King Creosote and Jon Hopkins enter without bombast; with a backdrop of field recordings of café chatter and long, sparse chords from Hopkins, King Creosote (real name Kenny Anderson) fiddles around the stage with a different kind of theatricality. This is the beginning of the first half of their set – a carefully crafted, almost entirely uninterrupted rendition of last year’s Diamond Mine – and we’re being teased into a tense anticipation.

This half of the set is all about the kind of extreme focus that this opening scene creates. The sound is even more stripped down than on the album, with only vocals, guitar, piano, and a few gadgets for field recordings and drones from Hopkins, all interacting carefully and delicately. The beautiful interplay of only two understated melodies, sometimes in harmony, sometimes fading in and out of one another, is often striking.

Where many live shows are about increasing volume and excitement, here it is about clarity, forcing the audience into an almost interactive level of involvement with the songs the pair present. This involvement is rewarded by the tiny sounds that lurk underneath the main melody and vocal: the hum of a car exhaust, a flutter of birdsong, even Anderson’s foot can be heard tapping along when the music provokes it.

“Now we’re going to muck about”; Anderson speaks for the first time, ushering in the second half of the set. One or two more upbeat songs, including a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Only Living Boy In New York,’ break the melancholia that has hitherto pervaded the performance. Though the variety is nice, the spell is broken, and this second half feels like much less of a carefully crafted and imminent experience than the first.

Some new arrangements of old King Creosote songs such as ‘Cockle Shell’ and ‘Spy-Stick,’ both from the Hopkins-produced Bombshell, brilliantly demonstrate what the two musicians can do when they work together as they did in the Diamond Mine set, but overall this second half was somewhat disappointing after the absorbing subtlety of the first.