Paul Stammers takes in a night of creative sound courtesy of Thomas Truax

A troubadour dressed in a suit and tie who produces experimental soundscapes using his own avant-garde instruments fashioned from salvaged junk is likely to be a crashing bore or an inspirational eccentric. Fortunately, Thomas Truax quickly proves to be the latter, a charming raconteur as well as an oddity who claims to hail from ‘Wowtown’.

Murmuring to the audience – a respectful, mixed-age cluster gathered in the basement of Modern Art Oxford, mostly sitting quietly on the carpet – as he dabbles with foot pedals and adjusts his part Gothic, part Heath Robinson contraptions, he resembles a mad scientist, albeit a dapper one. He evokes wry smiles as he warns that those of us “in the first ten years of internet use” won’t recognise the following sound, before the bleeps of a dial-up modem logging on introduce “Inside the Internet”, an ominous number seemingly at odds with Truax’s upbeat personality.

Pride of place among his homemade equipment goes to ‘Mother Superior’, a solenoid-based kick drum attached to a slowly rotating bike wheel, although the trademark ‘Hornicator’ is more attention grabbing; Truax bombards us with fuzzy reverbs as he strides back and forth with this miked-up gramophone horn – fitted with strings, frets and pickups – clasped to his head.

A few iPhones (refreshingly absent for most of the performance) are brandished by onlookers as the lanky musician later clambers among the audience carrying the String-a-Ling, a bongo drum with assorted devices attached to a tumble dryer tube. The sounds it emits can’t be called music, but that’s not the point.

The performance is not all about mechanical gizmos, though; some of it is almost mainstream, although delivered with a childish sense of fun. For the catchy and melodic “Full Moon over Wowtown”, for example, Truax scampers about with a torch stuck to his guitar, briefly nipping out of the room and reappearing, only to hide briefly under a flight of stairs before resuming his crooning.

With this sort of delightful showmanship, it’s not hard to see why half the audience admit to being “repeat clientele”, but after an evening of wackery, including support from fellow one-man experimental band Ratatosk, it’s also a relief when Truax eventually finishes with a lullaby, having previously donned a pair of flashing, spinning LED spectacles for the fuzzy, buzzy “Beehive Heart”.