Dan Arborise, The Roxy Room, Edinburgh

Sometimes the back story doesn’t lead you to where you expect it might. Sometimes that turns out to be a good thing. Dan Arborise was born in Borneo to Polish parents, which opens up all sorts of musical possibilities, most of them probably far less exciting than they sound, but in reality his music is as English as sweet summer rain.

I missed his first album, Around in Circles, released in 2006, but last year’s follow-up Of Tide and Trail made me sit up and take notice. This was woozy, trippy folk with a dash of west-country weirdness, a tinge of the acid-fried out-there-ness of Ozric Tentacles rubbing against the odd burst of Frippian guitar exploration.

Though raised in London, Arborise is clearly an organic kind of guy, in quiet thrall to nature. He wrote his first album in a remote Scottish cottage and has since been known to spend time in a yurt. He now lives in North Devon and recorded Of Tide and Trail in a cabin on the edge of Dartmoor. These signifiers, far more so than his genetic heritage, tell you what you need to know about the smoky ambience and woody, pastoral textures of his music.

Despite growing critical acclaim, Arborise’s career is still at the stage where he has to play London on a Thursday night and Ullapool on the Friday (which he did last week, presumably while negotiating the volcanic dust-cloud). Last night it was Edinburgh’s turn. He played a disappointingly short set on a multi-band bill at the Roxy Room, an artfully distressed basement cubby hole no bigger than your front room. A crowd of around 40 people sat on the floor in intimate little clusters, listening with rapt attention. Throw in the exposed pipes, the black drapes and the table lamps on stage and it felt like a scaled-down throwback to some blissed-out Art School happening from the mid-1970s.

Arborise’s music did little to dispel the sense of time shift. As he ambled on stage with his white-boy dreads, cargo pants and brown socks and fired up “Another Side of the Sky”, one of Of Tide and Trail’s stand-out tracks, there wasn’t so much an elephant in the room as the equally hefty ghost of a much-missed Scottish troubadour.

As on record, it was impossible to listen to Arborise in the flesh and not think of John Martyn. On the opening song and others such as “My Child” and the closing,  luminously beautiful “Take Heart in Your Hope”, he had down to a tee Martyn’s rhythmic, open-tuned finger picking, innate melodicism and ability to mix vowel sounds in his throat as though gargling with them. At times all that was missing was Danny Thompson standing in the shadows stage left, boinging out dazzling double bass lines.

On the epic “Cries” Arborise squeezed the rack of effects pedals with his stockinged feet and conjured a kind of acoustic trance music, reminiscent of Martyn’s “Small Hours”, the mazy, reverbed notes hanging in the air like mist on an autumn morning. It occasionally got a little too noodly, and when it burst into a passage of “Space Oddity”-like lift-off noises, the heady whiff of space-rock filled the air. A fiver says Arborise knows his way blindfold through Gong's back catalogue, but any suggestion that he was hiding behind technology was thoroughly dispelled by the simple beauty of “My Child”, which showed what a fine player and direct songwriter he can be.

However close he got to raising old ghosts, it never felt like pastiche. Arborise is a strong enough performer and covered enough ground just with his voice and guitar to bypass any concerns about identity theft. And anyway, who cares if last night may have been a partial throwback to other times and other voices. For 40 gently intoxicating minutes it was rather a nice place to be.

• Find Dan Arborise on Amazon
• Check out what's on in the 2010 Edinburgh International Festival