Silver Apples' rig—details below; photo by Donte Parks

I caught one song each from Finally Punk, Mika Miko, and the Death Set, playing round-robin style at an outdoor party on the East-side with a small roller rink. Of the three, the Death Set are the band that I'm dying to see again. They played their song where the chorus is just dudes screaming "motherfucking death set!" (they should play with Champagne Champagne some time) over the band's usual mix of drum machine beats, live drumming, and thrashy punk pop guitars, and they totally ripped shit up. The singer climbed a ladder into a tree behind their stage, he stood on the drum kit holding a cymbal over his should that the drummer kept on hitting, he shoved a mic up his shirt and sang into it there. Antics aside, this band, on album Worldwide has some super catchy, sing-along songs ("Moving Forward," "Peak Oil," Selective Memories"); bummer I keep missing them.

Caught a couple indistinct songs from Blue Jungle, playing at the Smell showcase in a big empty studio space with a cool, fuxxed-up video projection in the background (think messed up VHS, vertical hold and pixellated test colors all melting across the screen). Blue Jungle's drummer is Donnie Shoemaker from old Eastside/Seattle band Mikaela's Fiend (whose other member, Chris Ando, now plays in Talbot Tagora). Blue Jungle was much more straight-ahead than either of those bands, though—rock and roll most memorable for the aggressive drumming and their high-heeled and hot-pantsed lead singer's dancing, which at one point had her lassoing three of the seriously on 8 audience members with her mic cable (the vocals were too low in the mix to make out much).

A few blocks away at the Todd P party outside Ms Bea's: Titus Andronicus were playing their Clash-by-way-of-Rancid brand of punk rock—all marbles/glass shards/broken teeth-in-mouth singing over big three chord choruses. They closed with a cover of the Misfit's "Where Eagles Dare," a song made famous by Bratmobile. Ponytail played up on the stage, but because their singer is so tiny (between them, Wavves, and Max Tundra, I think I'm seeing the shortest performers at all of SXSW this year), it was impossible to see what her primal scream-y (like the therapeutic yelping, not the band) singing looked like. What I can tell you is that it sounds like this band listened to a lot of OOIOO and tried to refit that sound for something more like standard pop punk songs—this is not really a bad thing. Abe Vigoda played next, sounding more straight-forward punk and less reverb and ersatz tropicalia (guitars plucked to sound like steel drums) than I remembered. It was their first SXSW, they said, so they played some new songs, but encouraged the crowd to "dance like you know what's gonna happen." Japanther played next, sounding scuzzy and clipped loud as always, dedicating their set to Jamie Hewitt (RIP) of Bent Outta Shape. They started with some new songs, of which I'm not as much a fan as of their older stuff, although "Bumpin' Rap Tapes" sounded good live, as did New Bad Things reversion "the Dirge," with its chorus of "I love you/no matter where you spend the night." Later, they busted out some "classic" jams, like "$100 Cover (Revolution Baby," one I can't make out from my notes, and "Maybe the Gravy's Run Out," closing with a cover of "Do You Wanna Dance." They encouraged the (already pretty punk/DIY disposed) crowd, "You can do it too. Start a band. Don't just listen to us, because we have no idea what the fuck we're doing."

Seattle garage rock legends the Sonics played the opening set at Emo's Friday night, a nice nod to the history behind the evening's headliners Black Lips and King Khan. (The MC belabored this point a bit, talking about these guys being the "the sonic boom that started it all," "the big bang behind garage rock and roll," and so on). The dudes are aged, and their bluesy songs sound a little standard at this point (even borderline state fair/casino-ready), but they can still wail, especially keyboardist/vocalist Gerry Roslie, who looked like he was singing from lyric sheets but who could still open up and let out some serious moaning and shrieking. I can imagine how to a teenager in the '60s this must've sounded as revolutionary and rebellious and whatnot as, say, Nirvana sounded to my generation. They played "He's Waiting" (which always makes me think of the Japanther song on Leather Wings that samples anti-cult nut Bob Larson talking about the "He" in the song being the devil). They played "Money (That's What I Want)," into which one could read some admission about cashing in if the Sonics didn't keep their reunion schedule so tastefully lean. They played "Louie Louie," "Strychnine," "Have Love Will Travel," "The Witch," "Psycho," and others, and the songs all sounded enduringly kick-ass, even if the saxophone and harmonica (and sometimes keys) didn't really made it into the mix like they should've. Sax player Rob Lind by the way gives off the vibe of a funny dad, cracking jokes, and directing folks to the merch booth by saying, "Remember, a Sonics t-shirt signifies to your dad that you just don't give a crap."

Two bands I didn't much care for: Woods, a four piece who are basically a standard guitar/bass/drums rock trio with one dude hunched on the floor singing into a pair of headphones and working a dj mixer attached to two tape decks and a pedal-board. For all that though, the fourth guy's contributions seemed to amount, on the couple songs I caught, to little more than some echoing sonar pings added between lines of the chorus. Ditched that show to catch Tigercity on a friend's recommendation, and while that band definitely nail their specific sound—something like Hall & Oates & Astley, with disco bass and drums, soft synths, and alternately deep and falsetto crooning singing—I wasn't really feeling it. If M83 sound the way you falsely remember/romanticize the John Hughes '80s, these guys are how it actually sounded.

I saw the Pains of Being Pure at Heart again, and I don't regret a minute of watching almost the exact same set as yesterday (I would watch it again today if it came up). Minor difference: the played a different new song this time, "Falling Over." Other things I noticed: their keyboard had one wonky, broken key; the keyboardist was pretty much nowhere in the mix, either on vocals or keys, but it sounded okay; the guitar was far clearer today than yesterday; they play "Come Saturday" much faster live than on record. So dreamy.

Went to the wrong venue (SXSW fail) then had to run way down south on Congress st, across the bridge, to catch electronic pioneers Silver Apples, arriving at the club just as the MC was talking about them being "the birth of electronic music." Originally a duo, Silver Apples is now just one man, Simeon, as drummer Danny Taylor has passed away. Back in the day, from what I can glean from photos, Simeon would just play an array of oscillators (basically just big boxes with some controls and maybe a waveform display), bending the tones into notes, almost like playing multiple theremins. Now, he was playing one or two such devices over backing rhythm tracks on a CD. Before his set, he was calling back and forth to the sound guy about impedances, trying to get a clean tone instead of a distorted (suitable maybe for Wolf Eyes) screech out of his device (later, he pounded the device, Fonz-like, to get rid of a buzzing). With the live drumming replaced by relatively restrained drum programming (think the preset beats on an old organ), it was easy to draw a straight through-line from these guys to Kraftwerk. Silver Apples' songs all have a certain rhythmic pulse and electronic tone to them, but they're psychedelic as they are anything, full of trancey drones and Simeon intoning something like shamanic poems over the sounds.

Silver Apples photo by Donte Parks

Simeon, wearing a brimmed leather hat, a Hendrix t-shirt (they were contemporaries), and an earing has kind of a Hunter S. Thompson-ish crazy old genius coot vibe to him. He talked about how you move to New York and they call this stuff avant garde, but down in New Orleans it was just (and then I missed the last bit; presumably he said "gumbo"). He said that when the band originally wrote and recorded these songs, in 1967-1969, "it took a while for people to catch onto what we were doing; we waited them out." He played "Misty Mountain," "Velvet Cave," a couple new songs—"I Don't Know" and "Purple Egg"—from what Simeon explained was an EP of children's music ("they wanted psychedelic, but I don't know what that is, so I recorded some children's songs; I guess children are pretty psyhcedelic"). Simeon chanted colorful nonsense while rotating a crank-arm on the front of his device, bending the note, jiggling vibrato out of it, pulling it down low into bass gurgles or high into piercing sine waves, playing with harmonics and dissonances. They closed with Silver Apples' first (and greatest) song, "Oscillations," and it was a transcendent recital. One song reminded of Eats Tapes; another of Animal Collective—safe to say neither of those bands would've come about quite the same without these guys. They truly are the original Simeon Mobile Disco (sorry), and it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime type of show.

Went to a party on the pedestrian bridge but had a literal run-in with Wavves' "Weed Demon" that sent me running scared just as Vivian Girls went on somewhere, invisible in the gigantic throng. Wound up at an afterparty where Portland's Starfucker and Max Tundra were playing. Last time I saw Starfucker, at Vera, I had wondered how differently the band might go over rocking a show with booze; now I know that the would go over swimmingly. After a few same-y sounding first songs, all marching rhythm and sliding guitar parts, the band (playing as a four piece tonight) broke out some of the more distinctive jams from their self-titled debut album. All of it had the crowd dancing and going aggressively nuts, though. Max Tundra set up and went on next, busting out "Which Song" with his usual eccentric flair to a considerably thinned crowd. After which song, though, exhaustion and diminishing returns were catching up (it was 3 or 4am by now), and it was time to cab it home. Now off to the SXSeattle day party!