It is a balmy afternoon. In the house opposite Christ’s Pieces, police are dusting for prints. Debris on the wooden table has been neatly separated, a garden path amongst a forest of dead coffee cups leading to a sadly pregnant rectangular blank space. A unhappily regular occurrence. Other towns have drug cartels; we have laptop theft.

Said laptop (which was, it seems, on its last legs anyway) contains the original electronic score to Kate Whitley’s new music-theatre piece, Terrible Lips. ‘Thank God I have it in hard copy,’ she says. Were it not to be preserved in this way, no doubt she would be compelled to join the police investigative teams, sniffer dog in hand, in searching town for her stolen opera.

This work is one of two such pieces to be performed at the next Carmen Elektra event—Carmen Elektra being the maverick student situational opera company that produced Bonesong at the end of 2010. If you didn’t manage to get to see Bonesong (and plenty of people tried and failed due to large queues), a brief: this is not typically ‘operatic’ theatre. The Zoology Museum—itself adorned with the skeletons of deceased giraffes and aurochs—was invaded by a ramshackle conglomeration of student performers, school children, a selection of DJs, and a portable bar. This is opera conducted as a kind of fetish club-night.

This time, it is a warehouse off Newmarket Road, one that would be empty were it not for the Bike Polo club that requisition it every Tuesday and Thursday, fixies in tow. It is a space of formidable blankness and impenetrable reverberation; to be filled, for this concert, with electronic sound and dense vocal textures. We visited to gawp at it and talk to some of the bikers who have invaded. What do you think about opera being put on here? I ask. ‘Its great,’ says Jamie (the sounds of the Immigrant Song heard from the hi-fi in the background).

Another biker, Angelo, bedecked in violently pink t-shirt and shorts, explains the warehouse’s previous uses. ‘Originally it was used by Greene King, and then got taken over by Cambridge Uni Press, but after they left it was empty. Travelodge are probably going to take it over soon, or it might be used as accommodation for Anglia Ruskin students.’ Beer, books, bikes, and (soon) bedrooms. Opera seems a curious interruption.

Not opera per se, to be clear. Kate’s piece, she says, is a ‘dance opera’. An essay in science-fiction, complete with solo Theremin. ‘We originally wanted to make Blade Runner the opera’, she says, ‘but we couldn’t afford the rights.’ Finn Beames, librettist, adds ‘I’ve not seen Blade Runner’. Neither has he read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, nor did he think it, or its author, were especially well-known. Sci-fi does seem like an odd choice of genre for Finn who, it seems, had no prior interest in it.

He, nevertheless, seems quite sincere in the dramatic premise of the piece. ‘Essentially, it is a thought experiment exploring the possibility of bodily escape.’ I nod. ‘An attempt to destroy the body in order to remove the earthly barriers to the mind.’ To be fair this isn’t as outlandish as my misquotes have made it sound—this is the driving principle to the latter act of Kubrick’s 2001, as well as Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. ‘Inevitably there are points of comparison,’ says Finn. Though I suppose one of the benefits of doing no research is that one cannot be accused of plagiarism (think on that when reading for your next essay).

Terrible Lips will be accompanied by another piece, Jeremy Thurlow’s multimedia opera A Sudden Cartography of Song. Thurlow, a composer on the staff of the music department of the university, developed the piece as a collaboration with librettist Alistair Appleton. The same Alistair Appleton who, incidentally, presents Cash in the Attic, Escape to the Country, and occasionally, Proms coverage—he is, as it happens, coming down to the warehouse to perform the narrator’s part to the piece.

The text for the work—highly autobiographical—is published online on his blog here, with much of the material for the opera shown through the sonic and videographic components rather than through words. The ‘non-wordy beauty exemplified by babies babbling, birds flocking and singing and the elegance of deaf sign language’, Appleton explains. The focus on maps and birds recalls Peter Greenaway’s cartographer and ornithologist Tulse Luper, particularly in the short film A Walk Through H.

It also seems terrifically apt, given the marker-pen map scrawled on the wall by the bike-polo-ers I notice as we turn to leave. For the audience too, maps will inevitably be required to find the performance space in the first place; its location is hardly obvious, and it is easy to get lost. That is, if the operas themselves don’t get lost first.

Carmen Elektra presents: Terrible Lips is at 8.30pm on 17th June, at the Bike Polo Warehouse, Harvest Way. Tickets are availiable here.