Sounds From The Other City @ Various Venues, Salford

What Sounds From The Other City 2011 highlighted was just how partisan the local gigging scene is. In this neck of the woods promotors are no longer pan-musical purveyors exploiting anyone who can pull a crowd worth ripping off. Instead they are niche genre peddlers, all adopting a corner from which to flog their wares at increasingly reasonable prices (to their increasingly narrow audiences).

Today in Salford the feeling was of a fractured community scattered along a dusty street littered with cones and temporary fences. With the stink of petrol fumes and the boarded up pubs, in the shadow of Manchester's shiny commercial district of Spinningfields... we may as well be in Detroit. Additionally, there's a perceived hierarchy this year with Peel Hall - somewhere I didn't get to visit, unfortunately - housing the most recognisable artists. But beyond this mute point, the festival provided some of its most memorable shows to date.

Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides are a local group with huge international appeal thanks to being pushed hard by passionate fans in high places. Their new record is stripped bare and unsurprisingly, so is the performance. The show is bookended with an East-Asian gong chimed with delayed interval. On top of this a drum pattern develops with textures of distorted vocals, then layered with recordings of nature (running water, wind, etc.).

For this early a time slot, the band do well not to indulge in any psychedelic hedonism - and additionally, the slapstick humour of the gong repeatedly falling over acted as a precursor to what would be a gag riddled performance from Richard Youngs later on the same stage.

The late afternoon/early evening sessions seemed dedicated to local artists. Feel Right played blissed-out Summer hits - a show that only could have been improved had the group played outside with the fumes of a BBQ wafting through the crowd. Elsewhere, The Louche FC presented the best rising hope for any group looking to escape the area. Straddling somewhere between shoegaze and Roy Orbison, the group have the potential to sell a lot of records - not least because the members posses the uniqueness of major pop stars.

Continuing this A&R tour of the festival, Black Metal locals Wode provided some electric sounds even if the amps were limited. With rich 'sit up pay attention' drumming the band avoided an aggressively experimental vibe, finding solace in simplicity. Also on the block were Float Riverer (the only band of the day to have onlookers spilling onto the street), who maintained a beautiful level of restraint in both attack and humour. Their garage rocking ways conveyed a sense of maturity that rarely occurs or works with groups of this ilk.

Cult experimental artist Richard Youngs stood before the seated crowd at Sacred Trinity Church, posing like Elvis with his mic, his elbow protruding sideways and his back to the audience. The setting sun seeped through the stained glass at the back of the chapel and with the modest gold crucifix against the back wall, we were painted the perfect picture. It's all about the light with Youngs: his voice accompanies a bright synth, occasionally chanting, at other points speaking in tongues.

Floating in sacred tranquility for five minutes or so, he hadn't made a sound (and neither had the audience). Yet we were also being treated to the chatter from the bar staff and stewards at the back of the church; believing that the show was therefore a disaster, he auctioned off some of his records. He then borrowed an electric guitar from an audience member and proceeded to perform a beautiful folk lead pop song.

This year the accolade for most overlooked act went to Drunk In Hell - a band more people regretted missing than actually saw. The curtain on the festival was drawn to Action Beat - a group who managed to pack four drum kits, a bass and four guitars into a tiny pub. What space was left for onlookers fast became employed for a righteous moshpit (the type where elfish women can take on burley fat men with beards and win).

This was one of those rare moments when everything made sense. One of those moments where everything this festival works towards became aligned. Yeah the sound tech was having a nightmare. Yeah the set was just one booming bit feedback followed by another. But between the distortion and the battering drums such frenetic energy was formed that few will be able to shake this truly transcendental performance...

The spirit of this festival is in its limited budgets, and the idea of packing friends into a room and turning out something creative. It's about marginalised artists playing marginalised venues. The commercial scale attempted in certain parts this year meant that the increasingly fractured nature of the festival was compounded by a hierarchy in both promoters and visitors. What resulted was that the musicians (and promoters who put them on) who should have been celebrated for their ingenuity ended up being overlooked and deprived of a more diverse audience.

This year the festival was more excluding than exclusive, more isolating than inclusive. It hasn't been a vintage Sounds From The Other City because that which makes it great was neglected. That said, it's still the best music festival for miles around.