Thursday night was the Norwegian Voices event at the Barbican - event being the right word. Events, to my mind, are what classical people have when there’s lots of them in the same place, but they’re not in an orchestra. And, despite tonight’s featuring trad jazz, weird jazz, Sami folk fusion prog, extended vocal music, insane percussion, and Supersilent (who, we have decided, are a rock band) - despite a large proportion of that music being quite hypnotically wonderful - this was a classical people’s event in the oddest and most uncomfortable sense.

I don’t blame the Norwegians. From what I know of musicians over there, there’s a certain relaxedness concerning genre, and an informality that seems to permeate even the most academic music. To get together in a massive concert hall and celebrate with contemporary music 100 years of not being owned by Sweden seems a very sensible idea - and can you imagine the UK celebrating a national anniversary with women who sound like they’re singing backwards, squalling saxes and huge rumblings of meterological electronics? But this is England: we don’t do relaxed. We don’t mix things up, then sit back and let the music do the work. What we do, is we try really hard to appeal to lots of people at once, and then feel smug and uncomfortable about it. In this case, here is some modern music, right? So let’s make it really, really modern! Let’s put really awful visuals all over it, without respite, for a whole damn evening. Let’s project perfectly good poems, line by line, at silly angles, so that it looks like something off Brass Eye, and let’s film the performers and then manipulate it in ‘real time’ so they look all jerky-like.

Worst of all, let’s project behind Supersilent – a band so imbued with a sense of dark and light; a band so right and devastating that they’re like weather – simultaneous footage of the band playing that has been treated with whatever tool it is that makes them look like drawings done with pencil and charcoal, first seen, I believe, in the video for their countrymen A-Ha’s top pop hit, ‘Take On Me’. And let’s make this projection about a million feet high, so that anyone who enjoys watching Supersilent for the intense transfer of sound between and around a group of amazing musicians just can’t ignore it.

These visuals couldn’t be any more inappropriate if they’d featured dancing girls in marabou bikinis. They were the worst kind of unimaginative. But they were well-meaning, which made me think all day about why the concert organisers meant so well as to pay someone to do them. Why did we need them at all? This, after all, was mostly ‘art’ music, sold at £15-£20 a ticket to educated people. The sets by each artist and group were short and accessible, even the most musically extreme, and the awful Fiona Talkington was on hand to introduce things and fill up the dead air between sets, if required – her breathless trill of “You’ve a fan here, Jarle!” in the direction of genius drummer Jarle Vespestad was toe-curlingly priceless. And crucially, music – especially this odd brand of contemporary but emotive, jazz-inflected music – comes with its own wonderful visual stimuli built in, which is so ambiguous and fluid that you delight in feeling it’s yours alone: the dark, dripping undersides of rocks that I see when I close my eyes and listen to Supersilent won’t be the same stretches of shingle beach you see when you do the same thing, and that, arguably, is kind of the point.

When a band calls its albums just 1 to 7, and 7 is a live DVD that’s stark in the extreme (Kim Hiorthoy’s elegant, charged, black and white camerawork would have been very welcome here), you’d think that, if nothing else, could have suggested to the visuals people that they didn’t need all these twists and turns of dodgy virtual charcoal flickering above them. That their audience didn’t either. But that was the thing: the audience wasn’t the kind of audience who will go and stand in a darkened venue and just watch a band, and let that band’s music just be. It was a BBC Radio 3 audience, and for some reason, which I’m sure I could come up with given enough coffee and some funding, a confusion has arisen between accessibility and patronage, or between multimedia and just plain compromise in this odd grey area that Late Junction inhabits. And this translated on Thursday into this quite offputting and unmusical display of visual technology that was way more crass than anything I’ve ever seen at a club.

In the same way, the breathtaking footage of migrating spiderlings in David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth the night before was accompanied by god-awful, schmaltzy music instead of either, well, silence, or - more appropriately - the inspired recordings of Chris Watson, whose sound work is one of the main reasons I’m watching the series. In a taster for the next programme, Watson reverently explained how he managed to capture the strange sounds of a blue butterfly caterpillar (which is tended by ants, insect fans, in its larval stage!), possibly the quietest thing he’d ever recorded. However, I’m willing to bet that we’ll hear a few minutes of this, tops, before the poor caterpillar’s oscillations are drowned out by some sweeping strings, or some horrible poingy guitar stuff (this indicates tension or something). If it weren’t for the fact that I’d miss out on David Attenborough explaining the wolf spider’s mating technique I’d watch it with the sound off.

Why are we expected to need such stimuli to help us appreciate the wonder of spider-world or the elemental geometry of Supersilent’s music? Who makes that decision, and what is it based on, other than some very misguided notions of what constitutes popular demand, or how accomplished our imaginations are? Perfect technological marriages of audio and visual are possible, and when they happen they’re quite incredible (your imagination made real, for a second) but apologetic clashes of the two, conciliatory softening of the sublime with something a little more ‘friendly’ - that’s just dilution. And I want concentrate.