Installation art / Still Ringing The Old Leadworks, Bristol

The bells! The bells! As the vocal chorus rang out a canon in imitation of the lost city of Dunwich's ghostly clangers, and it went on and on and on, Quasimodo didn't seem like such an unreasonable guy after all. But vocal-bells apart, this site-specific music-theatre installation by the group 3 or 4 Composers, first performed as part of the Barclays New Stages Festival in Nottingham last November, and restaged here amid the decayed splendour of an old industrial building, was wonderfully inventive.

If the music - composed and performed by Jocelyn Pook, Helen Ottaway, Simon Rackham and Melanie Pappenheim - sometimes seemed to be spread rather thinly over the hour-long performance, the imaginative staging more than made up for it. Deborah Thomas's set of seemingly free-floating furniture hanging by wires from the ceiling, and choreographer Thom Stuart's orchestrations of expressionist movements from the locally recruited cast of extras, were vividly alive.

Inspired by the legends of spirit-world campanology from the Suffolk town that fell into the sea, and with libretti taken from - among other sources - the shipping forecast, the company successfully communicated the sense of a drowned world through a series of brilliantly staged poetic images: the poignant futility of hands cupping water; the uncomfortable dance of bare soles balancing precariously on pebbles. Using the depth of the building to maximum effect, the show unwound with a real sense of space, with obscure ensemble-movements in the farthest reaches echoed by front-of-stage performances by Pook and Ottaway on violins and the magnetic appeal of Pappenheim's extraordinary voice and presence. Mixing live and pre-recorded sources, the score veered between Packham's melancholy French horn solos and Ottaway and Pook's ambient and ethnic variations on devotional music, with a strong sense of emblematic English pastoral to the fore. And as they played, the female chorus hop-scotched around the set like a regiment of monstrous girls from a painting by Paula Rego.

The closing movement, written by Pook - the composer of everyone's favourite mobile-phone ad, the Orange number that uses a sample of Kathleen Ferrier's voice on "Blow the Wind Southerly" - provided a wonderful climax, as Pappenheim walked round the set pushing the hanging chairs, doors, windows and dressers into motion.

As country-kitchen furniture flew dream-like through the air, and the air became water, Still Ringing more than fulfilled its promise. Though there were frustrating moments when either too much or too little appeared to be going on, the overall mix of music and mise-en-scene was satisfyingly resolved, with the whole amounting to a rewarding blend of the English, and the English-eccentric, traditions. By the end, even the hellish bells sounded like a good idea.