Man Rei + Ugnė Uma @ The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 23 Feb

You could be forgiven for assuming tonight's lineup would lean towards the portentous, with both artists on the bill having something of the shadowy mystique that can go hand in hand with self-importance, and the threat of a studied indifference that can be all grand on record, but really tedious to be in a room with.

Opener Ugnė Uma is anything but, in a set that properly elevates her recorded output. Over playback of only detuned piano, hiccuping samples, and found sound, the songs spill out in one seamless stream, tracks mutating and shifting around her voice. It’s a voice that has a real malleability to it, slinking from sultry Sandovalism to keening and childlike, but able to do all this without feeling affected or disingenuous. The marriage of these mutable vocals and an ever-shifting soundscape, along with her lyrics shifting languages at will, mean the whole thing becomes a kind of slow-motion blur with an uncanny magnetism like little else.

Ugnė Uma @ The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 23 Feb by Serena Milesi

There’s something quietly confrontational about the way Uma performs, pacing the stage, fixing the audience with a gaze at-once powerful and pleading, communicating anything the non-Lithuanian-speaking contingent of the crowd are missing with just her eyes. By the time the piano tones have become more sodden and claustrophobic, the set feels more like an extended, totally enrapturing piece of theatre. It’s an experience only hinted at on a lot of their recorded output. There they are chopped into tiny slices – more fragmentary, more of diaristic snapshots – but here, in one gently tumbling morass, they are quietly stunning.

By contrast, Man Rei, is a more studied affair. Concocted largely from drifting loops of synths prodded out of their sampler, alongside Kristin Reiman’s sublime voice, their music connects the dots of Grouper and the Cocteaus into vast, aching spaces of murk. The songs are beautiful, and Reiman's voice is remarkable, but you’d be hard pushed to say how live it feels. It’s all a little inorganic with so much pre-recorded, and a restrained stage presence sometimes leaves Reiman seeming smothered by playback rather than buoyed by it.

Image: Man Rei @ The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 23 Feb by Serena Milesi

It’s livelier when they take to the guitar. It brings a more organic sound, the snapping coils of its lines slipping in and out of the samples to a brilliant, slippery effect that brings real depth of texture to the airy spaces created. An instrument seems to focus Reiman deeper, their voice seeming to grow, showing the true dark magic of these songs. It’s here that Man Rei really shines, and not only channels the authentic wounded gloom in their recorded output, but builds upon it.