Contemporary left-field bands have generally had a bit of a rough ride at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe over the years. Yet pockets of low-level activity continue to break the mould. One can date activities back to the old Planet Pop festival, which ran in the mid-1990s at the old Cas Rock venue, for providing showcases for then fledgling homegrown acts such as The Delgados, Mogwai and Arab Strap.

The short-lived Flux festival picked up the mantle on a larger and more consciously curated scale, on a par with London's Meltdown, as it billed Nick Cave doing a spoken word set and paired unlikely bedfellows Michael Nyman and The Divine Comedy. T On The Fringe picked up the commercial slack before morphing into the sponsor-free Edge festival, which this year has the likes of Magazine, Amanda Palmer and Faith No More in a programme of shows at various venues.

As well as under the radar delights such as the 14-band all-day Retreat festival at The Forest and a series of shows at the soon to be renovated Scottish National Portrait Gallery under the Rough Cut Nation banner, this has been the year of the Bang Bang Club. A local, all-year-round initiative run by veterans of Edinburgh's club and gig scene, throughout August The Bang Bang Club moved into the student union basement disco of Teviot House - currently being run by The Gilded Balloon - to present a smorgasbord of late-night weekend shindigs intended to capture some of the multimedia artistic cross-currents that continue to make the Berlin club scene so vibrant.

The gauntlet was slapped down to after-hours revellers from the start with an opening show by former Siouxsie and The Banshees bass player Steven Severin, who provided a live laptop score to classic German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Before that, however, Isa and The Filthy Tongues took Bang Bang's first Saturday night slot with their twanging brand of urban Caledonian noir fronted by the dervish-like form of singer Stacey Chavis. Isa and co may have recently scored Richard Jobson's Edinburgh-set film, The New Town Killers, but are commercial enough to resemble the sort of pristine college-rock bubblegum that soundtracked the 1980s brat-pack movies by the late John Hughes.

A real coup came with a solo turn by the man with the best moustache on the planet, Billy Childish.

Childish's very English take on the Blues followed a half-hour spoken word set culled from his extensive back catalogue of semi-autobiographical poems and stories.

With a table full of such wares onstage beside him, Childish delivered all this while his wife sat with her feet up at the side of the stage. It was a charming image of warped domestic bliss, which would look even better if they returned with a full band soon.

More in this vain came from a night hosted by local club The Go Go, who got the joint jumping with an appearance by Les Bof, whose shtick is to play already off-radar 1960s punk-garage tunes, but with a wild vocalist singing them in French. The effect is a fantastic mix of vintage Eurovision kitsch and authentic-sounding cellar-bar growl.

Local supergroup Paul Vickers and The Leg, featuring ex-Dawn of the Replicants vocalist Vickers, premiered their mini rock opera, Itchy Grumble, about an immortal who is fired from a cannon in order to revolve a lighthouse on the Firth of Forth. The glorious result, with the band clad in convict suits and wrestling masks, sounds like Kevin Coyne or Tom Waits if they'd hooked up with Texan psych-freak-out merchants The Red Crayola. They even brought their own lighthouse.

More veterans of the Edinburgh post-punk scene came via The Sexual Objects, led by former Fire Engines lynchpin Davy Henderson and featuring cohorts from his last band The Nectarine No 9 alongside guitarist Graham Wann from heavily Sound of Young Scotland influenced young shavers Bricolage. With their drummer on holiday, Henderson, Wann, guitarist Simon Smeeton and bassist Douglas MacIntyre line up around a floor tom with a tambourine perched on top for a typically rip-roaring set of skewed rock'n'roll. The Sexual Objects are used to improvising, and remain the most maverick guitar band in Britain.

For anyone still standing at this late stage in the Fringe, the Bang Bang Club isn't over yet. Prior to an autumn relaunch at a new venue, this weekend the club bows out with Severin's final electronic deconstruction of Dr Caligari tonight, while Sunday's closing party has special guest DJs from post-punk fabulists Magazine manning the decks, following their earlier live show as part of The Edge.

With such a parting shot, the chances of this particular Bang Bang ending with a whimper are rare indeed.

The Bang Bang Club, Teviot House, tonight-Sunday, 12.30-5am.