What do you get when you cross the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra with Sunn O)))? Over the next couple of days, music fans at the Adelaide festival are going to find out, when Ilan Volkov’s Tectonics project hits the city.

It will be the fifth time Tectonics has been staged since its inaugural performance in Reykjavic 2012 (it’s also been to Glasgow and Tel-Aviv). The idea behind the festival is to collide two opposing forces (like tectonic plates) – experimental music performers and a traditional orchestra – and see what kind of energy will be unleashed. Adelaide will get a programme that concentrates on Australian composers and musicians but also involves international musicians ranging from the aforementioned ambient doom metallers (playing in their Gravetemple incarnation) to Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi. With one of the two concerts running at nearly nine hours, the audience will get a total immersion in Volkov’s vision. “For an audience it’s a really powerful experience where you’re confronted by very diverse things,” says Volvok, “and that’s why the marathon aspect to it is very strong. If it was spread over three weeks it would lose this energy that it has.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Volkov rehearses with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra ahead of their Tectonics Adelaide performance, photographed in the Grainger Studio. Photograph: Alicia Canter

The idea behind the festival is easily explained by the fact that Volkov is a symphony orchestra composer (he was the youngest person ever appointed to conduct a BBC orchestra, the Glasgow Symphony) but also puts on avant garde music gigs at a Tel Aviv club he co-owns. Tectonics will express that range, including everything from solo acoustic performances to hardcore electronic improvisation. “As an audience you have a feeling of a real adventure,” he says. “Most of what I chose is very physical and visceral so you really need to be in the space to hear it, to really experience what it is, and that’s why the choice of composers like Scelsi feels so natural in the context of the other genres that are included in this event. The barriers are broken totally.”

Scelsi is Giacinto Scelsi, the 20th-century composer whose work provides one of the tentpoles of the programme, alongside that of Iannis Xenakis. Volkov chose both composers for their interest in ritual and symbol, which influenced many of the musicians elsewhere on the bill, including Gravetemple’s Steven O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi. There will also be a performance two works by David Ahern, a pioneering Australian composer whose work has been largely forgotten. Another piece, a collaboration between violinist and experimental music performer Jon Rose and classical composer Elena Kats-Chernin is, says Volkov, “a distillation of what Tectonics is about. It’s very elastic piece where both the soloist and myself, the conductor, are choosing a lot of options. We have a lot of decisions to make so it’s quite free.”

Perhaps it’s this sense of freedom that makes Volkov seem so relaxed about being charge of such a complicated festival. “Usually I try to schedule it so we have the maximum rehearsal time but for some pieces you don’t need too much or it will kill it, so it’s a matter of curating [the festival] in a wise way,” he says. “One of the challenges is to really open up the orchestra to new experience, for them and the audience. What was great in Glasgow was that more than 80% of the audience was new to the orchestra. In the 10 years I’ve been working there, the way the musicians and audiences deal with new music has completely transformed. I’m expecting a keen and interested audience and I’m not dumbing it down in any way. I think most of the audience is excited about that because you can really feel it straight away when you go in.”

Volkov is on a mission to expand the audience for contemporary classical music, and previous editions of Tectonics have included music by John Cage to entice a crowd who would prefer to go to visual art events rather than hear contemporary music. Adelaide will take a different tack but still do its best to prize orchestral music out of any ghettos it may still inhabit. Of course, Volkov still conducts the great symphonies in the course of his day job, but says that the experience of curating Tectonic enriches his approach. “I feel privileged to be able to still do the symphonies side by side with working with composers and discussing things more intimately with them. The contrast between the two makes total sense. Every time I do a modern piece it influences how I approach conducting a Brahms or Beethoven symphony. Musicians should be doing both – for me it’s natural.”