The underground café at Modern Art Oxford provides an excellent space for intimate live music performance, and tonight has attracted a very different crowd to the usual gigging faces, which I suppose is what you get when beer and sweat are replaced by tea and wine, and the “Oxford pasty” of vacant standing room in front of the stage is replaced by an even spread of occupied tables and chairs. A high-brow, almost reverential atmosphere then, for the first sit-down pure-electronica bill of local Oxford acts that I’ve yet seen. Both acts are solo laptop composers who have each brought a friend to embellish their live show, a move which hasn’t really done either of them many favours tonight.

Envelope is Tim Matthews, who takes to the stage with a laptop and an amplified electric guitar, and produces fairly minimal melodic indoor electronica, stylistically somewhere between Plaid and Autechre but with skittering beats which sound not dissimilar to those of Pole, and the whole conjures memories of the Random Number EP on Vacuous Pop. It’s good stuff, not breaking new ground but direct, melodic and interesting. He adds post-rock electric guitar on top which works well, and is occasionally joined by a drummer whose reach slightly exceeds his grasp, and the beats that aren’t quite in time contribute to a sense that the live and prepared parts of the whole don’t quite mesh together. They give the impression that they don’t have a lot of live experience and the music has a tendency to meander, but Matthews has a good grasp of the niche he’s found, and it looks like with time and support Envelope could turn into something very special.

Where Envelope wears his 1990s Warp Records influences on his sleeve, PRDCTV virtually has “Four Tet” stamped on his chest. Another soloist, Alex Lloyd – the man behind Geometric Records – is joined by an entirely unnecessary bass player, and where with Envelope it was unclear what the live parts were adding, with PRDCTV the ramshackle musical interaction between Chima Simpson-Bell on bass and Lloyd on drum kit, acoustic guitar and electronic plinky noises actively detracts from a solid and interesting laptop backing. Electronica artists should always be discouraged from performing on their own behind a laptop, but in this case it seems they’d be better off doing so until they’ve had a lot more practice; Lloyd’s instrumental tinkering is the kind which gives a bad name to multi-instrumentalists and makes you wish he’d just pick one instrument and stick with it. The debt to Four Tet and Fridge is evident, but as with Envelope’s set this is a gig which suggests inexperience and shows a lot of potential, as long as PRDCTV have a chance to work out how best to expand live on their promising recordings. Apologies if this all makes it sound like we’re watching a school band with one or two good songs, as it is much better and more watchable than that -though that could be because their half-hour set is accompanied by Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s immensely compelling abstract film “Der Lauf der Dinge”, whose depiction of Heath Robinson-esque mechanical energy was very much in keeping with the feel of the PRDCTV set.

So a good show for Geometric, a fledgling label with a lot of potential, though we’re confused by the organiser’s assertion that we check out all their other acts as Envelope and PRDCTV are the only two acts they’ve yet released. MOA could well have been the best place to see them as well, at least until some rigorous gigging has toughened them up a bit. The reverential atmosphere of tonight’s audience is certainly not something they can expect at every show – nor is it something they yet deserve, in all honesty – but they’re onto a good thing, and for all its flaws, tonight’s show was a very encouraging start.