearly getting exactly what they wanted.

The Melvins yet again pulled in a near capacity crowd Midi, Buzzo opting tonight for the all-seeing eye on his get up. Newer material seemed to be the order of the day with the main body of the crowd rather calmer than last night, content just to bop along rather than get into the pits and so forth. A pit or anything close to it wasn't at all possible back at Cul de Sac where young Belgians El Yunque were forced to mainly occupy the space in front of the stage due to the act after them having a kettle drum attached to their drum kit. Overcoming the lessening of sight lines between them and their own drummer they whirled around like dervishes and did the crowd's dancing for them as they hammered out their noise-rock with enviable displays of energy. Special mention has to go to the drummer who looked like he'd been caught in one of this week's regular rain showers, such was the amount of sweat pouring off the lad. An utterly committed band who hopefully will go on to gain wider acclaim.

Feeling in the mood for a seat it was off to Paradox now for yet more non-jazz in the city's premier jazz club. Iguana Death Cult are a homegrown surf/garage/psych quartet and so had attracted a fair sized crowd for their fast & loud performance. Hook-wise they were a bit lacking, rather making up for their influences mixing down to a rather generic final product by giving an exuberant performance. Trying to sort out camera issues occupied my foreground whilst they were on in the background.

More Belgian noise came from tonight's penultimate band, Ghent's Mind Rays, another element of Richie Dagger's Garage Basement at the Stadskelder. Theirs is a sound that ranges from classic Pixies to the rawest, unpolished garage punk whilst covering the shortest distance possible in between. Another act packing out the oven that is this small venue and giving the crowd what they demanded.

Finally tonight it was earplugs-in-time for Teeth Of The Sea at Hall Of Fame. Anyone not already deafened by Merzbow or The Melvins would certainly have been finished off here as the band thundered out their work along similar lines as when last experienced at the 2014 Liverpool Psych Fest. They arrived on stage a tad late so the fact of that could be felt propelling them to new heights of noise and greater emotion in their playing. The organ-shaking beats rolling off the stage were enough in themselves to signal this as the performance from which there was nowhere else to go tonight.

Evening two of Incubate 2015 starts off with a walk to the Hall of Fame, housed in what was previously an NS Rail machine shop or something. As per the previous night the first act taken in are Belgian. Partisan are so new they apparently have no internet prescence as yet (other maybe than this). Theirs is a pretty edgy punk/post-punk amalgam that is hampered only by noticeably large amounts of tuning up.

Heading down to Midi it's time to catch one of this year's undoubted big names as Merzbow is playing the second of his three shows, solo last night & tonight with Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi (tomorrow's show is with Full Of Hell). An appreciative crowd is in situ by the time I get there & the two players are respectively pounding away on the kit and doing all sorts of guitar murdering and button pushing to create an unholy racket. Not for the first time tonight will my enjoyment of utter noise be tested to the limit due to a seeming lack of a head & a tail to the piece being performed.

Round the corner I go in search of something more akin to recognisable music and pitch up at Dudok, which seems to be in one of the city's older buildings with a good vaulted ceiling which hints at good acoustics if the sound's mixed right. First onstage for the Rats On Rafts showcase are Dutch indie quartet Nouveau Velo. They experience a bit of difficulty in hearing each other on stage and so are maybe initially rattled by that but for me they never seem to get into anything resembling their stride, sounding too earnest and lightweight to really make any impact.

Keen now to finally get the night underway as far as actually enjoying a performance I'm thwarted yet again at Cul de Sac as Holland's Tamarin Desert can't quite convince me with their take on Byrds etc.-ish '60s sounds. Flat vocals and a lack of the sort of element Umungus had last night sees me head off after a couple of numbers. Thinking a change of musical style might be the catalyst required I head off to the Paradox jazz club for the second of Jasper Stadhouders' performances with his Improv Ensemble (all six of the group's performances over the festival will be released as a boxed set in the coming months).

The club's well set out and you can clearly picture it with candles on the tables and performers doing their stuff on stage to awed silence. The Improv Ensemble are though, as the name suggests, improvising away like mad and whilst they can probably all tell what each is doing or about to do and so join in it all comes across as folk just making whatever noise they feel like in the hope that it somehow fits into the whole. Jazz has its shades like any other music and this just happens to be one that doesn't suit me. Still, as I have a seat and the facial expressions of those involved (particularly the central drummer who seems to not play more than he does play until the dual drum workout near the end of the piece) are interesting in themselves, I hang around and catch the soundcheck of Khyam Allami, master of the Oud. Unassuming and clearly affable his workouts on the instrument just to get the levels right are thrilling enough that I'm hopeful that by the time he came back on stage the audience had bulked out and were treated to something special.

On now to tonight's second act with two drummers as The Melvins play the first of two shows at Midi. They've drawn the first truly big crowd of the week and so the balcony has been opened up, where I mange to plonk myself in a pretty comfy seat and marvel at King Buzzo's Paisley printed muumuu as the quartet pound away. This is great grunge rock performed for a crowd who know exactly what they want & are exstatic to be getting fed it. There's a small pit to the left of the stage but in the main it's just one single entity swaying and bouncing as the band play with hardly any let-up. It'll be interesting to see how tomorrow's show compares.

Buoyed by Buzzo et al's envigorating performance I head back up the road to Hall of Fame to see further hardcore from Belgium in the shape of White Jazz. Theirs is definitely the highlight show of the night for me and it's viewed by a barely double figure number of people. Where are all the pit starters from the Cheap Drugs show? Wherever they were they missed a searing performance from a band that put all their effort into supporting the sterling work of their mesmeric frontman who's firmly in the Rollins/Ian MacKaye mold. Only the destruction of a guitar string & the inevitable delay whilst that was replaced roused me to head off and see what else was happening.

Stage times started to be missed around this point so I wandered back & forth between the Stadskelder, Cul de Sac & Dudok attempting to see The Vickers, Girl Band and Useless Eaters. All were eventually seen to some degree or other. The Vickers giving out a good '60s performance of fairly psychedelic elements with a bit of beat attitude, Girl Band focussing a lot of angst and power into their show (Dara Kiely performing in a wheelchair clearly had some extra stress to exorcise despite also looking half-sedated when not howling his head off) and Useless Eaters smartly channelled the sound of '80s US punk to a packed house.

And that was it, until it turned out I could get a lift rather than wait for the bus by heading back to Paradox to see the end of Jeffrey Lewis's Sonnet Youth (readings of poems based around Sonic Youth songs) performance. This I duly did, joining a mere handful of punters watching him rather stumble through the final bits of the show. Not though that it wasn't without some gem-like moments - his being slightly put on the spot by having to reveal to Gary Lucas that he didn't really see the point of Jeff Buckley when asked to join a tribute show to the late singer/songwriter and the classic deluded rock star tale of the time Johnny Marr had the bright idea of having his tweets illustrated with Jeffrey being the artist in question. As he was the first to admit more (or even some) rehearsal of the night's material would have been wise & as it was I've seen him better in the past. Still, I got a lift home.

Right from the off you can see that Incubate has a decade's worth of experience under its belt - keen eyed staff ready to sort out your wristband, festival publications etc. even on a Monday when things may well be quiet & the start of the week blues could be in play. Not that they won't have been working at a high pitch for months already. Either way it's clear that nothing would be beyond the realms of possibility for these people.

Staying 30 minutes outside of the city centre combined with hanging out with mein host means the festival opening event passes me by but I make it into town in time to drop in to Cul-de-Sac to catch the last couple of songs from Belgian quartet Umungus. They pour out a nice line in drawn-out stoner/prog instrumentals and immediately that feeling you expect to experience often at such an event exerts itself - "I wish I'd seen more of them". Cosy yet also inspiring you to nod along or more, their output is very easy to lose yourself in.

Second on tonight's personal bill is another Belgian act - Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. With a name like that they deserve at least one song's length of anyone's attention. Previously they've played neofolk (whatever that is) but tonight's show at Midi kicks off in a distinctly gothic vein with the four-piece pulling no punches and launching straight into towering rock noise mode. Stadium-level stuff in a mid-sized hall that no doubt built and built as the set progressed. Having a need to try and locate a bus stop for the end of the night I nipped off after a couple of songs and walked a couple of blocks over to Little Devil to see what Cheap Drugs were like.

Hardcore sums it up neatly. No nonsense, pit-inspiring noise from a great energetic band. The sort whose energy you can feed off for hours as they seem to be supercharged. Little Devil's backroom live space is probably not suited for the claustrophobic but it was exactly the right place to see this bunch and I'll make the point of seeing more acts here as the week progresses.

Back to Midi now and a slight change of pace, if not intensity, as it's time to see The Soft Moon in action. A good-sized crowd has made it out to see Luis Vasquez & his players and they get what they expected as the band's full-on, uplifting yet doomy set rolls over them. Vasquez does at least offer up some chat and thanks to the crowd so there's also interaction on that level too which is always good to witness. Here's their new video for good measure.

Time for another walk and a further reduction in intensity as Kevin Morby is plying his solo trade over at De NWE Vorst. Dapper in a practically all white ensemble he's also pretty chatty and gives a meaningful performance of 'Harlem River' to an undeservedly sparse crowd. As he says himself though there are a lot of options in town, especially for a Monday night but no one who saw him will have felt they made a bad choice. Finishing off the night with the score Belgium 3 - USA 4 ends up being the way to go as Wand are the penultimate choice at the Extase venue.

Unfortunately the vocals sound ropey upon arriving and after less than a song's worth all manner of guitar amp engineering is required. Cory Hanson describes the situation as "typical festival" in a tone that could be taken a couple of ways but mainly he sounds fatigued so maybe they've been on the road too long (in support of forthcoming album 1000 Days - watch out for our review next week). Either way it means a short walk around the corner and a longer viewing of The Shivas.

The Stadskelder turns out to be the basement bar in an otherwise respectable looking hotel; another of tonight's narrow rooms with a bunch of musicians sweating away at the far end whilst (in this case) a tiny crowd looks on appreciatively. Photographers come close to outnumbering fans but that doesn't put the trio off from delivering up a great sun-drenched, Californian sound with surf elements and nods to Redd Kross and suchlike. A world away from the wood-panelled room in the bowels of a Dutch hotel and the rapidly cooling night outside but all the more enjoyable as an end to the night's entertainment for that very difference.