An indie gig in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of town might once have been the student night out of choice. Not these days, if this sparsely attended night at the Edinburgh Student Arts Festival is anything to go by. Maybe Leith’s Biscuit Factory is just too off the beaten track, maybe the word didn’t get round enough, because it’s certainly no reflection on the music on offer.

The Wee Review misses opener Hamish Hawk and the New Outfit, but the shout-out he gets from next act up suggests he was well enough received. That shout out comes from Evering, the acoustic guitar/electric piano duo of Chris Yendell and Dawn Coulshed. Their sleepy AOR slips down easily, all very polished and heart-on-sleeve. They’re not the most interesting act of the night, but they hold an actual crowd of people, some not even techies or other bands.

The brilliant, squiggly Geordie jazz outfit, Archipelago, on the other hand, appear to actually scare people off. To be fair, not everyone’s aware they’ve started. What sounds like soundchecking turns out to be the first number. They also frequently look like they’d be a whole lot more comfortable in a rehearsal room than on a stage. But what noise! Drummer Christian Alderson has all sorts in his bag of tricks. He plays cymbals with a bow, he’s not averse to a cowbell and what the complicated multi-cymbal contraption he places on his kit for one number is, Modern Drummer Magazine only knows, but it sounds good. John Pope gets similarly adventurous with the FX heavy bass, including what at one point seems to be a Clangers setting. Between the two of them, the rhythm section aren’t afraid to go a bit krautrock either, which is all to the good. It’s topped off magnificently by the sax/clarinet of Faye MacCalman, which can be affectingly gloomy or flirtily sprightly as needs be. A “new song” is driven by an insistent rhythm section coming at us like the Joy Division of jazz. The only problem is the mistake in its otherwise brilliant title – More Bamboo, Less Pandas. Erm… I think you’ll find it’s “fewer” pandas, smirk the linguistic pedants in the audience. The audience, which is now down to just five. Because the rest clearly don’t know what’s good for them.

Things get even quieter for producer Glassmasterer. The Wee Review is now left completely abandoned in the middle of the hall and treated to a one-to-one performance of chilly, skittery mellowness. Luckily, it’s the kind of laptopism that requires no audience, or things could have got awkward.

Poor Publisher is in an even worse predicament. It’s late, he has a hell of a lot of kit to set up, and you’re half expecting a caretaker to wander in jangling a bunch of keys at any minute. To badly paraphrase Athlete, he’s got wires going in, he’s got wires coming out of his expensively assembled rack of gadgets. It’s a PAT tester’s vision of hell. Once underway, there’s a nice Durutti Column-esque sweep to it – live guitar, with layers upon layers of other jiggery-pokery, but as with the preceding acts, you pity the work that’s gone in for such scant reward.