On Grimes's last album, Art Angels, she deftly showed why she's making the most interesting music in the current pop landscape. Freewheeling and overflowing with ideas, the brilliant, restless record is built with a thousand musical pieces of her prodigious ability: she played and produced every sound on the album, with minimal collaboration.

Live, she takes a similarly controlling approach. Camouflage netting is draped across her spare backdrop; she pings ceaselessly between her pulpit of keyboards, synths and triggers, and front of stage with her two dancers, whipping up a ferocious storm of musical energy, while the broiling pit of the Olympia does its best to lose its mind.

Here, the tracks sound reworked and remuscled. Realiti hammers the delighted crowd with great clubs of bass. Flesh Without Blood threatens to run all the way to the horizon. Scream ends with Grimes on the floor, giving the track every decibel in her lungs. And on Venus Fly, when she's hammering the drum pad for everything she's got, you could power a small city with the energy in the room.

It's Butterfly, though, that gets broken on the wheel and ends up derailing the show. During the track, large sound pops and cracks are heard, leaving Grimes clearly in pain from the noise in her in-ear monitors, and from what she claims are electric shocks on the stage.

Initially, she blames a pedal that is part of her rig, and as her stage crew struggle to fix the issue, the crowd burst into a rendition of Happy Birthday (the singer is born on St Patrick's Day). Several false starts later it's clear the fault is not going away, and even with the songs that remain, the sound seems less substantial. Symphonia IX and World Princess Part II also have to be abandoned, before she finally closes the set with a blistering version of Kill v Maim, having jettisoned the broken bit of kit. She bounds off stage, upset and apologising profusely.

After the show, responding to tweets from this writer, Grimes says the electrical faults are with the venue and not with her equipment (the tweet has since been deleted and she has apologised for blaming the venue). She also promises to come back, saying “hell yah, I need to come back any way to visit castles . . . If y’all will have me back I badly wanna play a proper set”.

The songs that click in the Olympia are immense, and Grimes is one of the most charming and effervescent performers in music. Technical issues in shows of this scale are not unusual, but they are usually handled with military efficiency, with back-up equipment or crew on hand to keep a set moving. Despite her stature as an artist, Grimes’s set up is lean: she has just one other musician on stage, and relies heavily on samples and backing tracks. If something goes wrong, on the evidence of this show, there is little room for manoeuvre. It’s a real shame for the artist on stage, who is on the last night of her European tour and clearly cares deeply about the performance; but it’s more frustrating for a crowd baited with bits of brilliance, and left with an overriding sense of what might have been. Here’s hoping the Grimes Castle tour gets set in stone sooner rather than later.