There are no prizes for guessing who the most popular act of Saturday's Great Escape was: Latest Music Bar couldn't let everyone in for US indie waifs Howler's gig at lunchtime. When they played Komedia later in the day, the queue of frustrated punters almost stretched to the end of the road.

Amatorski are Belgian, but their beautiful, glacial post-rock makes it hard to believe they're not Scandinavian.

Singer Inne Eysermans' vocals were soft and fragile enough to be barely discernible at times, backed by an elaborately carved contrabass, keys, synths and a drummer capable of simultaneously giving their sound a bed of shimmering percussion and rattling a tribal rhythm with a shaker.

They moved from funereal hush to majestic rock on the exquisite Soldier, their dreamy music the stuff of forests and folklore. Hopefully Green Door Store will see them again soon.

Down in a packed Audio, Fanzine also sounded like their musical influences came a long way from home. The four-piece are from London but their scrappy dynamic is from the Dinosaur Jr school of fuzzy indie. Watching them in action occasionally felt like entering a time warp to the late 1990s but their derivation seized on the best elements of slacker rock.

Over at Digital, there was nothing borrowed about Errors, who played one of the meatiest sets of the festival. The Glaswegians have a touch of Battles about them but their tremulous interweaving of electro, math-rock and more, usually in vocal-less numbers with an air of cinematic menace, gave them a real edge of futuristic originality.

If it was a party you were after, back alley hideaway The Warren was the place to be. Foppish folk-funker King Charles was orchestrating the gyrating, and the gleeful air of debauchery was ramped up several notches by his decision to play a cover of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire by way of finale.

The location definitely played its part - the pop-up venue has been brilliantly transformed into a large performance space with an enchanted garden outside, where the headliner himself could be spotted wandering around half-naked in the aftermath of the show, absorbing the atmosphere of one of the most unusual settings he's likely to play all year.

One of The Great Escape's strengths is the diversity of artists and venues joining in - whether it was in a church or a pub, there was plenty to intrigue, not least at The Hub, a central playground in Jubilee Square which hosted a showcase of Spanish bands.

Germany, though, could claim the most hard-hitting act of the day, as Booka Shade - a techno duo famed for innovation - combined a heady dance mix with some fearsome live drumming, smashing several shades of cymbal out of their hi-hats. It added spontaneity to their armoury of beats and made for a tremendous display of communal shape-throwing.

The Corn Exchange's depleted beer reserves, alas, suggested that all that dancing was thirsty work.