It’s incredible how much music you can make just using some drums and electronics. In a blend of the primal and the technological, four distinct performers brought their unique blends of genre-defying music to the William Keeton House last Saturday night, courtesy of Fanclub Collective. These four musicians, DJ Dog Dick, Ed Schrader, Adventure (the three of whom are in the midst of their own tour) and Cale Parks, doing a one-off solo show, brought the goods to a crowd eager for any opportunity to dance. The performers delivered, making for a night filled with blips and bleeps and quick-footed dance moves.

The first performer up was DJ Dog Dick, a Baltimore native who performed his genre-defying mix of hip-hop and electronics out of a makeshift system of plugs and knobs. This homemade laboratory of tech was situated in an old suitcase and featured a CD player as well as a black box lit up to display a cutout of a crying face with the words “sad potato” written underneath. The audience was welcomed to join Dog Dick as he performed with a plead of “Please don’t be shy. I’m not going to be shy even though I feel like being shy right now.” These words proved prophetic, as Dog Dick’s stage presence was a whirlwind, with the DJ constantly moving around the audience in front of the stage, bringing to life his lyrics. His sound mimicked this spontaneous energy, with vocals that traded off between unintelligible screams and raps, coupled with an array of electronic distortions that emerged with every twist of a knob. While he may have felt shy, DJ Dog Dick’s cacophony of sound radiated confidence.

The crowd was next greeted by a shirtless 130-pound Baltimorean, Ed Schrader, who towered over his floor tom drum, his only instrument onstage. Schrader builds his songs on the juxtaposition of pounding floor tom and screaming vocals, compared with more abstract wisps of drum coupled with pseudo-angelic singing. The performance is at once isolating and awesome, with its power evident from each muscle in Schrader’s body flexing with each strike of the drum. The performance itself is hard to comprehend until you are part of a group singing along to lines about “a beautiful transvestite in the rain,” and then it’s an incredible experience.

Schrader knows his music isn’t mainstream, commenting on how many flannels were in the audience, and cracking jokes about Aerosmith, Eric Clapton and Jackson Brown. He also revealed his roots as a talk show host, reading a passage from Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinlanguage on the purpose of body odor, as well as telling stories about his own fantasies of American Apparel models who used to be men. Whether you liked it or not, Schrader’s performance left every member of the audience with a feeling of “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Conversely, the next performer, Adventure, was immediately accessible and incredibly enjoyable. Armed with a keyboard and a laptop, Adventure has been the headliner on the Baltimore-centric tour featuring Dog Dick and Schrader. Saturday’s performance displayed his confidence and control, with his fingers running nimbly up the keyboard, or using his entire hand to engulf a number of keys. Adventure’s music is pure dance, with deep and booming bass lines that are highlighted by higher electronic riffs that twinkle through the air. The quick, darting beats immediately bring to mind Gameboy music, and several of his tracks would not have felt out of place as the theme music for a level of Super Mario Brothers. Adventure was successful in his mission, getting the entire audience to move around to his fun and energetic music.

Emerging as sort of the elder statesman of the lineup was headliner Cale Parks. This Brooklyn-based songwriter displayed a level of sophistication and smoothness that provided a sharp contrast to the more spontaneous and borderline naïve attitudes of the previous performers. Parks had the most elaborate setup of any of the musicians, with keyboards, a laptop and a drum pad next to a reduced live drum set that featured a snare, floor tom and cymbal. Although his set highly utilized electronics, Parks’ past as a drummer was highlighted, as he used drumsticks to both bring forth electronic tunes from the synth pad as well add in the live drum sound. Parks built his songs up from the base, mixing in layers of sound from the laptop and pad, then letting it rest to through his live additions in the mix. It made for a striking visual to see Parks standing alone at the mic stand with an entire song he just constructed playing behind him. Although the show went on late, Parks kept the crowd captivated into the wee hours of the morning with his swirls of sound that established him as the most mature performer of the night.