BY JENNIFER KELLY

Would you bring earplugs to a show at a used bookstore?

I didn't, and boy was I sorry.

Also dumb. The Bookmill in Montague is no ordinary used bookstore. It is lined floor to ceiling with old books, furnished with folding chairs and one sagging couch. You could definitely camp out, most afternoons, for a quiet read. But from time to time, it is also the setting for the wildest and the weirdest in experimental music. Tonight: a local hardcore band called Phased Out, the electro-shocked noise sculptures of Blues Control and the shimmering psychedelic rock of Kurt Vile and the Violators.

Phased Out, from nearby Brattleboro, VT, is on first, a Rollins-esque, G.G. Allin-ish punk band, whose guitarist is Kyle Thomas (from folky Feathers, Mascis' Witch and assorted lesser known southern Vermont bands). There is also a bass player (who has his shirt off by the second song), a drummer and a singer, apparently named Opie, who struts, screams, stalks and does split kicks in front as the band rampages through a series of brief, head-banging rants. It's brutal, fast, fun and block simple, except that Thomas occasionally erupts into shreddy burst of high-on-the-neck guitar bravado, a little bit of arena metal in the midst of the most elemental kind of punk. The set is very short - the ratio of set-up to playing time has got to be over three to one - but it's not bad, not bad at all.

Blues Control also takes some time to set up, but in their case, it's understandable, given the stacked tiers of keyboards, synthesizers, samplers and effects pedals they bring to the Bookmill.   There are only two people involved -- Russ Waterhouse on guitar and various electronics, Lea Cho on several different keyboards - but a pawn shop's worth of instruments, and even the relatively conventional ones - a battered blue guitar, a keyboard that sounds very much like a piano - get filtered through a table's worth of sound-altering equipment. To test things out, Waterhouse digs out an old cassette tape from someone's car and pops it into the set-up. The sound of Spirit's "I Got a Line On You" suddenly fills the room.

But finally every keyboard has been pounded, every cord has been checked, and a single vast synthesizer tone begins to swell to fill the room. It unfolds and swells, vibrating in and out of focus, distended by sheer volume, a breathing, throbbing sort of presence. A battery of techno machine drums clatters in over it, chopping a single monolithic sound into bits and beats. Waterhouse is playing a guitar, but the sound is so glossy with delay that it sounds like another instrument altogether, and Cho's keyboards just barely register amid layers of sound, high and insistent and icy, though she is banging hard on them, wrists flying, head down. The volume is blinding, overwhelming, a sandstorm of aural sensations, so that you sense, rather than actually being able to separate, all the different things that are going on.  Later, listening to MP3s, it seems likely that this first song was "Good Morning" off the new Siltbreeze album Local Flavor, but I wouldn't want to stake my life on it. Already people who have staked out first row seats are moving back and away from the stage.

The next song, which might be "Rest on Water", starts with vibrating percussive notes, like plinks on a wooden xylophone dropping into a deep well, simple motifs wrapped in a mirage-ish heat-shimmer. As before, a grinding, pounding industrial beat pushes up through the sound, shattering Cho's high notes into glassy fragments, while Waterhouse plays another keyboard that corkscrews up and around in scale flights. Elements of the sound - the hard beat, spirals of organ-like melody, the gamelan-ish percussive shimmer - flicker in and out of focus, so that now one and now the other seems to be the central "thing." But it is maybe the interplay, the uncertainty, the juxtaposition, which makes the piece work, that its layers never coalesce but only slip between and on top of each other.

My ears are hurting by now, so I move just outside the room, to a wooden stairway that links the second floor of the bookshop to a patio outside. The door is standing open, so you can still see and hear - in fact, you can hear much better with the buffer of another ten yards. The mass of sound, which seemed from up close to be undifferentiated, separates into clearer elements. Blues Control has launched into "On Through the Night", also from the new album, a spooky, space-whispering piece, shot through with sounds that might be machines or distant winds or ghosts whispering to each other. Cho is playing an organ for this one, further intensifying its eeriness with tones that remind you of cathedral spaces and, maybe, Captain Nemo. It's a sound that conjures up vast shadowy spaces, either underwater or between stars, with deep subterranean rumbles, glistening treble and bell-like bursts of percussive piano.

Kurt Vile and his Violators are next, bringing a more standard rock set-up of guitars, bass, saxophone and drums. It's a four-piece band - and a good one. Adam Granduciel, whose main gig is the War On Drugs, is playing bass (Vile returns the favor by playing guitar in the War on Drugs), Jesse Turbo alternates between guitar, saxophone and harmonica and Mike Zeng plays drums. Vile brings several guitars with him, but starts out on a 12-string, playing rhythmic Appalachian against Turbo's more abstract and eerie electric howls, Granduciel on the floor in front of the amp, bringing on the feedback. There are some lo-fi bedroom acoustic songs, with Vile drawling like Dylan above a steady web of picking, and some more expansive and feedback enhanced psych rockers and, at one point, an all-instrumental jam built on an elastic 1960s soul-psych bassline. And then Turbo switches to sax, Granduciel to guitar and Zeng cranks out the locomotive clatter for "Freak Train."

Vile plays a couple of songs by himself, with only an acoustic guitar, next, the sweet folk blues of his playing ever so slightly twisted. (Sample lyric:  "She was a tomboy/And I was a peeping Tom.")  The band comes on again for Vile's best known song, "Freeway," and stays for another guitar-layered country-folk-psych-rock jam, the kind of beat that makes you bob and nod, the kind of shimmer that sets your head on an endless highway daydream.  It's a triumphant set, better and more cohesive by far than the show that Vile played at SXSW just a few months ago. Vile and his band just signed to Matador, and their first wide release is coming this fall, so get ready now. It's going to be good.  

[Kurt Vile will be touring the US starting August 11. Tour dates at his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/kurtvileofphilly]