To Dalston to witness the worst gig of my life. The premise of the Random Gear Festival was simple and rather inspired: gather some arbitrary objects; get people to play them. In previous iterations, the offerings had included an ice skate, a wet baguette and an exercise bike. This time we had a trampoline, a microwave, a dead fish. I kept an open mind.

Years ago at Cafe Oto I saw the then chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Ilan Volkov rubbing two blocks of polystyrene together with the subtle virtuosity of Martha Argerich at a Steinway. Take into consideration too what the composer Hector Berlioz declared in his seminal 1844 treatise on orchestration: ‘Every sounding object employed by the composer is a musical instrument.’

A nine-inch pizza was smeared on a keyboard. Top marks to the man playing an umbrella, however

In theory, then, there is nothing to stop a wet baguette becoming an instrument. Nothing, that is, except for a lack of imagination. And the lineup at this one-night event consisted of some of the most savagely primitive imaginations I’d ever encountered at Cafe Oto. Enticing combinations of objects – chosen by lot – came and went with no one doing anything remotely interesting with them. A toothbrush was used to brush teeth. A nine-inch pizza (Hawaiian) was smeared on a keyboard. Top marks to the man playing the umbrella, however, and to the artist Paul Purgas who drew a beautiful, fragile line with a clarinet.

Terrible gig, excellent lesson: a reminder that, no, free improv isn’t something anyone can do, however much people think it is. Unleash free drummer Steve Noble onto a wet baguette and you would have had a whole different night. Noble was the star attraction at a great newish monthly series called Grain at the Avalon Cafe. Watching him propel his ad hoc trio (Caius Williams on double bass; Tara Cunningham on guitar) through a 40-minute set, seeing him capitalise on every inch of his compact drum kit, convert every coincidence, every cymbal-toppling accident, into a gift, a new groove, a fresh scenario, was pure joy. Such shape-shifting was also creating a kind of cinema, jump-cuts flinging us into strange new neighbourhoods – Williams wheezing out whale songs; Cunningham being joyously wonky; Noble frog-marching us into the sonic wastes with a bullying tattoo.

Later, we witnessed a coder improvising with a set of algorithms. Harry Murdoch typed up his algo-improv live on a laptop and projected it onto the wall – I could make out some ‘chopping’ and ‘striating’ of ‘jerseyperc’, whatever that meant – while Theo Guttenplan on drums glitched his own riffs in emulation.

The future has set up camp here in Bermondsey, in the wilds around Millwall’s stadium. Avalon, Venue MOT, Ormside Projects: these are the main labs where the sounds of the 2030s are being cooked up.

In our supposed centres of excellence, by contrast, I smelt death. At the Barbican, to thin audiences, the BBC presented a ‘Total Immersion’ into the work of Missy Mazzoli. A strange choice. Within the neo-romantic shallows this American inhabits – all cheap sentiment and never-ending glissandi – there’s precious little to immerse yourself in. Mazzoli’s main talent is for turning everything into baby food. And syrupy pap is conducive to easy digestion, not rumination or depth. We were diving into a puddle. That said, her earlier postminimalist work– the string quartet Harp and Altar (2009) and opera Song from the Uproar (2007-12) – has a certain vulgar appeal.

At the Wigmore Hall the Riot Ensemble played Hilda Paredes’ new The Hearing Trumpet twice. Which was more than a touch hubristic. A second listen doesn’t necessarily lead to deeper appreciation: it can lead to deeper hatred. Here the repeat merely confirmed how anaemic the work was, populated by musical gestures that, in the supermarket of new music, felt like they had been grabbed last minute at the till of a Sainsbury’s Local.

The piece we really wanted to hear twice was sandwiched in the middle. Brian Ferneyhough’s Liber Scintillarum (2012) is a lithe, sinewy chamber work, gruff and exhilarating. People love to hate Ferneyhough. But to be able to bottle that spontaneous, transmogrifying energy that seems to be the preserve of free improvisers, as he does, is no mean feat.

That same vitality was in evidence among two electronic duos at the ICA last year. As part of a residency by cult Berlin festival CTM, Prison Religion showed up kitted out as American cops and barrelled through the crowds with cigarettes dangling from their lips looking murderous. They specialise in a type of apocalypse-core that makes Autechre sound like Chopin, exploring massive, nebulous structures whose sharp glistening edges occasionally heave into view amid machine-gun bass and vast metallic clouds of intoxicating noise. The thrilling Gabber Modus Operandi provided something more mischievous though no less hardcore, yoking the scales of Indonesia’s gamelan tradition to the speeds and intensity of Dutch gabber. To top it off, one half of the duo, Ican Harem, would periodically spring onto the decks like a cat and howl into the mike. As composer Ed Henderson once noted, this is music that requires you to move your feet so fast you feel like an ant.

By far the most astonishing new work I heard recently, however, was Rebecca Saunders’s Us Dead Talk Love (2021), based on a text by artist Ed Atkins, which received its UK première last November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Moving with monstrous inevitability in the hands of Ensemble Nikel, and burning up everything in its path, the piece was terrifyingly, demonically alive. At the centre of the fireball was the extraordinary contralto of Noa Frenkel, who devoured the words and converted them into smoking hot rocks and flaming lava.

It was a tantalising glimpse of what the British composer’s first opera might sound like, which will be another collaboration with Atkins and is set to première in Berlin. Will it make it to the UK? Who knows. Saunders – winner of every award going in Europe – has still never been the subject of a Total Immersion portrait, never had a Proms commission and, I’m willing to bet, no one at the Royal Opera or ENO has heard of either of them.

How long will it be – years? Decades? – before the British musical establishment realise what an act of aesthetic self-harm they’ve committed in ignoring one of this country’s greatest composers?