What a night! This is why I love seeing live music. A few months ago I reviewed HEALTH and Wire at Beck’s Festival Bar and wrote about what a treat it was to see such inspiring original music. Well I got the same on Friday night but, even better, three of the four acts were locals!

The Red Rattler, hidden in a back alley in Marrickville, was the perfect venue for this show. Half a warehouse converted into an arts/music performance space, it was intimate and relaxed; the kind of venue Sydney definitely needs more of.

Opening the night was the riotous Simo Soo, a solo Sydney vocalist, who, after performing a completely unassuming sound check, pressed play on his Macbook and proceeded to blast the seated crowd with glitchy, million-beats-a-second electro punk. He was like a one-man Crystal Castles or You Love Her Coz She’s Dead, shouting playground chant vocals over heavy, sketchy beats and distorted vocal tracks. Making the most of the, sadly, empty dance floor to throw himself around Soo was pure head-banging fun and you imagine with a slightly less cool crowd and some strobe lights he could get a pretty mean party started.

Next up was Domeyko/Gonzales. These Sydney lads make sweeping hypnotic and ethereal electronic music. Playing an almost entirely instrumental set, the trio suck you in immediately with swirling synths and guitar positively drenched in delay. Their songs – although it’s often hard to distinguish one from the other, given the seamless transitions – rise, fall and evolve effortlessly. They blend everything from classical sounding piano and distorted glockenspiel to sometimes sparse, industrial sounding guitar and shifting drum patterns. It’s mesmerising and so intelligently constructed that the set almost feels like an opera (not that I’ve been to one) taking place in movements, each distinct in character from the last. Quite brilliantly they end all of a sudden with no fanfare or warning. Definitely a band worth checking out if you like something a little more experimental.

Then, well, there was Melbourne’s Rat vs Possum. What to say about them? I must admit that with such creative music on display this night my brain was struggling to keep up so halfway through their set I decided to give up taking mental notes and just enjoy the performance because this was simply joyous in every way. Weaving a seemingly impenetrable tapestry of layered vocals and chants, whirring, buzzing synths and simple melodic bass lines, the band moved from funky noise pop to high energy art-rock with driving tribal rhythms. Lead vocalist Daphne Shum shuffles and yells through the noise like a slightly happier and breathier Yoko Ono.

And the drums! Halfway through the set, the charming and uplifting “Animals” suddenly explodes, bursting into ecstatic rapid-fire drumming as Shum and keyboardist Kieran O’Shea attack their floor toms, their sticks a blur. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more intense, the two remaining members turn to their drums and join in seamlessly in a cacophonous, all out, jungle beat assault. It’s infectious and it’s absolutely thrilling.

Just, wow!

Pay money; cut off your right foot; God forbid, even move to Melbourne, just see this band.

Lastly, Brooklynites Aa – pronounced ‘big a little a’ and around since 2002 but on their first Australian tour – unleashed their eclectic, piecemeal sound. The trio who set up half on the stage, half on the dance floor combined any manner of percussion from fire station alarm bell to maraca and plenty of floor toms to create relentlessly twisted music. Distorted staccato vocals sat on noise samples, mutated synths and the often wonderfully discordant time signatures fired out by the two drummers. The vocalist writhed and gesticulated, jumping from floor to stage and back again seemingly lost in his own world, somewhere in the dense sound and indecipherable vocals.

Before long the beat took over once more. Closely encircled by the crowd and dramatically up-lit by a single strobe on the floor, a raucous drum orgy ensued with two of the RvP boys joining the Aa percussionists on whatever drums they had at hand in a rolling, all-consuming crescendo. And then it was over. Just like that. It was a very abrupt end, way too soon. “No” was the blunt reply to the crowd’s completely justified and slightly bemused calls for more. It wasn’t a great note to end on.

Regardless, this was an amazing night of intriguing and often exhilarating experimental local music with an equally interesting off-the-wall US group. Hats off to the artists and the Red Rattler for a uniquely memorable show and, just as I finished the HEALTH + Wire review: more of the same please.