East India Youth / PIXX @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, 28 Oct

Hannah Rodgers, recent 4AD signing operating as PIXX, opens our Wednesday escape with her dreamy, folksy psychedelia. Backed by a guitarist and another singer on keys, there are smeary echoes of Cate le Bon and Warpaint here, especially when Rodgers forgoes her synthpad for her own guitar and gives her bold voice room to unfurl.

If you’ve ever wondered why every track name on East India Youth’s sophomore album CULTURE OF VOLUME is relentlessly capitalised, the outrageous, interplanetary shimmer of opener JUDDERING – and how fitting a name – should not simply answer your question, but open up its galactic maw and swallow you whole: this is a culture of volume indeed.

Not because he’s loud – though he is, make no mistake – but because he’s a one-man collective, commanding an unapologetic sonic assault behind a band’s worth of equipment, dressed in a slick three-piece suit. William Doyle is a harried player at his kit: sweaty, intense, tweaking filters and spidering keys and hitting drumpads and playing guitar and also, you know, singing all the songs. The tech rattles, sweat drips; it’s less an operation executed by a machine, and more a madcap scientist keeping his rickety machine on the brink of nuclear meltdown.           

This Bournemouth producer’s two albums exhibit a heady blend of glacial, distorted electronics and considered avant-pop; the result, tonight, as with every night, is that he is all things to all people. You swoon at the progressive arpeggios of Total Strife Forever’s Heaven, How Long, you bop shamelessly to the shiny space-boogie of BEAMING WHITE and TURN AWAY, and then HEARTS THAT NEVER sneaks up on you, its teasing build-up swelling and distending until – surprise! – you’re clubbing now.

The jagged ENTIRETY and, later, Hinterland, share a pH level with Daniel Avery’s metallic techno, and just as their industrial chug starts to wrap an icy grip around your heart, to the point where it might just damn near rip it out, it all stops. Spotlight on, Doyle sidesteps his control panel to swim through CAROUSEL’s churchlike, plaintive aria, and in tonight’s dumbstruck crowd there’s more than a few furtive eyes being dabbed.