THE EVENING STARTED with my group going to a karaoke club. I tried to sing Sammy Davis Jr.'s "Candyman" with the backdrop video projecting island resort scenes. There were more Korean and Japanese songs than English ones, so we ventured forth, wading through pop music from the past 40 years and going as far back as Petula Clark's "Downtown." This was when I first brought out the laser pointer.

If you want to blame anything, blame Portland. Favorite Oregonian sons Jonny X and the Groadies unloaded a case of these bad boys when they stayed at my house a few months back. They gave me alternate heads with different messages that could be projected a block away: "I © U," "Happy Birthday," and a plain old cupid's heart with an arrow through it. I chose not to modify mine, though. It merely looked like a sniper's sight. My roommate eventually got busted for having one of these things outside Balazo/Mission Badlands Gallery when a cop tagged him as a potential terrorist.

I blame Portland for my actions because that's also where the openers for the Hemlock Tavern show, Alarmist, hail from. The quartet slam and dive-bomb with a U.S. Maple-inspired offbeat angularity – their Get Hustle-y operetta vocals rebounding off a growling hardcore tarmac. While they played, I found myself flashing the laser in their faces, at their bellybuttons, at their asses. Why? I merely wanted to give them a kicky light show and speed things along like an air traffic controller.

My friends kept giving me "what the hell are you doing?" and "how old are you?" looks, but I knew in their hearts they wanted pointers of their own, to taunt and blind at will. Maybe it was time to tame it down for the headliners. This was the debut show for Le Flange du Mal, a new collaboration between members of the electronic noise unit Earwicker and Jason Stamberger from Crack: We Are Rock. Le Flange du Mal started off with Chris Clones of Earwicker beating his drums and Stamberger playing keyboards. Both men were inexplicably wearing frog masks. The drums were being processed with a heavy reverb dub effect, with Clones reaching over to manipulate a pedal. His drumming was fast and dancey, and combined with Stamberger's shadowy, repetitive sounds, Le Flange provided a melodic surprise to what I imagined would be a full-on noise jam.

Their rhythm section got into a skittery groove as two figures in French maid outfits emerged. One of them was Kimosciotic label head Chris Rolls, who also pulls duties in Earwicker and Zeigenbock Kopf. What's with all the Euro drag, you ask? Zeigenbock lambast Teutonic stereotypes, so I studied Rolls, who was also wearing a frog mask, and it all came together – the French name, the French maids, the frogs! It was like a Bastille Day celebration gone all Tenderloin-y. Stamberger was draped in a French flag, which was hard to identify in the Hemlock's red glow before the lights went down. It began to make sense: French equals "freedom" – lasers equal "terror."

Rolls alternated singing into a mic and squealing into a megaphone. One song featured a call and response with the other maiden, Violet, saying, "San Francisco," and Rolls responding, "We dance to the same beat." Another tune was about getting shocked, as Rolls manipulated electronic doodads on his mixing board. The keyboard riffs were repetitive, and the drum parts flowed with the demands of the song, but on the whole, it was pretty entertaining and properly loose. At one point Violet played a cowbell, creating a train wreck of rhythmic competition and dance party vibes. Members of jump-rope team Double Duchess appeared out of the back room bearing a plate of bread and cheese, shoving handfuls into the mouths of unsuspecting audience members.