Liverpool Music Week Opening Party @ The Kazimier, 23 Oct

This leads to wildly diverse if not wholly coherent bills like tonight's busy opening party in the pit of the Kazimier, which sees the overdriven stoner fug of Micachu and the Shapes' new material rub up side-by-side with the polished, tangential pop of Outfit, and the thoughtful digital manipulations of Darkstar and Holly Herndon – all underpinned by an atmospheric, frequently haunting collage from up on high by DJs Kepla and Ling above the stage.

With, consequently, no crescendo to proceedings, each act instead takes their allotted time as a challenge to test the malleability of the crowd, and mould the surroundings into their own. Mica Levi is perhaps the most disarming, her group playing up to the druggy haze of their latest record Good Sad Happy Bad. The trio throw the record's undeniable if sometimes hidden hooks between themselves until they're left beaten and bowed, lost in the group's cloying fuzz, Levi's throaty vocal content to lurk in the middle of it all.

Outfit – up next, and a group whose own material dances around textured nuance – come across as glintingly crystalline in contrast, only heightened by the inclusion of three of their more accessible cuts from debut LP Performance (Elephant Days, Spraypaint and Thank God I Was Dreaming). In another time, another era, they'd be held up alongside the likes of OMD and Talk Talk as masters of deep-thinking pop music; tonight they make do with a partisan home crowd hanging off their every beat. 

Given that their latest record, Foam Island, deals with the divide between the southern-dominated thinking of the Government and the post-industrial north, Darkstar wind up sounding a darn sight prettier than expected. The pair look over banks of analogue equipment (although two glowing Apple signs lurk mysteriously at their feet), while pirouetting out the more melodic elements of their sound in lieu of anything overly grizzled in the lo-end department. The tension of Foam Island is maintained only by the cold, disconnect of Aiden Whalley's vocal. 

It's Holly Herndon who takes the role of de-facto headliner and, joined by husband and visualist Matt Dryhurst plus Colin Self, she picks up with what she's been doing most of the summer: deconstructing conventional techno patterns to create a fractured audio picture of her inner workings.

Images flash across the screen above, blurring technology with nature and images of people taken from her previous shows. The rigidness of the set's initial glottal movements melts away as layer on layer of sound is piled onto the soundsystem – a devastating force that, in this oddly shaped mix of a bill, will linger the longest in the memory.