Wzt Hearts

Baltimore's white-noise trio Wzt Hearts explores numbness with guitar, drums, a laptop, and a mixing board. Unlike a good percentage of bands featuring laptops -- and, most likely, thanks to the drums -- there's more going on than the usual bleep-bloop farting that all too often defines such acts. Heat Chief, the group's 2006 album for the Hit Dat imprint, drifts seamlessly from squiggling anti-music to gradual sheets of eerily psychedelic horror-movie themes, kind of like the middle part of Pink Floyd's "Echoes" gone nu-age space-hippie.

According to the band, its live set is always improvised from start to finish, so you can't really trust its recordings as far as tonight's show goes. But with a genuine ability to reach far-out extremes, fans of like-minded explorers (think the Boredoms minus the metal) will most likely get their experimental rocks off. Wzt Hearts even flirts with the notion that laptop noise is not a completely dried-up well, with the intermittent breaks in the electro-squall feeling both gentle to a narcotic degree and often downright beautiful. Think laptop tribalism funneled through a neo-no wave sensibility (whatever that means). By the way, for some reason the name is pronounced "Wet Hearts."