Go fast young man. Go fast.

Salad Gaze is an ensemble. There were six players on this night, though I suspect that number might grow or shrink as schedules allow. In fact, I reckon that if you're a queer musician, and you can make noise along with the existing saxophone, loops, electric guitar, resonator guitar, more loops, vocals, bass, percussion, and drum kit that were present on this night, you too could join the party. The outfit played a single thirty-five minute (surely improvised) piece that manifested as a rising and falling soundscape. There were honking moments of free jazz, but most of the piece leaned into atmospheric post-rock. Sculpted guitar feedback led to a particularly delightful drone which dominated the middle portion of the set before ultimately erupting in a chaotic finale. Attentions were held, art was made, and the crowd of friends summoned by the band was effusive. Then those friends left.

The Sleepy Cats are four youths from Topeka. They played through the smallest practice amps I'd ever seen. The lead guitarist was tethered to his with only a three-foot lead. Maybe the project is new. Maybe the players are novices. Maybe metronomes are for narcs. Whatever the case, their songs were definitely loose. The bass player and drummer never locked in – or even looked at each other. The vocalist (and grungy rhythm guitarist) puked out his vocals. The other guitarist dropped simple quarter note leads on every song. Each lead sounding as if he were attempting to pick out a melody by ear for the first time. We all start somewhere. Late in the twenty-five-minute set, the frontman announced, "Low key though, after this show, we're going to be working on some other projects." Does that mean the end of The Sleepy Cats or just the creation of new material? Let's hope the latter because the newest song of the set was by far the best, as it traded in the tinny plink plink leads for a gauzy churn, offering an enticing glimpse of what the band could be.

Still Ill is once again a trio. And that's probably where it belongs. This format allowed the three musicians to fuse post-hardcore, shoegaze, and indie rock into a marvelous fourth thing. The frontman croaked his vocals, often barely getting them over his thick roiling guitar. Or maybe they just couldn't make it past the very necessary earplugs I had lodged into my skull. On the rock-forward numbers Beach Slang came to mind, while "Pain in Things" was so snappy and jangly, I heard Ducks Ltd. Still, the band was at its best when it roared out cuts like "The Way Things Are," where anguished vocals left the audience overwhelmed and impressed. I imagine it was the small crowd that prompted the musicians to skip two songs from their prepared setlist, but they didn't slight the faithful with "Running in Place" – that one stretched out, creating a most satisfying finale.

Headliners Corners of the Sky knew something about long compositions and blending genres too. The quartet's first song jumped with '60s pop urgency, while the second drew from the heavy psych of the '70s. Both benefited from '90s garage-is-punk freak outs, manifested in the wiry guitar leads and bluesy solos delivered by the act's theatrical frontman. I smiled throughout the set, thinking to myself "This is what the Gibson SG was born to do." As with the previous act, the vocalist was frequently buried behind his guitar. I couldn't blame my earplugs when the small microphone employed by the band was often entirely inside the singer's mouth. Style points. Some cuts had great interplay between the two guitarists, while the slapped and fingered bass and rapid-fire drum fills were ubiquitous. Even pop songs like "The Spider" stretched out, journeying to the outer planets and back. Eruptions happened in unlikely places, but the vibes were thick throughout the forty-five-minute set.

There you go. Three hours of music compressed into 663 fast words.