THERE’S a woman on my regular journey to work I’m convinced is an iconoclastic experimental punk musician.

She carries a large suitcase. She places it opposite herself during rush hour, breaking all of the rules unconsciously and effortlessly understood by commuters and commute-studying social anthropologists.

She won’t let anyone move it. If someone challenges her she explains, in a strangely compelling and sonorous voice that she has a bad back and the suitcase is filled with “important things.”

Hers is a beautiful experimental soundscape, which she alters only slightly each day, depending on how outraged the challenging commuter is prepared to get.

Close your eyes and imagine the above exchange slightly cut up and set to a jarring melody. It’s the sort of thing you could imagine hearing on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction.

The station gets a pretty bad press. You know the drill: it’s stuffy and elitist. It doesn’t do enough to reach out beyond its core audience. It’s a shrinking and irrelevant cultural ghetto.

And then you switch it on just before midnight and there’s droning folk that sounds like it comes from the end of the world.

Over the past few months, I’ve been drawn in to the late-night, midweek show on the venerable classical station. On Hallowe’en, I was confronted with about half an hour of spooky ghost moans followed by some trad 1920s jazz.

I was intrigued. Growing bored of my usual listening haunts and determined to drag myself towards the shock of the new, I made a regular date with this unusual show.

I started to worry that it was all an error. If I did some research I’d find out that the woman above had locked herself into the studio and that the whole thing was a mistake.

But there it was, in the schedule. Late Junction, a mishmash of experimental music, weird electronica, medieval chanting and the odd bit of drone.

Listening last week, I removed all distractions from my room. The smartphone was imprisoned behind a plastic case. I moved all my bookcases to face the wall. I removed all photographs and postcards of communist space propaganda from the wall.

I sat on the bed and closed my eyes.

Emanating from the radio, a computer was unpicking a song. Someone called Kant had decided to find out what would happen if you programmed a computer to do exactly that, unmixing it to its constituent tracks. Then getting real humans to play what the computer came up with.

Why? Part of me is tempted to ask: “Why not?” but the stated reason is to “shine a light on machine learning, listening, pop music and copy­right.”

If you do this to It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, it sounds like an explosion in a jazz factory.

Radio 3’s former controller, Roger Wright, came under fire for Late Junction. It was seen as dumbing down by some of the station’s vocal supporters — a desperate grab for commercial success.

This seems hard to grasp as I listen to 10 minutes of cut-up throat noises made to sound like the Clangers and other, sometimes startling, examples of musique concrete, like the thundering, shuddering music from Hexa, inspired by the sludge and industrial waste in David Lynch films.

Or you get speeches made during the miners’ strike, looped, altered and looped again until you start to get slightly anxious. Like the walls are closing in and the communist postcards are rising from the floor.

And then you get a slab of folk goodness from Alex Neilson of the Trembling Bells, jarring in its juxtaposed melodic warmth.

By the end of the programme’s 90-minute run, it’s the early hours of the morning. The walls are troublingly bare. I haven’t moved for hours. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t listening to the radio. The neighbours have called the police.

Why am I lying on the floor?

It’s a good show. You should have a listen.

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