You have to listen hard to a group like The Nels Cline Singers. If you don't, it'll sound like a lot of racket, and you'll say things like, 'why do they bother to play musical instruments'?

Cline's band mixes composition and improvisation, with electronic machines running and band instruments playing, so that eventually everybody on the stage starts sounding the same (in a good way).

Nifty, a 5-piece Toronto band, opened the night. (We're now in a tape loop.)

Nifty has a taste for LOUD meltdowns, but clearly has an underlying jazz sensibility. The soundboard mixer makes the tenor sax sound like a synthesizer, and guitarist Erin Langley sounds like an electronic fog horn, all as part of their pushing and sometimes brutally collaged music. Drummer Rob Gordon kicks the band and indicates the next step. You can tell that Nifty has listened to a lot of music, just by the way they mix and match sounds.

Well! Nifty doesn't play rock and roll. Neither do the Nels Cline Singers — by the way, the Nels Cline Singers have no singers.

What these two groups play is a body-based fusion of many kinds of music in a framework of electric and acoustic sounds.

And they improvise, so we can shoot off into the future.