THOUGH PERFORMING ONLY sporadically for the past decade, spazz-art ensemble Caroliner are a vital and exciting musical institution. They are a remarkably, unclassifiably weird outfit, an explosion of sound and color and genuinely antic behavior. Though they were most prolific from the mid-'80s to the early '90s, there was nothing nostalgic about their recent gig at 12 Galaxies. Headlining a showcase of accomplished local noisemakers, Caroliner turned in a positively ebullient, if bug-eyed, performance in marked contrast to the evening's predominant theme of head-nodding loops and spare-part electro-acoustics.

The crowd was diverse, bustling, and rambunctious for a Tuesday night, especially considering the obscure, or shall we say "elite," nature of the evening's program. Regardless, devotees kept the bar staff hustling, testifying to an encouragingly robust interest in the overthrow of euphony.

The Hydrogen Pellets, the meditative alter ego of local wall-of-noise duo Leavenworth, set the tone for the evening with a montage exploration of field recordings. Gerald Hawk, whose music can be found on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, followed with a pair of modified electric guitars bolted together and prepared with a variety of electrical and mechanical contraptions. His set, an exploratory, drifting vamp, was offset by moments of panic and occasional sparks (at one point, one of the modified devices actually erupted into the audience, impacting an attendee in the shin). Skozey Fetish, another fixture in the scene from way back when, did their version of jump-up music in masks and fake beards, screwing with digitally scratchable CD players and using a reel-to-reel tape player as a turntable.

All were lively, and the crowd paid close attention, hovering around the various performers in fascinated semicircles. But the evening's culmination threw a bucket of neon paint on the proceedings. The draped sheets obscuring the stage were torn away, and the audience quite literally yelped with glee at the phosphorescent yellow spectacle that was revealed. Every square inch of the stage had been encrusted in glowing, intricately painted scenery, as complex and coherent as Aztec engravings, with strong lines like a Keith Haring sketch, radiating light and color.

The band, a lurching six-piece done up in elaborate costumes, looked exactly like a bunch of Cthulhoid Holly Hobby characters enacting a Saturday-morning cartoon. There were flowery bonnets with long horns protruding outward, splayed tentacles, and unutterable protuberances. There was a happy-field-mouse keyboardist and a nice puppy dog drummer who might have been a pair of axe murderers in a Freudian fairy tale, and a bassist with no face and a huge top hat – you get the picture. At the center of it all was a floppy, bouncing, vaguely humanoid character prone to occasional epileptic sallies into the audience, jabbering incomprehensible but singsongy lyrics.

Caroliner have a slew of albums and an elaborate band mythology involving their origins in the carcass of a singing bull from a 19th-century road show. There was a banjo onstage, and on this evening the band had some moments that recalled a tumbledown, Lovecraft-ian jug band from just after the Civil War. But the rhythm section was absolutely rockin', so much so that a mosh pit was churning up front before the set had hit its halfway mark. And the larky, springy keyboards recalled the high-flying sounds of Sun Ra and his Arkestra. For all the off-the-scales dada in the room, Caroliner were artful and deliberate. The music was practiced and full of humor, the shifts in time signature calculated, and the moments of punk rock abandon matched by "serious musician" improvisation.

Noise music has always thrived in the Bay, but Caroliner are a dose of Viagra in a world of laptops and brow-furrowing introversion. Fusing sonic invention with real performance – now that's magic. (Josh Wilson)