The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

One might think it is Sting or the second coming of KISS, I mean Christ, or some other hugely popular international act packing the Triple Rock this past Saturday night. The room is awash in colored patterns, setting the evening up for a fierce Stripes v. Plaids / Sharks v. Jets rock and roll rumble. But the cocktail-clutchers and the Pabst-proffers are anxiously awaiting four local bands. The Minneapolis music scene is geared for explosion, and it's hard to believe one of the masterminds is a gentleman quietly hunched over an acoustic guitar.

When Darren Jackson, better known as the leader of Kid Dakota, isn't sending his emotionally raw songs lassoing through the air, he is perched behind his recording console, twisting knobs, fiddling with levels and crafting the sound of many of the city's biggest shiners. He has produced 20 albums in the last year and a half, of the likes of Bella Koshka and Vicious Vicious. Since opening his studio, Jackson has been a catalyst to the scene, playing the role of the mysterious man behind the green curtain. But Jackson has held many roles, one being part-time musician, full-time office drone.

"I was working at the University of Minnesota running reports, just office bullshit. It was a means to an end. It was me for six years," Jackson says. "And the whole time I was there I was acquiring studio gear to build a studio. So about 2006, I got my studio up and running and I quit my job and I started working on that record [A Winner's Shadow] and then started recording other people... and then started recording other people."

That was the obstacle, Jackson says. He spent so much time wiling away in the studio working on other bands' music that he had to put his personal passions on the back burner.

"Pretty soon I was just working every day recording other people. I had no time to work on my own record," he says. "I was working with five or six at a time. I started putting their interests over my own."

This March Jackson finally finished his two-year effort, third album A Winner's Shadow. It was, he says, "utter relief." But his focus has not been in vain, when considering his output and momentum as a producer. One such act he produced, Aviette, is celebrating its CD release at the show.

Aviette is a slow-moving, deeply vibrating machine. Singer Holly Munoz' smooth alto is sleek and flirty. Justin Hartke's bass is deep and rumbling. Aviette can be powerful, but tends to enjoy the demure, with mid-tempo swooners lollygagging on the subject of heartbreak.

Joining Aviette on the bill is The Alarmists, one of Minneapolis' most hyped acts. Largely the band's title is fitting. Their psych sound lobs one leg on each side of the pop/rock border and behaves like Brian Jonestown Massacre or The Warlocks riding high on a shot of candy-coated peppermints. Only, the pieces don't quite yet fit together. Live, the vocals shudder with pop punk's nasally intonations and stand in opposition to the music's wave of psychedelia. But the keyboards save it. Jorge Raasch's set-up consists of three keyboards, from which he elicits Motown ivory-pounding, church chorus chords and ultra-fuzz. With some fine-tuning, The Alarmists' sound will only get better.

And then comes Kid Dakota, playing to a hushed landscape of faces.

"I think the quiet acoustic drove all the noisy people away," Jackson jokes to the thinned crowd. His bare acoustic filters out other distractions, sending the people who want beer-swilling party music in search of Cedar Avenue's plethora of seedy bars.

Jackson sings about what he knows, a sepia-tinted childhood in South Dakota, Minnesota, its ten thousand lakes and the Weather Channel. The haunting melodies and sparse guitar make listeners feel like they are pulled into his inner sanctum of pure thoughts and tones. This stripped down version of Jackson's music is primitive and emotional. His baritone can be thunderous; it can also evaporate like whispers. Tonight he is just a man, not work-weary producer. He sits, just him and his guitar on a lonely, dark stage, a capo his only adornment. The curtain is drawn.