Merrill Garbus, aka Tune-Yards, strolled onto stage in front of a backdrop of a pair of out stretched hands. To the audience at the back of the Red Marquee, it was a clever visual trick, which much like her music, was disorienting and strikingly poignant at the same time.

Her first song, a drum beat laden, “Look at your hands”, brought even more attention to the imagery, which for the uninitiated is actually the album cover of her latest release, “I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life”

Garbus tinkers and warps sounds, voices, sampled bits, building them in a rising crescendo where she can later drop a chorus. Once you understand what she is doing, it can be hypnotic. While her early albums have been inspired by African rhythms, she has purposely tried to avoid such temptations on her latest album, relearning new beats by studying older recordings.

She eventually settled on poly-rhythm seeing in 6-8 time while her backing band by 4-4 time, allowing for a convergence ever four bars where bam, she drops the chorus. The effect can be powerful, if not hypnotic and overwhelming, especially amped up via tape loops and distortion, and her electrified ukulele.

On bass, Nate Brenner,plays tritones, which is best exemplified in the opening jingle for “The Simpsons”. The notes are rising and fit well with the experimental style that Garbus has chosen. Putting these elements together, a sort of throwaway, nonsense nursery rhyme like “ABC123″ can be built into just a pounding dance track.

It’s hard to pigeonhole Garbus as an artist. In her early career, one might think her a poet, or clever folk singer prone to experimentation and loops. With the fame of her breakthrough second album,”Whokill”, she expanded into a bigger show, adding a drummer and stretching the sound to unimaginable lengths.

Onstage, Garbus is not afraid of experimentation, stretching out the opening notes of “Gangster” into a minute plus look, also exhorting the audience to sing along. Tonight she definitely milked this track and had the thousand plus audience inside waving their arms.

A platform of foot pedals contributed to “Heart Attack” which was a thuddering conclusion for a brilliant set tonight.