INTIMATE and warm as a womb her acoustic, unhurried weekend music may be, but nothing prepares you for Emiliana Torrini's daffy stage magnetism.

One half Icelandic, the other half Italian, and wholly gorgeous with silken scarf around her neck, she has drawn a full house, with men of a certain age already hooked by the whispered Sunday morning sweet somethings of her two albums, 1999's Love In The Time Of Science and this year's Fisherman's Woman.

Her blissed, blue songs seduce all the more in the flesh.

Sunlit and languid as a cat in a window, they are sung with eyes closed, head tilted and the fingers of her outstretched right hand always taut, as if her concentration in the moment spreads to the very fingertips.

Guitar, Indian harmonium and "drums and the rest of the stuff" caress the gossamer singing that is pitched somewhere between Suzanne Vega and the lesser known Stina Nordenstam.

What lifts this night from gentle reverie and conventional musicianship is the rambling humour, the quirky chatter, the streams of consciousness that marry the child-like wonder of Bjork with an even more left-field way of looking at the 9 to 5 world.

She giggles midway through her cover of Sandy Denny's Next Time Around, regularly alludes to her work-shy songwriting inclinations amid the joys of woozy nights with friends on vodka and fags, and teasingly says she will never do old favourite Unemployed In Summertime. Naturally, she ends this magical night with that very song.

Updated: 10:12 Monday, April 04, 2005