By ten o'clock I was on a couch relaxing with the Disco Biscuits. The couch was on a riser behind the drums at the Trocadero, a former vaudeville theater on the outskirts of Chinatown, Philadelphia. The Disco Biscuits were home. The 215. Philly. The Biscuits are from these streets and if you want to understand their sound, you must first understand their city.

Last year, at a tavern somewhere in Delaware, drummer Sam Altman and I talked about his pre-Biscuits ventures: "Well, I started playing bass first, because I was into hardcore and a friend of mine was like, 'You don't even have to read music! Just read tab, you know? You can play 0's and 3's the whole time!' So I played bass."

Sam got to return to his 0 and 3 roots this spring, picking up the bass for several songs at each show.

During "Crystal Ball," a new tune and just the second song of the night, guitarist Jon "Barber" Gutwillig's amp gave out - probably in defiance, knowing what it was in for. To keep the momentum going while it was being fixed, Barber picked up a bass and ran with it. "Well I've been playing a little bass, but not a lot. Just a little bit," he told me a month earlier.

For the songs in which the band performed as a trio, keyboardist Aron Magner played double-duty, providing both space invasions and bottom-end.

Barber: "We're going to try all of this stuff out. All this stuff. Anything we can think of, we're going to try it. A lot of experiments, a lot of crazy stuff and at this point in time - this Year 2000 - there's a lot of stuff that's possible that's only been possible for a couple of months or a couple of years, and there's stuff that's been possible for three hundred years."

Barber continued: "Now that we don't have a bass player, no one's expecting us to go out onstage and do anything specific. So we're going to do a lot of different things. Because music is entertaining and so we're going to entertain."

People were entertained alright, but he was wrong about one thing - the crowd DID expect something specific. They expected to be headfucked while doing 360's on the dance floor. And they got it.

The band's willingness to test new waters should've been apparent from the setlist alone: out of fourteen songs played that night, eight of them were new, six of them were played with a special guest and three of them featured a member of the band playing an instrument other than their own.

That's not the Biscuits I know! That's guest star Meridith, seducing the crowd with "Soul Is Shaking," a lounge number that the band debuted two-weeks earlier at The Recher Theater.

DJ Mauricio Zuniga spun during setbreak, which was good for those who were spun themselves. Mauricio took to the drum machine for a couple songs during the show as well, allowing Sammy to play bass for "Splattums" and for the debut of "Munchkin Invasion."

The band welcomed Anthony Rogers-Wright from The Arthur Dent Foundation to the stage for a maxed-out version of "House Dogg Party Favor," with the classic "Vassillios" wedged in-between.

After he walked off-stage, he came up to me and said, "Man, I was totally feeding off of you out there. I saw you out there, smiling ear to ear and it just gave me such energy." That's funny, Anthony. I was thinking the same thing about you. I think everyone was.

Despite all the guest musicians, experimental instrumentation and musical chairs, The Disco Biscuits continue to be themselves, morphing hard-hitting jam-rock with dancehall trance in an ever changing mosaic of sound.

Jon Lesser on sound and Matt Iarrobino on lights are as much a part of the Disco Biscuits as Barber, Magner or Sammy. Lesser uses the soundboard often as an instrument in itself, sometimes adding special effects at opportune moments, while Iarrobino has managed to successfully translate audio Bisco into the visual realm, using colored gels and technobeams to create the penultimate Bisco landscape.

B'gocked at the Troc.