Vivers: Potential gigs of the year sometimes start slowly. A borderline misogynist wag may text “has the tampon music stopped yet?” during Rozi Plain‘s set, but this Fence Collective affiliate sounds quiet and lovely to these ears, a barely there folk breeze to welcome people awkwardly finding their seats. If Joanna Newsom was heavily sedated, given an electric guitar and told at gunpoint to keep it down a bit, it wouldn’t be far off tonight’s support. Funny little off-mic avian hoots accompany music that only gets a touch samey towards the end. If not a bird of paradise then, at least a bird of pleasant holiday somewhere nice.

Vivers: Time taken before pre-gig uncertainty at how the disparate musical styles that make up the Whale Watching Tour will be thrown together and presented turns into the realisation that this is going to be something special: about ten minutes. In that time extra strings and brass players follow the four Bedroom Community dudes onstage, Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurdsson worrying guitars and electronic waves, Sam Amidon plucking acoustic notes, Nico Muhlyriding it all on octopus piano and keyboard, before you’re suddenly into two Muhly compositions, all witchy ivory and schizoid orchestration, and then hey, look, Sam Amidon’s cosmic Americana section has started. This is the way an hour and three quarters zips by: songs in turn from each musician, introduced, arranged and led by a man on piano who’d be rejected from Will And Grace for being too camp (the lesbian bar in Newcastle is “so real” apparently).

It’s fantastic, brutal magic, and from the cloud of folk songs, creeped-out circuitry and modern composition a bucketful of highlights emerge: the trombonist casually taking Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s place for Valgeir Sigurdsson’s lushly tinkling ‘Kin’ and making it mad-eyed and gut wrenching; Sam Amidon’s standards swirling through scores that resemble surreally Great American Songbooks; and two Ben Frost numbers that are utterly terrifying: exercises in mixing static, looped breaths and heavy, heavy string swoops that revel in pin-sharp high volume and simultaneously elevate and crush you in your seat. What could be austere becomes warm and inclusive thanks to the players rubbing up to each other like courting swans, a sneaky bottle of passed-around Bells and Nico Muhly’s habit of conducting sat upright like a twitchy meerkat. It ends with a labyrinthine folk standard, Sam Amidon’s vocals cut up and looped around over backing that twists and rise maniacally before crashing to nothing. It’s incredible, and they take wild applause.

Keef: A few days earlier, a handful of superficially like-minded individuals took to the Arnolfini’s stage for a spectacle that fell some way short of the sum of its parts.  To be honest, I was concerned that the Bedroom Community love-in might have gone the same way as the second leadership debate.  Perhaps the participants wouldn’t gel, it’d be a bit academic and dry.  Piffle.  Nico Muhly is a genuine star, quite apart from being a startlingly talented composer and arranger; he flips from jarring concrete pieces to heart-piercing, sympathetic arrangements of Valgeir Sigurdsson and Sam Amidon‘s songs with no lapse in attention or sincerity, conducting the string and brass section with his entire upper body.  When he stops, he’s Owen Pallett recast in Will & Grace, gently teasing Ben Frost (a steampunk Dick Dastardly, glowering with intensity behind his handlebar moustache) and dramatically bemoaning the Volcanogate saga which threatened to derail the tour.

The shifts in style could have been jarring – the folk interlude seems a little polite or pedestrian at first, and Frost’s compositions crackle with malevolent drones – but there’s a consistency to the playing which overcomes this instantly and coalesces it into a hugely satisfying ensemble performance.  It’s this uniformity of spirit which sees Amidon’s songs soar like Micah P Hinson backed by Godspeed, his words sampled and looped by Frost until he duets with a ghostly version of himself, while Sigurdsson’s filmic electronica benefits hugely from the glorious string arrangements.   The highlight comes from an unexpected source, as the trombonist’s almost apologetic centre-stage turn, a masterful, crumbling Weimar torch song, is jaw-dropping and meets with a storming reception.  Couldn’t have gone better, really.