“Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation!” said the Reverend Eli Jenkins in Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’. But music needs no passport to cross national borders, and if it’s a musical planet you are looking for then take a look down; you are standing on one. When you’ve finished looking down, look up Uber Lingua, the crew responsible for putting on tonight’s entertainment at the Beck’s Festival Bar. They know a bit about gathering together some of the treasures of this musical planet.

DJ Gemma was playing when I arrived, but I caught only a little of her set before DuOud were on stage. DuOud are two Frenchmen who play the oud, which is a Middle Eastern variant on the lute. They’ve added their own variants to it, though – Mehdi Haddab’s oud looks like it’s been covered in gaff tape and had bits of bling stuck to it, and Smadj, as well as having a traditional oud, has another which is nothing but strings and frame. Smadj also has two laptops and the whole thing is pumped through some pretty impressive Marshall stacks. I made a note to myself to investigate whether you can get Oud Hero for your Xbox in the Middle East, and if not to try and get a licensing deal. The parallels with “the axeman” in Western music are emphasised when Mehdi plays one track with his oud balanced on top of his head. The electronic beats and the obvious virtuosity of both players marry together well (a reading of ‘The Chase’ from ‘Midnight Cowboy’ is especially inspired) and both players are obviously having a ball on stage – Smadj translates Mehdi’s thanks to the crowd from French into English, but the translation is hardly necessary, so obvious is the enjoyment of the music. Because DuOud are on so early, the running order does not permit an encore (which produces a few down-turned faces from the otherwise beaming crowd), but no matter, we concentrate on applauding loudly instead.

Next in the running order is Uber Lingua supremo DJ bP, who keeps the Arabic-inspired flow going for a couple of tracks before two belly dancers from Melbourne’s Underbelly dance troupe take to the stage (yes, Underbelly is a great name for a belly dance troupe, yes, they were around well before a certain Channel 9 production, and yes, they would be happier if Channel 9 had chosen another title!) The Underbelly dancers have been doing this for a number of years now, as is obvious from the effortless style of their performance. The belly dancers are followed on stage by another member of their troupe whose skill is not belly dancing but hula hoop, and whose performance ends with eighteen hula hoops all in motion at the one time. The hula music tells us that we are moving around the globe again, with the next stop being Cuba. Reggaeton MC Pochoman announced his nationality with the Cuban flag, which covers the whole of the back of his jacket. The jacket is soon off, though, as the heat of the stage lights and the heat of his delivery begins to take hold. Reggaeton has never been too high up the list of my genres of choice, but on a warm and pleasant evening Pochoman is delivering some warm and pleasant sounds.

Next on stage is Filastine, a self described “luddite laptopist” (work that one out, if you can) from Barcelona. Filastine has a new album out (‘Dirty Bomb’, the first record release from Uber Lingua) and he also has three laptops, what look like an MPC and a whole bunch of percussion mounted, logically enough, on a shopping trolley, which Filastine describes as an “indigenous artifact of a 21st century consumerist world”. The shopping trolley does double duty after his set when, on end, it becomes the improvised table from which he sells his CDs, but what really sells the music is, well, the music – an urgent and often pulsating concoction with its roots in hip-hop but nurtured by influences from all over the place, backed up by some impressive visuals. Following Filastine, DJ Maga Bo from Brazil, who takes to the decks and serves up drum’n’bass stylings that deliver much needed energy to these aging legs. Alas though, it was not enough energy to last out the whole night so I had to leave just as the last of the Uber Lingua DJ massive stepped up for the night.

If you’ve been meaning to get to an Uber Lingua gig for a while but never quite made it (as was the case for me, I regretfully confess), then their curatorship of the Beck’s Festival Bar tonight shows that you really have to get your act together. The Uber Lingua crew cast out their net and haul it back brimming full of music that’s joyously diverse and compellingly universal. See you at their next gig!