Deep down in the lower basement floor of a gangster-owned building set deep in the seediest district of Tokyo lurks the inaccurately named Shinjuku Loft. A Kafkaesque kaleidoscope world that expands or shrinks in size and inverts itself at will, depending on which door you enter by and what time of day you arrive, it should have been the setting of a Michelangelo Antonioni film. Instead, tonight it is the setting for Buffalo Daughter and Audio Active.

Dressed in uniform black, they take the stage like Thee Michelle Gun Elephant's geeky younger siblings and, sidelining the swing and bounce of the recorded version, set about pounding the hell out of "Pshychic A-Go-Go". The word "cute" is the curse of Japanese music and it has tarred Buffalo Daughter in the past, but tonight they well and truly bury it. Despite the critically distended running times of many of these songs, the tightness and focus of the band is as intense as it is powerful. The electronic and the live instruments swim about each other in perfect harmony like Martin Luther King's dream of the little white and black kids, while suGar riffs the hell out of her guitar and man-of-the-match Atsushi Matsushita deals machine-gun death to the drum kit. They slip up only once, during closing number "303" where they start imagining that they're porpoises or something and let the tiresome electronic blips and farts go on for just a couple of hours too long. A moment of lightness occurs as turntable manipulator moOog notices the incongruous psychedelic lunchbox image that VJ Naohiro Ugawa has set dancing across the backdrop. The track then eases its way, slowly but surely, into the blazing spacerock finale that we've all been waiting for, and they leave to the sound of a thousand minds being blown.

Audio Active complete the blitzkrieg, rolling onstage, all crashing drums, thundering bass and heavy metal guitars, like the Tiger tanks that should inevitably follow Buffalo Daughter's Stuka assault. The heavy dub that forms the backbone of their back-catalogue jostles for space with a bubbling cauldron of genres that might, in more naive times, have been called skunk rock. The ear-splitting military guitar rhythms shoot accusations of weed-fuelled lethargy dead on sight and the band's unstoppable assault crushes and soars its way towards the climax. A word of warning though: When you go offstage you should at least pretend you're not planning to do an encore. When your guitar-tech comes on and starts tuning you up before the band have even left the stage it doesn't leave the audience much to clap for, eh? -Ian Martin, Apr.17.04