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This is Adem’s festival. He curates it. He picks all the bands. He comperes. He helps bands set up and pack away their equipment. He plays on stage, either solo, or as “guest” of another artist, about half a dozen times. I was surprised and slightly disappointed not to see him behind the bar, or with his hand round the S bend unblocking a toilet. Lazy bastard.

He has a few helpers, truth be told. The jovial Fence Collective are on hand, switching and shuffling like one of those ball and cup fairground con tricks (can I slip in a reference here to Paul Daniels’ “Bunco Booth”. Hmmmm….). Adrien Crowley with James Yorkston! Pip Dylan with James Yorkston and King Creosote! Tom Bauchop with Pip Dylan and King Creosote! Where’s the ball? Under which cup? King Creosote, it should be added, appears to be in his cups, doing his utmost to distract other band members by grinning and mugging his way through a bunch of performances in which he mainly slaps an empty instrument case. All delightfully good-natured and uplifting stuff, and exactly the kind of bonhomie this festival so strives to encapsulate.

Grizzly Bear are part of Warp’s curious new policy of signing bleep-free guitar bands (heresy!), which didn’t get off to the most inspiring of starts with Maximo Park. Grizzly Bear are miles better, and one of the highlights of the weekend. If only they didn’t have a singer who looks exactly like Adrien Brody. Those eyes, oh they have seen such horror. Songs of epic sadness, keening vocals washed up on a sea of guitar, reverb and choppy drums, with someone scrambling around on their hands and knees howling into cups (which, to be fair, is how I choose to spend most of my weekends too).

You would think that slipping in snatches of “Orville’s Song” and Primal Scream’s “Higher Than The Sun” would be the work of either a genius or a bravely misguided fool. You’d be wrong. Gordon Anderson is a cock. And his band The Aliens sound like The Hives. Note to Gordon: That robot dance is so last week, my friend. And getting all your mates to come in and stand down the front a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ didn’t exactly endear you to most of the crowd sitting behind you.

And neither did it endear you to Isobel Campbell, who had to follow your boorishness with a set of gentle stuff from her recent duets album with Mark Lanegan. But without Mark Lanegan, if you follow, and with Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines instead. As Alien-fanboy chatter continues to flood in from the bar, Isobel comes within an inch of landing the perfect Celtic strop on the floor of the Conway hall. “Here’s another song from the last album….if anyone out there is interested”. Which is unfair, as most are interested, and when Isobel switches to cello, and the band crank it up a bit, the buffoons are amply drowned out.

Adem pitches up at the close of the day with a couple of songs from his recent “Songs From Other Planets” album; tidy fare from this most likeable of chaps. We hear these songs in a few different settings over the weekend, and while they grow on me, I can’t exactly get excited about them.

Sunday brings crisis (well, relatively; it isn’t exactly Darfur). French multi-instrumentalist Pierre Bastien has gotten off the plane, taken one look at Blighty, and immediately headed back. And who can blame him. This place is going to the dogs, I tell you. A big experimentally-shaped hole has been blown into the schedule, which no solo set from Adem, bless him, is going to fill.

It can be filled more than adequately by a trip to see the International Owl Project making music and table legs in the bar. Turning whittling into a musical form via various home built wooden/electrical devices (they call their “laptops” iLogs! I love them!), building soundscapes from natural sounds in a way a Matmos or a Mira Calix would be proud of. Not sure I’d want to sit on the table they produce though…

A second crisis is averted when the late running (London transport eh? Pierre Bastien had the right idea…he could smell the rotting infrastructure from the airport) Final Fantasy finally files in. One man, some red boots, a violin, and some pedals, sampling and looping to build up whole concertos, and displaying more talent than anyone else over the weekend; a delight.

Ex-Delgado Emma Pollock follows, although her keyboard pedals appear not to have followed with her. Frantic attempts to fix them ensue (Adem, the fourth emergency service, is first on the scene), including a request to the crowd for assistance – some kid next to me shouts something about reversing the polarity which, although I confess I do not belong in the land of keyboard effects pedals, sounds a bit dangerous to me. That was more exciting than the music, which was worthy but forgettable.

The re-emergence of Vashti Bunyan is one of the sweetest musical stories of recent years (topped perhaps only by the rediscovery, in its most literal sense, of Henry Grimes). We fall into a slowly revolving world of love, horses and dancing (not all at the same time; that way lies hospital, and perhaps even prison) as well as, she seems embarrassed to admit, quite a few songs about her children.

Adem joins in for one last bash on his glockenspiel before, I assume, he has to get out the broom and start sweeping up. Or maybe the Fence Collective sweep up, and he gets out his guitar and plays another little set just for them…