On Wednesday, 10 January I headed to the Rx Gallery for a special MacWorld edition of Backlit Lounge SF. There were small mountains of gear everywhere, belonging to truly excellent musical acts.

Effect69 (Chris Martinez, member of The League Of Extraordinary Beta Testers) V-Synthed all over the Gallery with his own brand of darkhouse and extraterrestrial remixes. I saw many a MacWorld geek bobbing their head when he laid out his reconstruction of Yes' Roundabout.

The man behind the cosmic evening, Onyx Ashanti's Interstellar Rib Shack bathed the place in rhythmic, flowing, improvisational BeatJazz. There is only one way to describe Onyx on the wind controller: bad ass. Never turn down a chance to see Onyx play live.

Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music brought a beautiful touch of strange by way of Eno to the evening: delays like raindrops, pianos like drums, and a bass heavy groove-down with Onyx to wrap. Look, ectoplasm! Peter broke a dimensional barrier!

Unfortunately picless, I can only swear to you that Astronout brought the tech and brought the boom: Machinedrum and circuit-bent TR-505, ably assisted by a Bleep Labs' Thingamagoop. Clocked out clickwork for robots dreaming of being human.

Onyx throws Backlit Lounge as a semi-regular event here in San Francisco. I'm already looking forward to the next. In fact, I'm warming up my Monome 40h right now.