After the law (or should I say, respect for the noise ordinance) brought an end to the live music at Hobo Village, it was off to try (and fail) to catch Tucson’s Bark! Bark! Bark! at New York’s MyOpenBar.com Sink or Swim party, which to everyone’s delight was held on the roof of a downtown parking garage and offered lovely, misty panoramic views of the city.

“Is there a party that Mika Miko isn’t playing at,” a friend asked, but certainly not with malice. The LA band’s full-speed-ahead, geek chic girl punk was a crowd pleaser. And rapid-fire, yelped vocals always seem to sound better when they are sung into a red telephone rigged up as a mic.

The art noise punk of These Are Powers probably just sounded like an apocalyptic cacophony to those in the never-ending free booze line (interestingly, there was no line and almost no takers for the free food), but those that braved the ear splitting feedback of the trio (two guys, one girl) were in for a treat. The setup was simple, sort of – a drummer who played standing up, an energetic, high-kicking female singer and a bass player, but the bass player had a schmorgasborg of pedals at his feet and was able to channel a mere four-stringed instrument into sounding like a guitar and a Moog. It harkened back to the good old days of early ‘90s experimental post-punk.

After These Are Powers performed their finale, party organizers vainly tried to scatter stragglers by refusing to hand out beverages and setting off the fire alarm (nobody even flinched). But no matter, because it was off to catch the Mae Shi again at an after-hours party thrown by 91.7 KRVX at the Austin Children’s Museum. Yes, you heard right – a CHILDREN’S Museum.

Do you know what happens when you unleash several hundred inebriated twenty-somethings inside a museum filled with educational installations, a miniature train, and other such implements designed for tykes? Well, I bet the proprietors of the Children’s Museum didn’t.

Empty bottles on the train tracks, bathrooms that were TPed, garbage and spills everywhere. Let’s just hope for the sake of the museum that the contract that KVRX had with them included clean up and damages.

While partygoers abandoned all notions of civility and queuing in line for drinks, Mika Miko (surprise, surprise) put in another high-gear performance, after ousting a 40-something man who refused to stop playing their drum kit. Brooklyn’s chunky-noisesters Knyfe Hyts (members of Ex-Models, Pterodactyl & Oneida) took the “stage” in nondescript costumes and bellowed a decent-sized set of sloppy, yet generally likable, mathy post-punk noise.

At some point, another noisy band began playing, but in the witching hour of 4 a.m., it began to really just sound like noise.

The air mattress actually started looking good. It must be late.