Loop 12 plays the kind of ambitious electronic music that is nice to have around and available – to enjoy on headphones with a nightcap on some particularly disaffected Friday night, or to leave a CD cover out conspicuously during a party so your friends can see that you are into this kind of stuff.

It’s rare for the casual music fan to withstand the two-plus hours of the snarling, swelling, concrete block of noise Loop 12 performed at the Sons of Hermann Hall Saturday, May 2.

I don’t mean “withstand” in a negative way. It is just that a performance by Loop 12, who take their name from that non-descript ring-road surrounding Dallas, does feel like a kind of confrontation. There are the five, studious musicians on stage filling the space with sound, and the dozen or so of us who were there in that audience space in folding chairs watching. Projected over the band was a video montage of various graphics, archive clips, and other obscure film scenes.

Their show began with a swelling white noise, accented with squelches, squawks and occasional percussive hits in a style reminiscent of the British duo Autechre. The fits of noise are only occasionally interrupted by beat segments that create a kind of rhythmic unity: a steady house kick drum, a break beat, some IDM percussive splats and smacks, sampled heavy metal filler. But whereas the front end of the show felt as if Loop 12 was building their blended music into some kind of progressive dance mix, these moments of rhythmic cohesion proved elusive and fleeting, always falling away to the behemoth sound of their noise-based-orchestration.

Mid-way through the show, which was performed continuously without breaks, moments of percussion-driven rhythm emerged increasingly infrequently until they ceased occurring all together. What was left was an introspective layering of otherwise non-musical toss-away noises and samples. The very use of these as building blocks of a sound with some appearance of musical order seemed to challenge the conception of music in the first place. The sound Loop 12 creates is so permeating, that by the end of the show you are not so much listening as existing in a space that feels filled up with sound as a pool is filled with chlorinated water. What began as a concert became a dialogue between each audience member and his or her surroundings.

Walking out of the Sons of Hermann Hall into the damp, dripping early Sunday morning, the scratching of feet, purring of car engines, distant sounding of police sirens – everything that touched my ears – all seemed to be woven together in some imperceptible semblance of sonic unity.