MONO PAUSE HAVE a reputation for unpredictability. Each time I've seen them has been a totally different experience. My first exposure to the band was during their White Ring incarnation as a satirical right-wing Christian group that sang about keeping promises and surviving abortions. They were Tune Out during another performance that featured about 20 minutes of instrument tuning. And then there was the time they appeared as Thai pop group Neung Phak with Dynasty's Diana Hayes on vocals. Mono Pause have roots in the East Bay experimental music scene (members have played in Three Day Stubble, Fibulator, Wetgate, Twelve Steppes, and a Gang of Four cover band called Not Great Men) going back a decade, so they approach each live performance as something beyond a mere gig. It's an opportunity to push it – and maybe you – to the next level.

Keeping this background in mind, I was amped about the group's appearance in their hometown of Oakland. The secretive Woodknot Die Club, in an unobtrusive Fruitvale storefront, serves as a nice incubator for homegrown experiments, and it's in keeping with the deliberate obscurity of the band's performance antics. While Mono Pause took their sweet time setting up, an Indian children's disco fairy-tale album skipped in the background and glimpses of costume changes could be seen behind a flimsy white-sheeted backdrop. Drummer Miles Stegall, keyboardist-vocalist Mark Gergis, and keyboardist-bassist Peter Conheim emerged draped in loose white cloth and then covered themselves and their instruments with sheets of transparent plastic. When keyboardist Erik Gergis and saxophonist Heco Davis came out wrapped in blue tarps, I was unclear about whether their costumes were part of the "clean room" theme of the set or had something to do with Homeland Security advisories, but considering the atmosphere, in which a digitized voice spat out the word "hamburger" at random intervals, there may not have been much of an agenda behind the gimmicks. After much delay, the group produced some light keyboard riffs.

Mono Pause have so many ideas and pull off genre parodies so effectively that you're glad the world provides so much inspiration for the subtle humor that drives their offbeat explorations. For instance, at one point a disembodied digital voice expressed controversial views on Nazis; at another the band moved from chants about a dead dog to a lengthy improv jam. Mark Gergis banged on a metal case, dropped a box, and manipulated a cassette tape while Conheim fingered his Kaoss Pad, creating swaths of delay.