The bulk of the album moves along at much the same pace, so it works perfectly well for the setlist to essentially be Lovetune For Vacuum on shuffle. Alone on stage, she recreates it by singing and playing her piano along to a backing track which supplies her with all the requisite sound effects that give the songs a twist and a kick. Hopefully at some point in her career she'll bring some sort of orchestra with her, as producing the entire sound live would add another welcome dimension to the show.

As it is there are a few tricks up her sleeve. After 10 or so tracks, and just as her audience is feeling comfortable with this strange but enchanting lady at the piano, the Purcell Room is plunged into darkness for a few seconds before the lights come back on bathing the audience in a blood red.

Plaschg is no longer at the piano but stands and walks off the stage and, with arms outstretched like a mad zombie princess, she walks through her audience, shouting her way through the industrial electro of DDMMYY before finding her way back for a primal scream. It's at this point she demonstrates she's not just a girl with a curious talent. Soap&Skin is her alter ego, and this is a performance as close to a piece of art as a gig can be.

With that realisation, the remainder pushes her and her audience further. The repeated call on the winning Spiracle to "please help me" imposes shivers on the audience's spines. And rather than a traditional encore, she reappears to stand centre stage to end with an acappella piece in a foreign tongue, leaving an unsettling sense of drama.

Like the album, Soap&Skin the live experience is creepy, heartbreaking and beautiful. The music is the same, but the performance is astonishing.

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end of year feature musicOMH's 50 Best Albums Of 2009 From the nearly 700 albums we reviewed this year, which did our writers love the most? Introduction 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 20-11 | 10-4 | 1-3