Day two of Le Guess Who? 2015 and the big guns of the weekend were getting rolled out with some potentially ear-splitting acts on offer later in the evening's programme.

First port of call though was Moira to see the earliest act of the day, the homegrown project of songwriters Thjis Kuijken and Geert van der Velde - Black Oak. Think Buffalo Springfield and you'll be pretty close to the mutually beneficial and harmonious semi-acoustic americana they and their fellow players produce. Perhaps at times lyrically over-simplistic theirs was nonetheless a warm and engaging show.

On to the first of the bigger acts & more Canadian performers as The Besnard Lakes appeared in the Ronda at Tivoli Vredenburg. Here then was the first oddity of the night - sound at a moderate level and ample space to walk around freely in the upper reaches of the hall. Not that the band cared as they turned in as tight a performance as expected but for my money they're better appreciated in slightly more intimate surroundings and with greater volume.

Upstairs to the Pandora next for the unknown quantity that is Kaki King. Visually she takes the everything-produced-by-one-guitar thing to a new level as the instrument is fixed in place to allow it to also be utilised for projections and with the larger ones behind her the show realises her current project The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body. For me though if you've seen one person sample slapping the body of their guitar to get the drumbeat etc. you've seen them all.

A swift cycle to see more of the Kicking The Habit programme at Moira found up and comers Hooton Tennis Club just getting into position. Clearly an unknown quantity in Utrecht they didn't enjoy the largest of crowds & fell foul early on of a lack of spare guitar strings but you can't be too harsh on a band wherein one member sports a Brudenell Social Club t-shirt and which performs with such gusto (particularly 'Up In The Air').

Titus Andronicus were the second act of the night in the Ronda and were still running through the soundcheck when I got back there (interesting use of Grand Funk Railroad and 'Tarzan Boy' for that) so you had that odd experience of a band of their level all being on stage already then leaving to come back a little later as if none of us had been able to see them prior. They've a lot of songs to get through so there's no messing about once they return and energy aplenty being expended by all concerned. 'I Lost My Mind (+@)' and the rest are greatly appreciated by the main body of the crowd but again there's not the level of volume you'd expect and movement around the hall is comfortably achieved.

The reverse, at least as far as movement is concerned, is the case from now on at the Pandora. Protomartyr pack the place out, resulting in a one in/one out barrier having to be manned at the foot of the stairs. For my money the sound they were provided with was a little too clean, thereby making the overall performance seem a little pedestrian in places. Given the crowd reaction that's probably quite a minority opinion though.

Handily with the use of a bike this year the Tivoli de Helling is sooner reached than in years previous so squeezing in at the back of the rammed hall to take in some of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown takes no time at all. A performer for whom time seems to have stood still he's all over the stage, whooping up the audience (who need little encouragement), removing the keyboard from its stand so its player needs to come with it to keep the music going as it's the most important element of the band's sound and other antics. Even at this early stage people are calling out for 'Fire' but I presume that's always held over till the very end as I head off back into the city after the spirited version of 'I Put A Spell On You'. Definitely a highlight act of the weekend.

Once back at the main Tivoli the popularity of the Pandora means I've now failed to see Metz twice at Le Guess Who? With no wish to mill around in the vague 'queue' I head downstairs to the Ronda to see what Belgium's Evil Superstars are all about. The festival blurb mentions them in the same breath as dEUS, an act I've never got to grips with, and it turns out that I can't really do that with Evil Superstars either, despite their enjoyably cartoonish rear projections. If the Foo Fighters decided to start employing jazz time signatures and funkier basslines then this is I think the result you'd get.

Leaving Ronda as quickly as I arrived does at least allow time for some food from the Just Like Your Mom concession. The vegan carrot cake was grand but the jury's still out on the sausage roll. It also makes it possible to beat the rush and get into Pandora in good time for Viet Cong, who once more pack the place out but don't get the volume they deserve although they're not to everyone's taste as it's "five minutes of my life I won't get back" according to one audience member. Musing on whether some of today's programming should have been swapped around keeps me occupied on the cycle home.

Le Guess Who? 2014 initially finds us in the newly built-upon (& so massively expanded) Tivoli-Vredenburg venue, slap bang in the centre of the city and now housing nine performance spaces over 13 floors - surely the envy of any similar sized city (or indeed many larger ones) with pretensions of being a shining light of the live music scene.

German industrial heavyweights EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN are performing their new work Lament in the venue's Grote Zaal so that seems the ideal way to start off this year's event. Originally commissioned by the Belgian city of Diksmuide as part of its WWI commemoration events the live environment is undoubtedly the best way in which to experience such an involving and intense document of man's capacity for inhumanity and the portrayal of war as a beast that feeds on social ills and religious zeal. As a result plans to see other acts elsewhere in the venue are quickly shelved, such is the hold exerted by messrs Bargeld, Arbeit, Unruh, Moser and Hacke.

Taking to the stage amidst great adulation from the capacity crowd the quintet are initially suitably grim faced and soon hard at work pounding away on the many instruments they've constructed specifically for the performance of Lament. Boiler-like sculptures of metal are pushed over, dragged, whipped with chains, added to and subtracted from to create a noise that, as it builds to its climax, manages to achieve the aimed for disturbing effect of the sounds of bombardment and other horrendous aural images from the first European mechanised war.

The sight of a purple dildo being used to gain a particular sound from the guitar and Blixa Bargeld's good humoured, though enlightening, extrapolations on the origins of songs in the work (not to mention his farm yard animal impersonations during the rendition of 'Der Beginn Des Weltkrieges 1914 (Dargestellt Unter Zuhilfenahme Eines Tierstimmenimitators)') and latterly N. U. Unruh's Casey Jonesesque plastic hat and the sight of 3 grown men squirting high pressure air through a number of plastic drainpipes to great musical effect all instil elements of lightheartedness into the performance without in anyway diminishing the weight of the subject matter.

There's no greater example of how seriously the band have approached the work than to see them pounding out 'Der 1. Weltkrieg' on the first use of those previously mentioned drainpipes. Lasting, as it does, over 13 minutes it's a furious workout for the upper body whilst also being a fascinating take on musically representing the main 1914 - 1918 period of the war. 'Let's Do It A Dada' from the 2007 album Alles Weider Offen gets a look-in during the first encore and the group prove once again that they're as up to date (if not ahead of the pack) as ever by having recordings of the show available to buy at the merch stall within minutes of the stage being vacated. A band at the peak of their powers and a performance worthy of the cost of the weekend's ticket alone.

Friday night sees us head to start on the outer fringe of the festival's circuit at the Moira venue, where Ryley Walker's doing his thing. Whether he's under the weather or otherwise phased by something the tracks from debut album All Kinds Of You just don't feel as effective live as on record. A broken string and the need to replace it, rather than swap for another guitar, after only a couple of numbers doesn't help matters and the misunderstood joke he makes to the sound engineer about putting on some trip hop leave a mildly embarrassing air in the room as we head off to Ekko for Dracula Legs.

Aware of the band only through their Too Pure single 'Heartburn Destination / Cold Licks' from earlier this year they were for the most part an unknown quantity. They rocked out pretty hard though & the venue's coal black interior was a good setting for their energetic mix of Seventies rock and Lungfishesque vocal digressions. The crowd was as dense upon leaving as it was when we arrived so clearly they were doing something right in terms of keeping folk from wandering off in search of a new thrill.

From Ekko it was a ten minute walk back to the (still amazing) Tivoli-Vredenburg for another bit of box ticking in terms of seeing an older and venerable performer, in the shape of Dr. John & The Nite Trippers. The slate was blank in terms of expectations so to say we were disappointed by the part of the show we witnessed would not be strictly true. Given the great man's need of two sticks to enable him to walk out to the piano and a total lack of chat with the crowd he's clearly not in the best shape of his life, but the pedestrian pace of the songs we took in (including a very mediocre 'St. James Infirmary') failed to raise our pulse rates. Things maybe improved after we left and the bulk of the crowd seemed to be getting what they wanted but Iceage were on in the Pandora hall so excitement was now sought there.

And thankfully it was found. Whilst having doubts myself about new album Plowing Into The Fields Of Love the intensity of previous works Iceage and You're Nothing was fully on display as Elias Rønnenfelt flung himself about the stage above the seething crowd. Sardines have more space in a tin than the sea of bodies we were viewing from the balcony appeared to have yet, like all of the rooms in the venue we were to experience over the course of the weekend, discomfort seemed to have been successfully designed out of the structure and ease of movement for those leaving at any point during a performance appeared to be a more straightforward process than the packed mass of bodies would have had you believe. Having regained some of the adrenalin rush of the night before we called it a night at this point.