In bits and pieces

It doesn't matter if you've never heard of Heiner Goebbels or his work. As far as the composer is concerned, the less you know about him the better, although, for the record, he's one of Germany's leading experimental artists. 'I hate it when my friends come to see my pieces because they think they know what to expect,' he says. 'I much prefer people who are curious and can accept things they haven't seen before.'

Goebbels's latest piece, Hashirigaki, gives Londoners the chance to do just that. First seen in this country at last year's Edinburgh festival, it's a 70-minute piece of music-theatre inspired by, among other things, The Beach Boys' seminal album Pet Sounds and Gertrude Stein's epic novel The Making Of Americans.

Goebbels had been a fan of both for many years, but it wasn't until he came across a session album documenting the making of Pet Sounds that the idea of using it in a piece manifested itself. 'When I was younger, I had never managed to reconstruct from memory the melody of Caroline No,' he says. 'I could play virtually every other tune I'd heard, but not that one.'

Goebbels - a multi-instrumentalist as well as a composer and director, although these days he rarely performs - has always resisted being pigeonholed. His catalogue of work, from Sound City, part of last year's Almeida Opera season, to 1997's Black On White - regarded as one of his finest pieces - flits between music, theatre, performance and art and invariably is a composite of all four. The contents are often oblique, the responses of those who see them ranging from the fascinated to the bewildered, occasionally via the bored. Hashirigaki, however, garnered near across-the-board ecstasy last year, and Goebbels concedes that it's one of his dreamiest, prettiest works.

While Goebbels's radical theatre may be difficult to pin down, it can - at a stretch - be compared to that of Robert Wilson. Goebbels admits that the Canadian's theatre collages were a big influence on him during the 1970s and 1980s but points out the extent to which music dominates his own work. ' Wilson also has a particularly impressive notion of time,' he says, referring to Wilson's love of slowing down time on stage. 'I'm far too impatient for that.'

Instead, Goebbels works with dissonance and incongruence, throwing together unexpected, disparate visuals, fragments of text, movement and music into drifting, abstract montages of sound and image. In the past, this bric-a-brac approach has involved incorporating music from such unorthodox objects as bicycle wheels and door hinges into his opera and jazz compositions. In Hashirigaki, he makes use of a littleknown instrument called a theremin which Brian Wilson used on Pet Sounds. 'Oddly for a musical instrument it goes quiet if you touch it,' says Goebbels. 'But if you leave it alone it produces wonderful high and low vibrations.'

None of this is particularly helpful in establishing just what Hashirigaki - or any of Goebbels's pieces, for that matter - might actually mean. In Hashirigaki, the dominant focus is on the interplay between Wilson's melancholic, highly complex harmonic music, and fragments of Stein's text; but even that relationship resists concrete interpretation: Stein's novel is a stream-of-consciousness narrative on everyday life. Goebbels rejects the notion that by drawing on two iconic pieces of post-war American culture he is making a comment on American art, and says that audience members will find themselves pondering how the piece fits together only after they have left the theatre. And just because they deal in abstraction doesn't mean that Goebbels's pieces don't have the capacity to move his audiences. Rather, Goebbels believes the fact that they don't have a fixed centre is precisely the thing that keeps audiences involved. 'People shouldn't get too bound up in literal translation,' he laughs. 'Rather they should let the float of images wash over them. It should be enough.'

Tomorrow until Sat, Barbican, Silk Street EC2, 7.45pm, £5 to £23. Tel: 020 7638 8891. www.barbican.org.uk Tube: Barbican/Moorgate