Injured Ninja ’s – œimprovised / experimental music night’ loomed as a spectacle from the minute it was conceived; improvisation produces the best and worst in any field. Experiments fail spectacularly or open up new worlds. Good or bad, it was gonna be interesting either way.

The Many Guises of Rod Stewart had a straight late-60s jam ethos; keep the tunes simple and keep them going. Tambourines shook, keyboards pumped out vintage Moog and organ sounds, a guitar was at times traded for a tinwhistle or banjo in mid-stream and the vocals wailed in a key of their own. A four-chord maximum and endless repetition let the Guises’ 10 players weave their improvisations easily, which looked like a whole lot of fun for the guys playing, but was less entertaining if you weren’t.

Experimental five-piece Brown were mesmerizing for some and a mere curiosity for others, who nonetheless kept watching to see how Brown’s bizarre handmade wind instruments would be deployed over that sinister pounding drone. Scraps of operatic vocals, churning keyboard, triangle, flute and bass lurked amongst the weirder tones. The piece seemed to build ceaselessly until eventually, one by one, they stepped off stage, snaking through the audience to the exit, still hammering their homecrafts, eyes blank. Strange and wonderful, all without a single guitar in sight.

Blac Blocs made up for any and all guitar deficiencies. A standard rock lineup at full strength, they punked through the issues of the day – local, national and international. Any band that name-checks Bassendean and Armadale alongside Jupiter and Wall Street is a winner.
“This set is dedicated to the children and mothers of the Gaza strip,” said frontman Al Boyd , before launching into Politician . It was followed by Government , featuring some timely shoe-throwing from the crowd, even if it came from Boyd himself. “Where are my shoes?” he asked afterwards. It was new-school journalistic action and inquiry at its best.

During These Ship Wrecks ’ sprawling 22 minute monotonal wig-out, it felt like they were one band too many. Their set was a cross between that of The Many Guises and Brown, but without the affable familiarity of the first and the cool innovation of the second. Hearing the downsides of both earlier bands in a different form, especially at this stage of the night, was a saturation-point breach. But it has to be said they looked good doing it.

Casting Abe Sada as the penultimate act of the night was practical if nothing else. Their habit of playing on the room’s fringes left the stage and floor empty for the intricate setup job of the main event. The sick, bass-driven, doomwarbling trial-by-noise that was their art served partly to clear the room and partly to be the calm before the storm. Twenty-plus minutes of throbbing ad-hoc feedback numbed the body and mind; as if you’d been in a colossal satanic washing machine filled with black Rohypnol.

With instrumentation for Injured Ninja’s drum assembly Epic of Gilgamesh taking up a fair chunk of floorspace, a glowing ropelight separated players from crowd in theory only. Stepping through a minefield of drum kits and 44-gallon drums, the Ninja’s Dominic Pearce led a shirtless warpainted tribe of nearly twenty Perth musos into the first movement: a 16 minute stomp of unrelenting power, which in hindsight served as a warm-up. At its close, with an ancient horn-cry ringing out of the dying beats, lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh were spoken into an infinite echo. Fast ride-cymbal sprinkles heralded an improvised DnB number which turned into the most danceable drum frenzy in recent memory. On this scale, with so much pace and sheer force behind each strike, the floor became a pulsing voodoo heart, pushing each beat up through you, shifting the feel from a trance into kinetic bliss. People sprang and shimmied. Others stood in mute amazement. It created tsunamis inside beer bottles, rattled tables and ignited wide grins. Arms flailed. Quick-fire rapping and guitar noise bounced off the walls.
It melted into a fuzzy keyboard bass riff, and chanting began the third and final movement, IDDQD (a.k.a. Doom’s ‘God Mode’. ‘nuff said).

The gig raised funds and consciousness, and though it’d be good to see this again, you just can’t recreate gigs like these.