Being new to L.A., I missed Echo Curio’s BYO pillow memo. So I was stuck with the cold concrete of the one-roomed performance space/art gallery, surrounded by hipsters sitting cross-legged in an amorphous blob.

In keeping with Curio’s egalitarian populism, the night’s artists hang out among the audience until their turn in the line-up. Then, like a Happening straight out of the ‘60s, they get up and do their thing, three feet away.

Fortunately, it’s the ideal venue for an artist like Shelley Short, whose gentle crooning and guitar plucking lulled the audience into a happy trance, as though she were gathering us all around some invisible campfire.

The same can’t be said for her openers. Up first was Erin Muir, the self-proclaimed “mystical variety of bohemian female who banks heavily off her extraordinary experiences and life journeys to create music.”

She made sure we understood this by occasionally interjecting things like, “I wrote this song while sitting at a cafe in Venice writing love letters to imaginary people.”

We can only hope they got lost in the mail.

Though her deep, throaty voice wasn’t bad, her songs were forgettable at best. Muir was accompanied by an Ozzy Osbourne doppelganger who was wailing on some bongo drums, as well as some pre-recorded synth tracks pumped through speakers. She seemed more into herself than her music, and the entire set seemed better suited to a gaudy cruise ship lounge.

Next up was Alexis Gideon, a guitarist who frequently joins Short onstage and co-produced her soon-to-be-released album, A Cave, A Canoo.

But first, he had a solo performance, specifically an “animated, Claymated live video opera based on Hungarian folklore,” which was projected on the wall behind him while Gideon rapped and sang along. There was a winged elephant, some foxes in capes and an animated Gideon rapping along in sync with human Gideon. I guess Hungary is a pretty weird place.

Short was a breath of fresh air when she hopped up from the audience and grabbed a guitar.

Unassuming and ethereal, her folksy tunes remind me a little of Joanna Newsom, without the croaky-old-woman voice, or Ingrid Michaelson without the clapping.

Her voice is sweet and almost childlike, but classic in a way that she wouldn’t seem entirely out of place singing in a mid-19th-century parlor. Which is fitting, because the Portland native grew up in a wood-heated Victorian home “chopping wood, growing our own food, wearing old clothes and singing our own songs.”

The rustic quality comes through in songs like “Time Machine/Submarine,” in which the simple melody and creeping tempo puts the focus on the wistful mood Short is hoping to conjure.

At times, Short’s pace was a bit meandering and slow, possibly because the set lacked some of the percussion that adds vibrancy and richness to her recorded tracks.

But while her songs do mesh together, it’s sleepily pleasant, like a long day spent sitting on a porch swing, drunk on life and sunshine.

You have to be quite a singer to pull off such an unadorned set, and Short certainly is. She kept from being dull by ranging from upbeat to haunting, occasionally chirping some “oo-oo”s while Gideon accented her with pick slides on the guitar.

At one point, she began stomping and invited the audience to clap along. We happily obliged, and then we really were like some sort of commune, too charmed by her music to feel our legs falling asleep.

—Olga Khazan