RIDING TO 21 Grand on my new bike, I discover it's a particularly chilly night, a deceptive sort of Bay Area evening with its clear sky and unexpected wind. My knee has been acting up in the week I've had this bike. Fortunately the ride to the venue is all downhill.

It seems that the night may be going downhill also. I'm the second to arrive, and I wonder whether the performer-to-audience ratio will balance out. 21 Grand shows tend to be way under capacity, and it's a shame. The space is around the corner from the Stork Club and just across the street from the Ego Park Gallery, in what some might call the center of Oakland's little "arts district." This block should have benefited from the "Oakland renaissance"; instead it's undergoing the fate of all gentrifying early adopters. The southern block of 23rd Street that houses 21 Grand and Smythe's Accordion Center is being bought by a Danville developer to be turned into upscale apartments.

I may be stretching an analogy, but there's something about the process of music boosterism, at least at the local level, that follows the pattern of gentrification. What begins mostly as genuine enthusiasm for original and creative sounds can quickly turn into premature hopes and expectations regarding pet projects. Those who laid the foundations become bitter about their displacement at the hands of newcomers. It's an analogy that's loaded with racial and class themes, and the parallel between these processes strikes me in trying to write about GX Jupitter-Larsen's Dec. 21 performance.

My first exposure to GX Jupitter-Larsen was a collaboration/audio battle with Peer Pressure Zombie artist Mr. California. I'd been convinced they were actually the same person, but I can't be sure anymore. The record is a blistering cut-up of constantly shifting two-second sound bursts, feedback, calculators, and brutal loops spiraling toward an ADD vanishing point. Jupitter-Larsen's set tonight isn't of the same tenor, though given he's the force behind more than two decades of the Haters, I imagine variety is the key to his longevity.

He dons a monocled leather mask before lowering the tone arm on his turntable. Playing with a mask is old hat by now. What's strange is that he does it onstage with a minimum of fanfare. There's a strange formality, as if he were saying, "You know what I look like without this thing, but for half an hour let's pretend this mask makes the music scarier."

A semblance of a crowd trickles in, and the placement of the turntable on a tall white podium on the high stage doesn't engage us so much as it emphasizes our distance from the performer. I can't see exactly what's at the end of the modified tone-arm, although the clicky loop sounds like a Bollywood record run through a distortion pedal and a mixer. He leans on the needle, and the droning white static harshness commences.

Oddly calm, Jupitter-Larsen takes a hands-off approach as distorted yelps of hellishness are coaxed out of the wires. It's dense and rhythmic, and I wonder if I even need earplugs as it gets gradually louder. He has one hand on his hip, exposing only tattoos and possibly a wedding ring, and it seems more like he's pumping gas than throwing down the confrontational turmoil I had prepped myself for. I appreciate the drones though, abrasive as they are. I admire the concentration – he looks like he's doing a delicate balancing act with the needle, yet it sounds like dirt clods collecting in the brain stem.

I notice that 15 minutes have gone by. Five minutes later comes the sound of a train whistle feeding back or a sandpaper saxophone. It's like the audio equivalent of staring at the sun. The sound shifts to two minutes of gut-rumbling bass tones and devolves into what I blearily write in my notes as "fart drags fog horn." The set ends, and the mask comes off.

I watch the touring one-man plant act Mr. Natural follow with a contact mic-ed piece of driftwood and then the great, if somewhat lengthy, laptop-trumpet-electronics power jam of All Tomorrow's Zombies. I don't come away with a better understanding of the Haters' role in the Bay Area noise tradition, yet I do think about the genre's intractable contrariness, its inability to sell out. The contrarian in me enjoys that fact and the dedication to "keeping it real," but I also wonder about the anti-entertainment stance and how to factor in the high- and lowbrow aspects. I'm hoping the new location for 21 Grand and this brand of programming don't die off from a lack of interest, though one gets the sense that these performers will keep doing what they do regardless of who does, or doesn't, show up. (George Chen)