Julie Byrne @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, 23 Aug

On Wednesday night, above the Fringe-related chaos in Summerhall’s courtyard, there was an brief respite from August madness. Just 24 hours after Blanck Mass nearly blew the roof from this same room, Julie Byrne arrives to sooth our hearts and minds.

With a sparse set-up and a perfectionist approach to tuning, supporting guitarist Duncan Marquiss holds a quiet audience transfixed. Bolstered by a loop pedal, his instrumental songs wander and evolve, and Marquiss takes plenty of time in patiently building texture and detail. Several tracks in he jokes, “You’ve probably guessed that I’m not going to sing – I’m doing you all a big favour, believe me.” He’s a friendly, relaxed performer and quips about a mysterious drop C tuning that’s reportedly borrowed, but twice removed, from Joni Mitchell. So well-behaved are the crowd tonight, that an audience member raises a hand before replying to him.

Julie Byrne takes the stage with little fanfare and receives a hearty welcome. She opens with Sleepwalker, from her most recent album Not Even Happiness, and the room feels as if it’s been coated in velvet. Byrne’s songs have such a rare, healing property that there’s an almost audible sigh of relaxation. She introduces Melting Grid as a song about “working a job for which you feel no conviction,” and grins at the laughter from the audience – “Oh! You’ve been there?”

Close friend and multi-talented musician Taryn Miller joins the stage to add careful synth to Byrne’s intricate guitar work, and conjures an organ-like sombreness for closing track I Live Now as a Singer – fitting Byrne’s suggestion that we take the song as a moment to consider personal completeness, and our capacity to love. These sentiments could easily sound trite, but from Byrne they feel heartfelt and earnest.

A brief encore of older song Marmalade is toasty and comforting, and she explains that they’ve been touring the festival circuit recently – including a set at Green Man that was her largest to date. It’s refreshing to be back in front of an intimate crowd, she says – for a brief, peaceful two hours, this is restorative for both audience and performer.