The much-anticipated Decibel Festival kicks off tonight—four days of electronic (and more!) music spread across a number of venues throughout the city. There’s a lot to see, so in his column this week, Dave Segal picks some of his favorites for each day. Here’s Thursday’s highlights:

Deconstructing Pop @ Neumos
Japanese producer Tujiko Noriko lends a skewed sensuality to electro pop’s oft- pristine, asexual veneer. Polyglot trio Jahcoozi rinse out slinky, dubsteppy triphop, featuring Sri Lankan singer Sasha Perera. Teutonic electro-pop maven Barbara Morgenstern extrapolates upon Neue Deutsche Welle and Cluster’s pastoral mid-’70s output.

Peloton Release Party @ Sole Repair
Aron Schoppert’s Seattle label Peloton christens its first release, Bicycles Are Your Friends, with a killer bill. American techno magus Stewart Walker jets in from Berlin to lay down the PhD-level minimal science, and [a]pendics.shuffle (one of Ken Gibson’s many monikers) uses madcap techniques to deflate techno’s seriousness while keeping the sonic palette very odd. One of Seattle’s most-slept-on tech-house producers, Mister Leisure (Matt Corwine) combines ingenious sound design with acute dance-floor-igniting knowledge. INCITE!, dB founder Sean Horton’s latest persona, has been generating positive buzz with his live dance-centric sets.

Read what else Segal recommends here, see what Decible Fest shows Eric Grandy is excited for here, and, of course, get all the rest of your Decibel Fest info at www.dbfestival.com. (There’s also a complete schedule in this week’s paper.)

Also tonight, Maceo Parker performs at Jazz Alley (read about it in The Score), and Book of Black Earth will destroy the Comet.

Book of Black Earth, Black Breath, Immiserate, GALDR
(Comet) It’s been a busy year for dark-metal rockers Book of Black Earth. They’ve recently signed to Prosthetic Records, cut Horoskopus, a second full-length with the label that will be released October 14, and they’re kicking off a North American tour tonight at the Comet. “Funeral of Peace” from the forthcoming album features drummer Joe Axler’s honed attack of unrelenting blast beats, much guitar churn-and-chug, and frontman TJ Cowgill’s typically gruff-but-intelligible growl. Generally, things are sounding tighter and looking up for the local five-piece, and fans of scary metal could do worse than tonight’s show, which is sure to register somewhere on the Richter scale. GRANT BRISSEY