The bleakest time of year, gig-wise, is early January, which was where the now defunct London indie label Fortuna Pop! spotted an opportunity in 2011. Its annual Winter Sprinter offered a reliable night out to those who prefer their bands off-the-scale quirky, and its ethos is encapsulated in the penultimate night of the final festival. It opens with DIY girl band Totally, who harmonise dreamily about being ghosted on Tinder, and are followed by the incredible – in both senses – Trust Fund, a powerpop repository of all things nerdish and rattling.
It’s Peak District multi-instrumentalists Haiku Salut, though, who have drawn the audience. Their two albums (the most recent is Etch and Etch Deep) don’t convey the half of it: onstage, the three women, who’ve dusted their faces with glitter for a midwinter-Glasto effect, work as an unspeaking, instrument-swapping unit. A trumpet, an accordion and a ukulele are impassively passed around, as if Kraftwerk had been an English demi-folk band. But there’s also plenty of what they call “laptoppery”, yielding a set that visits the margins of dubstep and rural folk. A loop of rainfall on Cold to Crack the Stones captures Haiku Salut’s Sunday afternoon mien; despite the complexity, what grabs you is the small-town introversion of it all.
Each song is a small, quiet world – although, with minimal peaks and dips, they lull rather than thrill. On the wild, Björkish gurgle of Things Were Happening and They Were Strange, however, they ratchet up the excitement impressively. Any more like that, Haiku Salut?
