DIAL UP IMPORTS JAPAN'S INNIT PARTY TO SEATTLE
Dial Up brings in two Japanese artists and one transplanted American associated with Osaka's INNIT party to Seattle: Seiho, Magical Mistakes, and And Vice Versa—all new names to me. Seiho (Seiho Hayakawa) sounds like some of the lighter, more lustrous fare coming out of LA's Brainfeeder and Alpha Pup imprints—a kind of ultra-vivid, neon-streaked, disjunctive update of R&B and electro. Magical Mistakes (aka Erik Luebs) traffics in a harder, more introverted realm of down-tempo music. His tracks often evoke the deserted streets and dilapidated warehouses of urban anomie we used to hear on certain instrumental hiphop records over the last 15 years from the Ninja Tune and Mush labels. Magical Mistakes' music wobbles like a sloshed poet between dreamy and sinister, sometimes melding the two qualities at the same time. The clumsily named And Vice Versa (Masayuki Kubo) creates wonky leftfield house and techno that reveals a mind not content to follow the well-trod paths of most producers in those genres. With DJ Hojo and DJAO. Q Nightclub, 9 pm, free, 21+.
MAGMA FEST GETS DEEPLY ELECTRONIC WITH STRATEGY AND OTHERS
For Data Breaker's money, this bill is one of the hottest of the monthlong Magma Fest. Newaxeyes are Seattle's most exciting new group, at times a potent mixture of texturally bizarre out-rock and off-center avant-hiphop, at others pure experimental, galvanizing WTFness. Olympia's Josef Gaard makes zeitgeisty end-times techno that sounds like a chaotic mishap in a factory at 4 a.m. Tacoma's Simic excels at suspenseful, melodic techno, and Portland's Strategy (Paul Dickow) is a jack-of-all-trades musician who's mastered house, dub, ambient, and post rock with the aplomb of a fun-loving scientist. Strategy's music oozes the pleasure principle, very rigorously. Hollow Earth Radio, 7 pm, $8 suggested donation, all ages.
GET MINIMAL AND QUIRKY WITH TECHNO JPLS AND SKOOZBOT
JPLS (Jeremy Jacobs) came to my attention through my infatuation with Richie Hawtin's M-nus label. In the mid '00s, the Chicago-born producer's cuts began appearing on comps like min2MAX and EXPANSION | contraction, and his contributions fit right in with M-nus's severely stripped-down yet groovy reductionist-techno aesthetic. His predilection for oddball percussion tics and zany timbres lends this cerebral brand of dance music a charming quirkiness. But he sometimes ditches the slapstick effects for very serious lab-coated minimal techno that's dying to soundtrack dystopian sci-fi flicks, as his 2009 album The Depths proves. If you dig JPLS, you'll probably sweat out a few pounds to Skoozbot (Brian Connelly), too. His bare-bones techno carries a madcap sense of adventure, usually keeping the pace brisk enough to give you a strenuous cardio workout. With Miss Shelrawka, Sone, and John Massey. Kremwerk, 8 pm, $10, 21+. 
