TWELVE Stars are a revelation. Not that this Glasgow-based performance company founded by Gerard McInulty exactly advertise the fact. Such quietly honed understatement, in fact, might be said to be the company's overriding ethos, and, converse to the welter of overbearing attention-seekers who tend to grab the headlines, has been something of a whispered virtue on the handful of works that have emerged since their inception in 1999.

12 Stars's latest outing, the magnificently titled Do I Mean Anything To You Or Am I Just Passing By? , forms part of the Traverse Theatre's lateral-leaning mini-season of new work, is a case in point.

Rather than utilise increased resources for some muscle-flexing exercise in sturm und drang, McInulty has opted to create a quartet of monologues, or solos, as these verbal riffs might more accurately be described as, rooted as they are in a tradition that's hipper than Alan Bennett but less manic than Eric Bogosian.

McInulty has also opted to work on the show's live score with Glasgow's equally retiring purveyors of fragile pop stylings, The Pastels. Having last surfaced in public for the soundtrack for David McKenzie's 2002 debut feature film, The Last Great Wilderness, The Pastels' own slim output over the past 25 years makes 12 Stars look prolific by comparison. Which is why the pairing is so perfect.

In the seven years since they formed at Glasgow University, 12 Stars have produced a handful of self-generated shows, all of them low-key. Their most recent production, Treatise on The Steppenwolf, performed with a live score of pastoral guitar by Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, appeared at Tramway back in 2003. Not for McInulty and his creative partner in 12 Stars, Carolyn Allan, the potentially draining treadmill of profile-raising small-scale touring and the heavy marketing drive that goes with it in order to get a foot in the doorwith funding bodies. As a much more intimate entity, 12 Stars prefer to do things on their own terms and in their own time.

"Sometimes, " McInulty says, "you need to stop for a while and think about what you're doing and where you're going next, and a lot of the time in the theatre scene as it exists that isn't always possible.

"You're expected to be totally around all the time, and I don't think that would work for us at all. I can't actually see us being able to plan three or four years ahead, and there's a downside to that, because things move quite fast, and people who you've worked with in venues have moved on, so you have to start from scratch."

Do I Mean Anything To You Or Am I Just Passing By? , then, has been a long time coming. For a company which blend into the background, it's fitting that the show began with observations of strangers, and the intangible relationship formed by their mutual presence.

"There was a connection there that you couldn't easily define, " says McInulty, "and onstage, it seemed to us that would arise, not through narrative or anything you'd planned, but through all the elements coming together very near the end of the rehearsal process. Around this time, in fact, " he says.

Although technically the four pieces on show are monologues, other performers appear onstage throughout, questioning the very nature of what defines a solo. In musical terms, McInulty sees these overlaps as a form of counterpoint, whereby each performer doesn't connect per se, but bounces off each other at varying tempos, as a band might do performing the same set on different nights.

A trademark of 12 Stars' style has been an unforced, undemonstrative casualness that's almost a form of anti-performance. Such a minimal approach is a high-risk strategy, but it's one McInulty isn't willing to compromise on.

"There may not even be a connection for a lot of people watching, " he admits, "but it's a connection for us. That's what I think making work is all about, finding your own meaning and your own connections, and placing it in front of an audience without worrying too much whether they'll get it.

"I don't see enough that doesn't seem to worry about what the audience is thinking. Coming from a music background as well, quite a lot of music I grew up liking during the post-punk period relates directly to what we do in terms of a take-it-orleave-it attitude. I'm not saying we have contempt for an audience or no interest in an audience. I'm just saying that it's not a primary consideration of what we do. You owe it to an audience to have respect for them and not to worry too much about what they think."

McInulty's own musical roots date back to the early 1980s when, following a brief stint as guitarist with Altered Images, then featuring Clare Grogan as a pre-twee Siouxsie Sioux soundalike, he formed The Wake. Signed to Factory Records, and later to the Sarah label, The Wake were moulded in the image of their Factory label-mates, New Order.

"Musical structures could be applied much more to drama, " McInulty says. "With music, the thing I love about it is that everyone can hear it in different ways and take their own feelings and meanings from it. I don't think theatre can be like that totally. It's not an abstract art form in that way. It's more solid, but part of the idea behind the Cubed season is to find out how different art forms can inform each other. For us, that's a blessing."

A mooted release of material generated and performed by The Pastels for Do I Mean Anything To You Or Am I just Passing By? on their Geographic label ties in with this selfdetermined approach.

"We were used to doing our own music in our own way, " McInulty says of his time in The Wake. "It's the same in theatre. We write all our own words, and I don't think there'd be any point in us doing a Harold Pinter play or something. That would be a dead process for us, and I don't think we'd be good at it, the same as if the band had ever done cover versions. This is what we do and this is howwe're going to continue to do it."

Do IMean Anything To You OrAm I Just Passing By? Cubed, Traverse, Edinburgh, until November 25.