On stage, Ato are a conundrum. Like The Sex Pistols, the line where theatre crosses over into raw punk anger is very hard to find, and the band seem intent on hiding their true intentions at all costs. This, however, is an event of which they themselves are curators, and through the choice of bands with which they have chosen to adorn their event, we might be able to catch a glimpse of what lies within.

The Second Circle are first up, and surprise straight off the bat by sounding a lot like Mogwai. It's a bit maudlin and mellow to start off with, but it gradually builds a head of steam and crescendos in a storm of noise and feedback. Still, nice though it is, it's not blessed with a surplus of originality, with a climactic chord sequence that is exactly the same as "Mogwai Fear Satan" and not much in the way of content of its own.

Merry Ann are a reggae band. Not a vast, sprawling, skunked-off-their-tits, heavy, heavy, dub reggae band. Just a typical Japanese, sunny, well rehearsed, arms-in-the-air, Aswad-style reggae band complete with rasta hats, suntans and vests. They're really good at what they do, but there's a nagging sense of unreality. What are they doing here? This isn't the revolution, this is fucking Big Mountain. In fact, if it bleached its hair and bought a couple of yachts it would be fucking Sting! Weird.

Weirder still, but in a good way, are Kegawa-no Mari's, who stray tantalizingly around the edges of genre, but crash, Steve McQueen style, straight through the borders of gender, amid a hail of sexually inhibited machinegun fire. It's a glorious, sloppy wet kiss of a performance, mashing together the best bits of The New York Dolls and Bowie, and delivered with enthusiasm bordering on the insane by a six and a half foot tall drag queen in a big floppy hat and a rather fetching dress. The bass and the drums are sturdy, keeping everything just on the listenable side of chaotic, and the guitar is all screaming, blue denim garage rock sex. Did I say great hair? Well it was.

Yagi probably think of themselves as an experimental punk band, and to be fair to them, they don't let themselves get constrained by conventional structures. On the other hand, they don't really let themselves get constrained by any kind of structure, cohesion, or respect for their audience's ears either. They twist and contort themselves, they swing from the rafters like monkeys, they've got a lot of the right ideas, but the music is self-indulgent to masturbatory extremes and never really connects with the audience.

Ash On The Street blow everyone off their feet again, in what might be a good way or a bad way, I'm still not sure. Imagine you're in a club, a little drunk, when some supremely self-confident young dandy sweeps you off to his penthouse suite and forces you to engage in an all-night orgy of three way sex with his domineering nymphette wife, fuelled by a mysterious, hallucinogenic South American liquor. Oh, and a python lives in his room as well. There has to be a python in this metaphor. Imagine how you would feel when you wake up the next morning, in a dirty grey bus station in a part of town you don't know. It was a fucking good night and it felt great, but you have this nagging, dirty sense that you've been used. That's what Ash On The Street feel like. Dual male/female vocals with some wickedly sleazy B52s dynamics, some amazingly sexy dancing, jagged new wave guitars, faux-tribal beats. It's powerful stuff and it's gone in the morning, leaving you to stew in the deliciously sleazy aftermath of their wicked pleasures.

Ato are last, and explode onto stage in a fury of strobe lights and incoherent lobotomised grunts and moans. The second guitarist only got out of hospital last month, and he still looks like he's about to die of cholera at any second, the bassist still refuses to dignify the audience with anything so grand as actually facing in their general direction, and the drums explode all over the place like an American peacekeeping force discovering an Iraqi orphanage. Vocalist Yosuke Otsubo is his usual manic self, spending as much time as he possibly can anywhere except actually standing up on stage. A rubbish bin gets demolished somewhere, which is about as punk rock as eating a cheese sandwich, and you get the feeling that a band like Ato is better suited to making sudden, unprovoked guerilla attacks on other people's gigs, rather than the rather demystifying process of organising their own. Still there's enough chaos and mania on display to chalk this up as another successful Ato gig, and if the support line-up was uneven, it provided at least a couple of moments of weird satisfaction. -Ian Martin, Sep.04.04.