The Annex House is already an uneasy place to see a show – bands and solo acts setting up in the corners of the East Dallas house’s living room or dining room, no stage, no division between performer and audience – fans a few inches from amps.

But on Friday, July 10, when Dale Jones, the personality behind the act, New Science Projects, began prowling about in circles surrounded by a ring of onlookers sitting Indian-style on the dining-room floor, the audience seemed to sense their own vulnerability. Jones was not going to play nice. His face and guitar smeared with blood (fake or real – who knows?), the musician spat out gibberish in a poorly disguised fake accent – sounding like something between a Yiddish peddler and a Hungarian vampire.

Behind him, on a piano bench, there was a beat-up fake leather briefcase opened to reveal dime-store price tags – “five dollars” – and a collection of nickel-sized buttons. Leaning against the bench were the two guitars in his arsenal, a cheap sounding Epiphone acoustic and a twangy steel-bodied Dobro guitar, which Jones picked up, fiddling with the tuning knobs before returning it to the floor. Digging through a duffle bag in the corner, he produced a collection of tambourines and handed them out to the gathered crowd like a teacher in a third-grade music class. The more he prowled, the more he poked at the audience, muttering bad jokes or seemingly testing them with outlandish asides, the more at ease we became. What began like the witnessing of an unleashed lunatic began to feel more like a cheap comedy routine.

Until New Science Projects began to sing.

Jones ripped into a bluesy-minstrel song, screaming incomprehensible lyrics, arching his back and raising his face to the ceiling like a howling wolf. The only percussion, save some hesitant, nervous clanging tambourines, came from the pounding of Jones’ foot on the bowed, wood floor of the early 20th-century home, inches from the crossed legs of his audience. As Jones played, he thrashed around the room, banging into (or pushing over) some of the onlookers. The performance was just that – a performance, one that felt like a cross between a 19th century minstrel show and The Living Theatre, which, in the 1960s, inspired audience provocateurs like Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop.

On the Dobro, New Science Projects drips with a Tom Waits influence, growling and shouting out an off-beat apocalyptic blues about crying, heartbroken misfits, and bad luck convicts being abused in jail. But New Science Projects isn’t bogged down in Waits. Later in the show, Jones pulled out some ballads on the acoustic guitar, which betrayed a David Bowie influence, as well as overtones of The Paper Chase’s John Congleton’s solo stuff. In one of Jones’ songs, God is sitting on a living room sofa, waiting for a mysterious band of men to arrive and take him to the gallows. It is a haunting and mesmerizing parable, one that is difficult to unravel but indicates that there is poetry at the root of New Science Projects’ screaming and shtick.

The evening at the Annex House was rounded out by the two-month old Dear Human from Denton and ambient rockers Hotel Hotel, an Austin band a few weeks off from a tour of the United States and Canada.

There is a fresh enthusiasm in Dear Human’s sound, a marauding instrumental brew that mixes near-virtuoso guitar work with relentlessly driving drums and bass lines. The result is something that sounds like Robert Fripp meets an Emo band on amphetamines. Guitarists Dan Minshew and John Gillespie lock together in syncopated finger-tapping and arpeggio strumming, creating complicated rhythms. The tracks on their MySpace page do not do justice to Dear Human’s live sound, which is as invigorating and infectious as it is complicated, though still somewhat muddled.

After the wildness of New Science Projects and Dear Human, Hotel Hotel’s ambient jam was a welcomed rounding out of the late-night. Hotel Hotel – on Friday a guitar, amped-violin, and drum trio – creates a swelling mass of noise that mixes the harmonic sensibilities of Euro-bands like Sigur Ros and Mogwai with something hauntingly Texan – like strange overtones of a vacant landscape, an abandoned town. The effect owes much to Patrick Patterson’s violin, which whines and wails, peeling melodic moments from P.D. Wilder’s guitar sound, a wall of lovely noise produced, in part, by a pile of foot pedals.

Unlike fellow Austin ambient rockers Explosions in the Sky, Hotel Hotel seem content to create great moments of introspection which swell and expand, creating drama in their volume instead of resolving in riff-based jams. Ed Warga’s drums pound out a delicate balance in the soundscape, providing not so much a unifying groove, as a beating heart.