For tonight’s Irregular Folk event, through the careful arrangement of greenery and daffodils, cut-outs of silver swallows, and hand-made feathered table pieces, the Cellar is transformed from sticky-floored rock venue into the perfect intimate DIY-alt-folk venue. Everything from the beautiful entry tickets to the dangling lanterns casting a dim light over the stage has been painstakingly organised to cast the right kind of magic into the atmosphere.

It seems that some ticketholders are running late, but it’s their loss. You Are Wolf, aka Kerry Andrew, takes the stage bearing a loop station and an enormous smile. Her set is loosely based around an ornithological theme – there are songs about barn owls, wrens, nightingales, sparrows – each invoking the spirit of the bird in different ways. Most impressive is the cuckoo song, a mash up of two traditional songs about cuckoos, in which Kerry uses the loop station to create a tight rhythm of handclaps and finger clicks before enriching the song with an impression of cuckoo song. Another highlight is her poem-song ‘Barceloneta’, invoking the atmosphere of a lazy, post-siesta Catalan afternoon: the rattling of castanets, the whine of a scooter. After performing a trio of songs alone, Kerry is joined by husband Andy on the bass for ‘The Cutty Wren’, and looks to be having a great time as she taps out a beat on a rolling pin with a wooden spoon, and adds a table knife used as a guiro. It all adds to the tapestry of the sound-poems, creating vivid and animated images, and leaving the audience thoroughly charmed.

Following that lively performance, Phil McMinn is markedly more sedate. Using a MacBook to broadcast ambient, resonating chords, he overlays these with delicately finger-picked guitar and an emotive, pitch-perfect voice, creating an airy, naturalistic open sound. A brave and dauntless performer, McMinn’s music has a way of spellbinding an audience – that omnipresent chord winds its way into your head, lowering your defences, drawing you into an other-worldly daze. Offering little explanation between songs, he lets the music speak for itself: the touching ‘Chase Horses Down’ with its air of optimistic melancholy (it’s about a dinosaur!), the beautiful ‘Barrowlands’, a heartfelt cover of ‘Lavender Hill’ by Scottish musician John McCusker. If there’s one criticism to make of McMinn’s set, it’s that it’s a little one-pace – even the song introduced as ‘upbeat’ seems to promise energy without quite delivering it.

Finally, we see the peerless Laura J Martin take the stage with the tools of her trade: flute, mandolin, piano, and of course, the loop station. Kicking in with some crazy jazz-flute, she soon puts an end to any lingering inclination the crowd may have to chat, as the loops build and build into a squalling racket not dissimilar to the sound of a swarm of bees. Interpreting tonight’s theme in yet another way, Martin has beats pre-loaded into the loops, ready to kick in as the flute reaches its apex, at which point she also punches forward with that unique, wry voice. Unwilling to be typecast, by the third song she has moved from flute to mandolin to piano for “a song about cockfighting”, for which she is joined by local superstar, Stornoway bassist Oli Steadman. It’s an arch and witty song, delivered with aplomb, like a bonkers, northern Noël Coward. Some songs are more theatrical than others – one song, introduced cryptically with “There once was a man called Tom”, could be the soundtrack to a modern-day reboot of Mary Poppins – a sweet, music-box ditty played over a pre-loaded beat of glockenspiel and xylophone. Another, led in with more raucous flute harmonics, has a lasciviousness that would lend itself nicely to a crocheted stop-motion Bond film. A truly unique entertainer, she throws every part of herself into creating the magic: from the melodies and the words to her looks and gestures, and her performance is totally enrapturing.

Billed as ‘an ode to the loop pedal’, throughout tonight’s show it has been truly enthralling to experience each artist using technology to augment their music in different ways – crafting intricate rhythms, layering melodies, and creating a chaotic cityscape of colour and noise. An eye-opening and inspiringly creative evening.