Extra Life + Dan Deacon

If any one band can heal the rift between the raw and the cooked, artifice and intensity, it's Extra Life. The brainchild of composer and virtuoso guitarist Charlie Looker, the Brooklyn-based quintet plays songs in which zig-zagging guitar lines give way to sudden, dramatic silences and a voice as pure as a choirboy's soars above a rhythm section from hell. Extra Life is “scarily focused and ruthlessly complex . . . with a dark, sumptuous art-pop vibe,” says Time Out New York. “The end product is relentless, enveloping and frequently gorgeous." In the course of his career, Baltimore-based Dan Deacon has evolved from a producer of hypnotic, wordless electronica to a galvanic showman who flails audiences into ecstatic motion. He'll be making good on his thwarted (we're glad he's better) attempt at shaking EMPAC's studios with a wave of exuberant indie noise dance with cohorts Nuclear Power Pants, whose latest album was described as “a warping, Salvador Dali-surreal glob of sneering synth[s]… and dinky, Dark Meat-esque noisemaking.” (City Paper) Nuclear Power Pants have unfortunately cancelled due to the inclimate weather further down the east coast.