At The Kitchen, the crowd of music connoisseurs and ultra-hipsters reek of pretentiousness but one can find slight merit (and not much else) in the work of the pioneer David Behrman and the up-and-coming Ben Vida and Greg Davis.

Synth Nights consisted of five major acts. The first was banality incarnate: Behrman endeavored to perpetually sustain a note on the cello with minimal synths. Fortunately, the cello in itself is beautiful. It induced a trance but delved into monotony. Immediately after, was the sharp contrast of the second act: a spam of incessant Nintendo Game Boy, Sega Genesis, and Atari sounds. The irking assorted synths were a lesson in intolerability from Ben Vida and Greg Davis, who fought the drone of the first piece with punishingly rapid and loud beats that tested the eardrums of every audience member. A friend sitting in the chair beside me tried her best to block off all sound by covering her ears. Vida and Davis fired 8-bit machineguns at the crowd during the second piece, while Behrman had spent the first lulling the audience to sleep.

The remaining pieces consisted of a balance between the previous two extremes. The third act was a light show that involved elongated electronic loops and repetitive beats over the cello that was not nearly as aggravating. However, the lights were to match the music, but the two failed to ever synchronize after which the fourth movement starts as a mundane rehash of the first.  The electronica synthesizes with the cello, resonating on the same wavelength only to be swamped by glitches until it all becomes static rain. All the while, the performers are furiously moving their fingers across buttons and knobs on synthesizers as well as MacBooks, playing with technology to create cacophony.

The final act was the most compelling. The cello is played fervently (thankfully) and the synths start to feature jazz-fusion that breaks away from drone to breathe life. Spoken word samples of arrest procedures from the Bush administration, such as “Peter, what happens if I’m arrested?” finally engage the audience with language but albeit were almost perfunctory. If they were to serve a larger social purpose, it was never stated nor emphasized.

Synth Nights is an experimental experience, one that individuals should go through once to see if they can find the elusive hidden beauty and then avoid for the remainder of their lives. Not all ventures into the unknown are rewarding.