Nina Garcia @ The Old Hairdresser's, Glasgow, 24 Sep

Opener Speculum Bunny seems a potentially wonky fit into the night’s more abrasive tone; on record their gothic EBM feels comparatively straight-laced next to the freeform noise that is to follow them. Their live act is more akin to a haunted radio play; all spoken evocations and bowed bass churned into an atmosphere of woozy malevolence. The line of hamminess her records walk works far better in the room, the sense of camp that hovers in its severity makes for something interestingly off-kilter and confrontational in this setting.

That said, Arnaud Rivière is in real danger of stealing the show with a barnstorming set of free noise. Sitting within the crowd hammering at pedals and gadgets, he has the vibe of a puddling scientist trying to revive his clockwork friends, many of whom it sounds like would rather be put out of their misery. There’s such a sense of fun to how he burrows into sounds, excavating and turning them over, finding what he can from them before tossing them over his shoulder. There’s a lot of jabbing atonality, but there are points when he hits upon real beauty. There’s a moment where he clamps onto a chord that sounds like a buzzsaw going through the centre of the Tardis, and it feels like you’ve Calgonned your mind. But like all good free noise it’s totally silly at the same time as it is bracingly intense; even when just throwing bin lids at the floor it’s done with a sense of comic timing and theatre missing from the vast majority of choreographed stadium shows.

Image: Nina Garcia by Ofner Gergely

Tonight's headliner, solo guitarist Nina Garcia, arrives amid reinvention. After retiring her Mariachi project, she returns with a set that is more composed than her improvisatory past, playing from her (fantastic) recent LP Bye Bye Bird. She’s on superb form, with the snapping Le Leurre particularly good. It’s made up of repeated jabbing shards of guitar that feel like being trapped in the moment you slip a disc, but the way she guides it into the realm of ghostly radar without seeming to do anything at all is genuinely miraculous.

The key to her sound is a tiny electromagnetic pickup in her picking hand that produces feedback as she moves it. It’s kind of the same principal as an EBow, but less restrictive, turning the guitar into two instruments in conversation with each other; one droning, the other sharp and precise. When experimentation lies in the technology you’re often left feeling cold, but Garcia’s landscapes have such desolate colour that this is never a worry, no more so than Whistling Memories. It's a rural pylon’s eye view of the apocalypse, a lonely centre amid a storm of shrieking chaos. A magnificent reinvention from one of the guitar’s most exciting proponents.

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