Onstage, before a respectable Sunday night crowd for two relatively obscure acts at Chop Suey, Growing’s two guitarists—Joe Denardo and Kevin Doria—flanked newest member, Sadie Laska. The behooded, thin woman sounded like a fat man when she sang-spoke into her mic. This was surprise number one. Surprise number two: Growing’s three members all stood before keyboards/samplers and made sounds that I didn’t expect to hear. What I expected were kosmische drones oscillating to infinity in soothing concentric circles. What Growing produced instead were staccato torrents of heavily treated guitars and somewhat clunky canned (not Can-ny, unfortunately) beats; this was more Excepter than Popol Vuh or Stars of the Lid.

Clearly, some change has been going on in the Growing camp. Everything sounded processed into a strident un-organicness. The second and third tracks were downright extroverted and cheerful, in their way, with the latter delving into the jagged dance-floor grotesquerie of fellow Brooklynites Black Dice. Track five (it was hard to tell where one piece ended and the next began, so I may be off here) sounded like hauntological house music, while the set closer rode rigid midtempo dance beats, looped vocals, and smudged guitar hieroglyphics into strange club territory, before morphing into an anticlimactic, dark gray rumble. This wasn’t the Growing I was anticipating, but I respect their desire to evolve.

Fuck Buttons’ Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power tellingly faced each other onstage. They hunched over their laptops and noisemaking toys in deep concentration, rarely acknowledging the crowd. Their sound may be expansive, but their stage demeanor is insular. Most in the audience didn’t seem to care too much about the lack of communication and eye contact, though. We’ve had enough “How ya doin’, Seattle?”s to last several lifetimes.

Fuck Buttons’ first track, “Surf Solar” from the excellent new Tarot Sport album, swept in on sweeping, Vangelis-sized melodies and massive galloping beats. It recalled the Field, but with a PhD in noise. So far, so exhilarating. The next cut, “Colours Move" off Street Horrrsing, thundered with thick, tribal drums and a momentous buzzing drone that burrowed into brains and enveloped the venue; it was at once comforting and discomfiting. “Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic” flaunted serrated synth tones and distorted squeals over what sounded like pitch-shifted horse hooves. “Phantom Limb” pushed a fucked-up cha-cha rhythm to a sonorous chainsaw symphony.

There also surged forth a few huge techno anthems—including “Olympians”—with gigantic Surgeon/Regis-style kickdrums swaddled in burnished, industrial-strength noise and mollified by grandiose tunes, making it often feel like a rave in an abattoir; that their songs bled into one another like a well-planned DJ set further lent a rave-like aura to the night. The set proper finished with “Flight of the Feathered Serpent,” which concluded as if Fuck Buttons had ripped all the plugs from the power strip. Abrupt endings, as always, rule.

Fuck Buttons encored with “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” whose spine-tingling music-box tinkling spurred hands to wave sentimentally—and, to some degree, ironically—in the air. The song then built to a gargantuan, droning zone-out before reverting to its original motif. It was an expected yet nonetheless satisfying conclusion to a night of billowing, valedictorian tuneage and rampantly pummeling beats. Prediction: By this time next year, Fuck Buttons will be working under the auspices of Sub Pop.