The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has announced the line-up for its fourth annual Tectonics Glasgow: two days of experimental sound art, orchestral premieres, wacky electronics, rogue vocalists and unlikely collaborations involving all or various of the above. Most festival programmes are easy enough to scan for the big names, the commercial compromise, the box-office mollifiers, but not so much with Tectonics. For an orchestral endeavour it stands out as joyously uncompromising and off-piste. Long live public service broadcasting.

Tectonics is the brainchild of BBCSSO principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov, indefatigable champion of new and/or weird music who founded the festival in Iceland in 2012 and now runs editions around the world — instalments are cropping up soon in Adelaide, Oslo and Reykjavik. He says he’s thrilled that the format has caught on internationally but that he still thinks of Glasgow as Tectonics HQ. “The way the BBC has embraced it, taken it seriously, given us a really good amount of air play…” The arrangement suits all parties, too, because Radio 3 fills four consecutive editions of its Saturday-night contemporary music programme Hear and Now with content recorded at the festival.

Volkov’s co-curator in Glasgow is the producer Alasdair Campbell, responsible for keeping a healthy dose of non-classical, local, underground and DIY music in the mix. “In some ways it gets more and more intense each year,” Campbell sighs when I ask whether the festival’s success has made programming any easier. “We both have a million ideas, Ilan gets carried away…” Another sigh. “Actually we both get pretty carried away.”

If there was a theme to this year’s festival (which there isn’t, not officially) it would probably have to do with poetry and the voice. Ivor Kallin is a satirist, multi-instrumentalist, broadcaster, and pibroch fanatic; he collaborates for the first time with Scots balladeer Alasdair Roberts and drummer/singer/improviser Alex Neilson in a piece that according to Campbell will “deconstruct Ivor’s poetry and do funny things with Alasdair’s songs”. The Finnish vocalist Ánde Somby summons the sound of wolves and other animals in the ancient Sami yoiking tradition. There is an opera of sorts called Labyrinthe — a piece by Jane Dickson about women and feminism performed by two singers (Lucy Duncombe and Anneke Kampman) and live electronics; Alwynne Pritchard sings in her own Rockaby for voice and orchestra, inspired on Samuel Beckett’s one-woman play; Wolf Eyes founder Nate Young sings in his ensemble work Standard Deviance One; and there’s a piece based on Marco Polo’s travel journals by guitarist Andy Moor of Dutch anarcho-punk outfit The Ex involving a whole panoply of guitarists in the Old Fruitmarket. “Pure guitars, no effects,” says Campbell. “I think that was the jist of Andy’s brief.”

Volkov stresses how much the unique character of City Halls and the Fruitmarket formed the starting point for a lot of what’s in the programme. “We’re determined to get away from a stage-versus-audience concert experience,” he says, and that makes for quite a playground. Alvin Curran is an American composer who specialises in serene meshes of sound; he creates a new work called Musique Sans Frontières for brass bands, bagpipes, saxophones, choirs and orchestra that will roam around both foyers and both halls. London-based Luxemburger Catherine Kontz has written a piece specifically for the Fruitmarket — indeed, it’s called Fruitmarket — which will fill the space with recordings of market hubbub from around the world. Hirta Rounds by Glasgow composer David Fennessy is for 16 strings without a conductor and will be performed in the round on the floor of the Fruitmarket. So far the piece has only been heard in Munich, so a Scottish premiere is welcome.

It’s becoming something of a Tectonics tradition to feature an elder statesperson of the contemporary music world. In early editions we had visits from Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff, and last year shone a light on the immensely refined sound world of French synthesiser doyenne Eliane Radigue. This year’s luminary is Annea Lockwood: 76-year-old sonic artist from New Zealand who pioneered techniques of environmental sound sculpture and field recording. Her series Piano Transplants (1969-82) saw her burning, drowning and planting pianos in genteel English gardens; her landmark 1982 album Hudson River mapped a sonic landscape from the Adirondacks to the Atlantic. Volkov got to know Lockwood in New York and describes her as “a beautiful person who has always done her own thing. She has this calm, wonderful energy.”

At City Halls, Lockwood will take over the Recital Room for this year’s Tectonics sound installation — remember Alvin Lucier and the ping-pong balls? Sarah Kenchington’s pedal-powered instruments?. She recreates a 2010 piece Housatonic River in which she maps a small New England river, once a favourite of composer Charles Ives. Lockwood also opens the festival with a piece called Jitterbug that mixes sounds of aquatic insects with musicians improvising using photographs of rock surfaces as scores. Naturally.

One of those improvising musicians in Jitterbug is John Tilbury: contemporary music’s foremost pianist who turns 80 this year and celebrates with a new concerto by Howard Skempton. The premiere of that concerto is centrepiece of the festival’s Saturday night orchestral concert, and it fits with a general bent in this year’s programme towards open spaces and primary colours. Maybe you could call it post-Cagean New Simplicity. Laurence Crane contributes a new work called Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section, while Michael Pisaro describes his work Fields Have Ears — also a premiere, also written for John Tilbury — as inspired by “the silence one feels standing in the dark at the edge of a canyon; a vastness of the space is not conveyed by the mass but by its lack”. Come prepared for silence as well as sound. Should be intriguing for the radio audience.

Tectonics is at City Halls and the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, on 7-8 May.

For details visit bbc.co.uk/bbcsso