Electronic duo Vanessa Amara are riding a wave of success at the moment. Last year, their caustic take on Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s organ music earned them credits on Rosalía’s much-hyped Duolingo album LUX, and this summer Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana – both former volunteers at Koncertkirken – will appear at Roskilde Festival.

But on Thursday night at Christianshavns Beboerhus, they were overshadowed by RMC alumnus Harald Bjørn, who opened under the alias Soli City. He too placed a classical instrument, the cello, at the centre of his electronic music, and his masterstroke was to make it shimmer like a beautiful, lost memory amid a restless abundance of chopped-up hyperpop aesthetics and melancholic spoken-word poetry.

The cello, played on electric keyboard, was synthetic yet human: an intentionally sloppy fragment that set the tone for half an hour of dissolution. Even when Soli City reached for life with an urgent handclap beat in a vast sonic space, it was staged like a chance pause during a flickering radio scan, while relaxed piano chords sustained an ambient sadness. Impressive.

It was refreshing when Vanessa Amara followed with a different, ecstatic take on the atomised information society. At their best – and they were at their best in the beginning – the duo combined, with Kanye West-inspired genre agnosticism, distorted pop samples and polytonal church organ until the 21st century seemed ready to come apart at the seams. It was sublime, simply put.

But instead of delving deeper into the forces they unleashed, the duo quickly moved between tracks and veered far too early into dull, therapeutic deep house, a mode they never left again. We barely had time to lose our footing before we were handed a group hug – and frankly, I’d rather do without.