Owen Pallett

Near the end of Owen Pallett's set, someone shouted a request for a song from his new album. "I'm going to stick to the hits," Pallett wryly replied. That got a laugh – this Canadian violinist has yet to have a hit, though as an arranger he's created them for several others, ­including Arcade Fire and the Pet Shop Boys. When Pallett, formerly known as Final Fantasy, works for himself, he's far more esoteric, using violin, software and voice to invent four-minute symphonies that are by turns dense and airy. Heartland, his third album, is a ­concept piece about a fantasy kingdom called Spectrum, inhabited by "an ultra-violent farmer named Lewis and a supreme deity called Owen". Pallett himself thinks this concept is "preposterous", and amen to that, but his ­performance was far from preposterous. The music was complex and sometimes oblique, but never self-indulgent. Even the most high-flying moments, when Pallett created loops of dissonance using a foot pedal and played wild Gypsyish melodies on top, were tempered by a sense of discipline: no song lasted longer than a few minutes. Brief as they were, there was enough time to appreciate the variations on the violin/loop/keyboard theme: the brassy blasts that offset That's When the Audience Died's sprightly melody; the cute pizzicato intro to The Dream Tree, which then turned into a battle, Pallett sawing intensely at his violin's strings. Skinny and floppy-haired, he looked like he should be fronting a guitar band, but there was nothing rock'n'roll about his playing. Pallett doesn't make the violin "sexy". His style is informed by his ­classical training: he and drummer Thomas Gill often sounded as if they'd come straight from the conservatoire, but that solid base was a launchpad for bursts of fantasy. The music they play in Pallett's imaginary Spectrum must sound like this.