BY BRAD NELSON—This is terribly late but on Thursday June 18 at the River School (which took me two frustrated attempts to drive to after I missed my turn and 4th Street cut my reluctant path to I-80) Daniel Francis Doyle and local band Manacle performed music full of sharp angles as many experts of fire-tossing with poi decorated the oncoming night in fierce orange blazes.

Against the scenery of trees and the background murmurs of the Truckee River, Austin musician Doyle acted as a veritable one-man band. He started each of his songs with guitar lines that initially seemed like soundcheck cast-offs.

But then they didn’t stop.

After looping his abortive and jagged guitar, Doyle would rush to his drums, warping the guitar sample with a pedal—so that a rushed and rhythmically fractured guitar line could later be transformed into crushing doom metal or whatever else he needed it to be—while madly pounding drums and screaming bloody terror into his attached microphone.

The final effect was that of convulsing noise rock hammered through jazzy, unsure time signatures. The final effect was exhilarating.

The two acts were separated by a brief set from Santa Cruz indie rockers That Ghost, but by that time my camera’s powers of persuasion were slowly being dulled by the night. It is with great regret that I even post my photo of Manacle, who went after.

It is with little regret that I write about Manacle, probably the only math-rock band around anymore (Don Caballero mach two, with entirely different members, doesn’t count) and who trace jazzy, ever-shifting instrumental rock in the air effortlessly.

Night had fallen and we all smelled of campfire and that previous week I had been the sort of depressed that lacks knowable origin and that anchors any body capable of movement to a bed forevermore (the same depression that had left me unable to post these photos for almost two weeks), but three bands deep and surrounded by people who also seemed to have a predilection for bizarre and unpredictable music, I felt a part of something. Not in the I-smoked-up-with-people-of-ill-repute-at-a-Dead-concert “part of something” sense.

In the sense that there is great art being made everywhere and perhaps just glimpsing it is reason enough to get out of bed and get lost and frustrated on the way.