Diagrams main man Sam Genders only just got back from a British Council residency in China, and it shows. At this 10th anniversary show for indie record label Full Time Hobby, his 11-strong live band are distinctly under-rehearsed, as he wryly admits: “Half of them only met each other yesterday.”

Diagrams’ imminent second album, Chromatics, is a lovely, vivacious affair, teeming with warmly poetic Hot Chip-style electro-pop, but the nuances and textures of songs such as You Can Talk To Me and Phantom Power are buried tonight. The nervy Genders needs to relearn that, sometimes, less is more.

It’s a stark contrast with Genders’s former group, Tunng, who exude the grace and fluidity of consummate musicians who have recorded five alluring albums over their decade-long existence. In honour of Full Time Hobby’s birthday, tonight they cherry-pick from this catalogue chronologically.

They have the audacious ability to make music that is firmly rooted in the folk tradition while also being hearteningly experimental. Glitches of electronica fizz through Tale from Black’s macabre narrative of a young murderer, while the rich voices of hirsute frontman Mike Lindsay and accompanist Becky Jacobs dovetail meticulously on highlights Bodies and Good Arrows.

Their deceptively simple songs conceal dark, labyrinthine musical and emotional depths. The bucolic dream-pop of Embers teeters on the verge of pitching into a surrealist nightmare, while the skew-whiff charm of the soundtrack-friendly 2006 single Woodcat demonstrates that Tunng have never been too far from scoring a big crossover hit. It could, and it should, still happen.

• Diagrams play the Lexington, London N1, on 21 January. Box office: 020-7837 5371.