Dan Deacon @ Cabaret Voltaire

If you stood at the back for Dan Deacon's show, all you'd see would be people going nuts, and a lime green pvc skull on the end of a pole, flashing menacingly. But really, there is no 'back' at this show: the (small-ish) crowd are packed around Deacon's portable sequencer set, which he sets up in the middle of the dancefloor surrounded on all sides by the crowd, including on the stage. And with all the party games, quasi-New Age rituals, mock theatrics and general hurly burly, we're all kept moving around constantly. It's one of the most fun and boundary-dissolving gigs you could hope to attend. Though to a large extent this is due to Deacon's charisma and the shit he gets you to do, none of it would come off without some cracking tunes to back it up.

Deacon's music is an accessible hybrid of alternative styles, played loud enough to inspire anyone to participate in group idiocy: there is fast-paced electro over whip-like beats, ramshackle hip hop rhythms and halfway nonsense lyrics ('I got my rattlesnake gun, I got my rattlesnake gun', or, 'I'm gonna get my bathing suit on, gonna get my base face on'). There is a sense of euphoria to the build of these tracks that echoes cheesy trance as much as it does LCD, but Deacon's lo-fi approach and outsider outlook mean the show comes off as a new kind of absurdist punk: playschool punk. Long may it, and Dan Deacon, thrive. [RJ Thomson]