MATT CARLSON, RM FRANCIS
Gift Tapes, my favorite local label, hosts this night of "Outsider Electronic Music." Headliner Matt Carlson has a new cassette out on Gift Tapes offshoot DRAFT called Gecko Dream Levels, and it's some of the most awesomely weird shit I've ever heard. Playful and surreal, Carlson's electronic tinkering sounds like torrents of alien vocabulary being shouted over 25th-century urban noise pollution. Ms. Pac-Man as reimagined by Dali. Geoduck mating songs. Opener RM Francis is making his solo debut, demonstrating "time-stretching" techniques for digital composition. Chapel Performance Space, 8 pm, $5–$15 sliding scale.
CAPTAIN AHAB, FOOTWORK, STICKERS
The new Captain Ahab record declares, with confidence, the death of the concept. It's a whirlwind tour of outré sounds, a confetti storm of juxtaposed cultural trash that totally works. Cairo, 8 pm, $5.
THE DAVID LIEBE HART BAND, COUNTRY LIPS, FRIENDS & FAMILY, FEVER TEETH
One of the most polarizing aspects of the brilliant, adventurously hilarious Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! was its frequent use of real-life weirdoes—nobody actors, terrible standup comedians, hopelessly awkward old farts, and the genuinely deranged. Were these people "in on the joke"? Were we laughing with them or at them? David Liebe Hart is perhaps the most renowned performer from Tim and Eric's fun-house-mirror menagerie, and now he's bringing his patented puppets-and-songs act to the underground masses. Like Carlson, he credits himself as an "outsider musician," but Liebe Hart's brand of weirdness is more funny than frolicsome. Your enjoyment of his set will begin as ironic but end up sincere. Healthy Times Fun Club, 8 pm, $5.
