Anna von Hausswolff Road to Nowhere, Saturday★★★★★Anna von Hausswolff’s music is capital-R Romantic, preoccupied with vast interior spaces, the sublime, the irrational, the darkness of forests, seas and outer space. Her compositions are thorny, Wagnerian, pipe-organ epics, but suspended above them is her limpid voice, carrying gorgeous melodies that seem to yearn towards transcendence.Her set at All Together Now is not just brilliant but genuinely surprising. Live, the music is less stately than on record: more volatile, with unexpected flashes of metal and jazz. A large part of that comes from saxophonist Lisen Rylander Löve, whose searching, improvisatory lines shadow von Hausswolff’s voice before breaking away into ecstatic spirals of their own.The set opens simply. Swirling red smoke, von Hausswolff silhouetted in a trucker cap, then Facing Atlas from her latest album Iconoclasts. “The world is full of s**t and full of evil,” she sings. “I came to take you back to where you came from.” Her emotional register has a frightening purity. She sings with the conviction of a saint prepared to burn at the stake.That biblical intensity reaches its white-hot peak during The Struggle with the Beast, as flames climb behind the band while grainy VHS footage of what looks like nocturnal protests flickers across the screen. “More to this life than the life I’ve had, an angel is crying and she can’t get out,” she sings. Von Hausswolff evokes apocalypse, environmental collapse and spiritual darkness, but the songs always seem to be striving towards the light.“Hello Ireland,” she says between songs. “It’s beautiful to be here for the first time.”Anna von Hausswolff performing at All Together Now. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill