Sigur Rós @ Edinburgh Playhouse, 15 August

As ever with Sigur Rós, the group's ethereal performances are as much about the visual as the aural. The gilt and plush scarlet surrounds of Edinburgh's Playhouse form a befitting location for the trio's latest sensory feast; as well as unveiling unreleased songs in the first of their two International Festival shows, an innovative new stage set-up sees the group emerge, spectre-like, from behind a mesh-enforced cage.

A network of pinprick lights scatter across the backdrop screen like a map, and their opening tracks usher in an ambient hum that gathers steady pace. Sæglópur, from 2005's rock-oriented Takk... then announces the group, who scurry to the front of the stage and take up their instruments, powering through the song to a backdrop of spiralling, Yayoi Kusama-indebted infinite galaxies. The bright spotlights catch the bass's tuning pegs, projecting golden beams into the audience, and Orri Páll Dýrason's impassioned drumming is such that crew scuttle out for several tweaks and adjustments to his kit.

The Icelandic innovators lead the bewitched full house through a dreamlike set, where the band's signature traits – Jonsi's celestial falsetto (which he holds for a spectacular length of time at a later point in the set), his bow-playing, and the group's fluid shifts between light and dark – all culminate in a rapturous standing ovation. Performances of this scope make the use of Hopelandic, the group's invented language, seem particularly apt: the only difficulty with a Sigur Ros show is finding the vocabulary to describe its intense visceral pull.