Julia Holter writes music out of joint, a mixture of times, genres and styles as unsettling as it is beautiful. St. John’s church in Hackney seems like a fairly fitting setting for a woman and a band intent on channelling choral music as much as operatic post-rock and trad-jazz. The five take the stage to perversely open with the closing song from last year’s full length, Bright City Song - ‘City Appearing’. “Bright blue flames under my fingers” sets the tone for the night, as Holter closes her eyes and stares into the lights, her keyboard strokes dancing around the nodding and bouncing of the various string players in her band.

Her set tonight is a combination of her two previous albums and her latest, recorded not in a studio but in her bedroom. As vocoders double and triple her voice, and she switches from quiet, Badalamenti free-jazz breakdown, and literal breakdown, horns, drums and strings batter against each other like the interlude in a David Lynch film. The screams of the saxophone in the crowded church at St. John’s make this more of an operatic experience than your standard gig. The horns of ‘Horns Surrounding Me’ mimic the experience of being aggressively surrounded, in Holter’s world, by photographers, in our world, LITERALLY BY HORNS.

It’s not difficult to tell that Julia Holter writes her lyrics before she writes her songs. The music is a brush stroke around a story, but at the same time the music seems to mimic the story. As Holter sings ‘In The Green Wild’, a song about escaping the city, the instruments cool and soften as Holter walks towards the sea. There are no choruses here, and operatic jazz parts mesh with delicate, choral verses. The majority of Holter’s work begins with a story that gradually morphs into discordant jazz, vocals and piano that ramp up into a Thelonius Monk-style freak out. The band plays ‘Marienbad’ (tentatively introduced by Holter with “There is a garden here [outside the venue]… and this song is about a garden”), which employs all the devices of so-called ‘post-rock’, vocal-less-ly folding in on itself and becoming (appropriately, as it refers to Alain Resnais’ film rather than the place), a kind of jazz-drone.

There are times during the gig when all the reverb and cello make you think Holter might be about to launch into the Titanic theme tune, but then the keys drop, the drums start and things become a fair bit darker. Julia Holter is all about time slippage. Just as her entire first album (like the nouveau roman, post-war) re-appropriates ancient Greek myth to become the story of a woman living in New York (“this one is a really new one and a really old one at the same time”, she quips), last year’s Loud City Song was a re-telling of Minnelli’s 1958 musical comedy, Gigi. Her first LP re-appropriated the classics - specifically Euripides’ Hippolytus - to make them say something new. Gigi does the same, but with a post-war musical rather than a Greek tragedy. Holter’s songs are also based around “trying to make yourself a work of art”, and watching her live, one is struck with the idea that Julia Holter is actually descending into her texts, speaking to her audience “whether it’s my voice or someone else’s” (as she told Quietus last year). Her second album was called Ekstasis, Greek for ‘ecstasy’, which although colloquially means ‘happiness’, literally (in Greek) means ‘outside of your own body’. Holter has apparently written an album around Gigi because she was fascinated with it as a child. This is nostalgia, which in Greek means ‘the pain of coming home’. That sums up the experience of watching Julia Holter pretty well.

Double headers don’t come much more impressive than this. It’s safe to say that the Sage have assembled some phenomenal line-ups as part of this years Summertyne festival, but this is up there with the best. It's an early show, taking to the stage promptly at 2:00pm Ethan Johns brings has band on for their final show for some time.

Whilst it is rather early and it feels extremely odd being indoors in a dark room, we’re quick to forget the rest of the world as Ethan Johns serenades us with his awesome catalogue of tracks. As Ethan is currently in the process of recording a new record, there are a number of new additions to his repertoire on display this afternoon.

Both ‘Judgement Time’ and ‘ Twenty First Century Paranoid Blues’ sound absolutely fantastic. Both have a stereotypically bluesy feel, yet it's hard to put into words how great Ethan Johns truly is anyway; a legendary producer now making some really great music. New tracks may shine, the brilliant ‘Black Heart’ rings out, its hefty bluesy riffs kicking up a storm in hall two this afternoon.

Similarly ‘Talking Talking Blues’ brings down the pace a little, yet it still possesses that awesome blues sensibility. The crunching of the guitar, the hefty reverb, this is truly one of the stand out tracks of this afternoon's set. Its easy to see why Ethan closes with ‘Twenty First Century Paranoid Blues’ though as it’s a huge number with some awesome riffs and it leaves us breathless with more yet to come.

Hot on the heels of Ethan Johns is the equally exciting Cass Mccombs with his own brand of Americana, Cass is here to rock out. He seems in particularly high spirits, and again has a huge collection of songs which he can choose from. This afternoon sees him picking from across the board, the down tempo ‘Home on the Range’ is a beautiful track. The touching lyrics delivered in such a sweet manner that we can’t help but be mesmerised by Cass.

‘Home on the Range’ is a stark contrast to ‘Prima Donna’ which today feels grittier. The benefit of a full backing band really sets this track alight. ‘Big Wheel’ has a similar effect it stands almost head and shoulders above the rest of the set, with such a great feel to it. Throughout the afternoon, Cass’ delivery reminds us of the likes of Conor Oberst.

A true master of his craft with today being nothing short of exceptional, ‘County Line’ gives us with goose bumps. Its phenomenal lyrics leaving us almost floating on air as we exit the venue.

We leave completely filled with adoration for the amazing artists that we’ve seen; men very much on top of their game at the moment. We feel truly privileged to have been able to experience this today, and must thank The Sage for their immense programming and bringing such phenomenal acts to the region.

Walking into the Union Chapel for a gig feels a little strange. It's a beautiful setting; a Gothic church built in the late 19^th century, which hosts concerts and comedy events as well as Sunday prayers, and was voted London's Best Live Music Venue by readers of Time Out magazine in 2012. But the echoey acoustics, high vaulted ceilings and ornate bas-reliefs invoke the feelings of somewhere you sit and behave rather than a place to jump aroundand make noise.

The challenge of the performer then, is to break down the barriers of a place associated with worship, and turn it into a music venue. Staff Benda Bilili were well-placed to do it - primarily a funk band rooted in rumba, or soukous, they incorporate reggae and traditional R&B into their music and have two excellent albums to their name: 2009's Tres Tres Fort and 2012's Bouger Le Monde. A ten-strong band of all ages, it's almost impossible to sit still when they're in full swing.

When the group come onstage they have their work cut out. The diverse, all-seater crowd welcomes them with a modest cheer and watches intently as the group set up in silence. Someone in the back row drops a pin. They start hard, opening with a high tempo and by the second song they have everybody on their feet and dancing in the aisles. There was something of the gospel revivalist fervour about it as one by one the entire house stands and moves involuntarily to the beat. Benda Bilili, who starts the show looking a little disinterested, soon wore wide smiles and feeds from the appreciation of the audience, injecting their performance with more and more energy. By the end of their set (70 or 80 minutes that felt more like half an hour) the crowd are sweaty and euphoric, pockets of people making little dance-parties of their own in the spaces between the pews. The musicians leave to the rapturous applause of a full house and they look like they've enjoyed it just as much as we had.

Catch them live if you can, and if you haven't seen it already then hunt down and watch the documentary that charts their rise to fame from the slums of Kinshasa to world tours and international adoration. It's a brilliant film and after watching it, it's hard not to see them as anything other than inspirational.

Photo Credit: Briony Carlin

Queuing up in the woods for Tim Key on Saturday night at Latitude Festival – all the meanwhile playing Larry David to those attempting to ‘chat and cut’ - we were struck again by the variety that this festival has to offer. We’d already seen several bands, comedy acts and transvestite interpretations of Lou Reed’sTransformer by this point, and Henham Park’s 2014 offering was a tribute to the attention organisers pay to their punters’ differing interests and tastes. Key was his usual angry best, performing his ‘Single White Slut’ show in the Theatre Tent this year (‘Why is it NEVER the Comedy Tent?), brilliantly recounting a time he gouged Anne Hathaway’s eyes out on the set of One Day.

Lily Allen headlined the Main Stage on the Friday night, filling in at the last minute for Two Door Cinema Club (who pulled out due to illness). Surrounded by giant illuminated baby bottles and making shout-outs to the working mums of the audience, Allen was, for someone who was not even supposed to be there, the best of the three headliners of the weekend. Damon Albarn’s Saturday night set was somewhat upstaged by the thunderstorm which cracked overhead. The similarly booming chants of ‘Blur! Blur! Blur!’ summed up the difficult predicament of the solo artist with a previous record as prestigious as his. Whilst Albarn eventually caved into these demands - with Graham Coxon appearing out of the woodwork to play ‘End of a Century’ and ‘Tender’. The Black Keys took Sunday’s headline slot, though again suffered from ‘new material’ syndrome and so struggled to maintain a large crowd. Many left for the alternative headliner, Lykke Li, who provided a more theatrical end to the festival.

Latitude’s opening acts this year truly shone through. The main stage’s opening acts on the Saturday and Sunday, Ibibio Sound Machine and supergroup Atomic Bomb! (covering the songs of Nigerian psychedelic-pop svengali William Onyeabor) were fantastic, both pulling a hungover crowd to its feet for a midday boogie. Hiss Golden Messenger drew a decent crowd on the i Stage on Saturday, playing much from last year’s Haw. The 6 Music Stage was the best of the bunch. Goat appeared in their best Arabian Nights best, mesmerising the audience away with one of the shows of the weekend. Hall & Oates received the most genuinely enthusiastic welcome - giving exactly what was demanded, with ‘Out of Touch’, ‘I Can’t Go For That’, ‘Rich Girl’, and ‘ You Make My Dreams Come True’ whipping the tent into a frenzy.

Latitude also went to the woods on its more ‘arts and culture’ side this year. The forest was filled with interesting artistic exhibitions and performances, featuring big names such as the Royal Shakespeare Company. RPM Productions' ‘Panopticon’ was a clever take on the prevalence of surveillance in modern society, allowing visitors to step inside a mirrored box and watch other festival-goers through CCTV cameras placed in the trees.' And perhaps most notably, the always-overflowing Comedy Tent delivered big names this year, with Simon Amstell and Marcel Lucont as highlights. And whilst several of Sunday’s comedians made light of the drabness of Damon Albarn’s performance, it is important to note that such jibes only partly reflected the mood of the festivalgoers. Indeed, whilst Latitude 2014 set itself the tall (perhaps too tall) task of living up to previous years’ headliners – especially in a year in which Glastonbury seemed to hoard acts which are the staple of its typical demographic – it was able to easily redeem itself through its ingenious reliance on diversity over fame. Unlike other festivals, one can truly explore Latitude and the smorgasbord of different entertainments within it. Music-wise, this creates a unique, open-to-anything festival environment in which any musician with enough charisma can stand out. And that has to be a good thing.