Comprised of producer Ethan Kath (an alias) and vocalist Alice Glass (also an alias), Crystal Castles didn't take the stage until 1 a.m. at electro festival the HARD Summer Tour Saturday. No matter the wait for their set -- together with drummer Christopher Chartrand, their chaotic fever dream of a performance wrecked every eardrum within listening distance. In a good way, of course. CC entered in pitch darkness, shrill instrumentals winding up to a strobe-light effect, revealing Ms. Glass stomping and shouting, moving in a frenzied, almost epileptic manner. Familiar with their recorded sound (which is frequently pleasantly ethereal and twinkling), their live performance proved somewhat shocking. It was Ms. Glass who stole the show, no doubt, commanding attention for a number of reasons; from her grandma-meets-punk-kid get-up (think conservative skirt, tights, tee and black combat boots, all amounting to a heroin chic sex symbol) to her sporadic swigs of Jack, from her crawling and rolling on the stage  to her diving on countless occasions, to security's obvious dismay, straight into the ocean of waving hands, tentacles swaying to catch her fall.

Among memorable moments from the performance, two take the cake: one, Ms. Glass mounting the drum kit (which she's been known to destroy in the past), singing whilst perched there, then banging the hell out of the cymbals with her mic and, two, during one of her myriad dives, when it appeared a young man got grabby and she swung at him approximately five times.

Prior to the hour-long glass-shattering shrieking of, well, Ms. Glass, I walked in to catch the tail end of Destructo's heavy set, followed by the UK's House sultan, Sinden. The former, LA-based and better known by day as Gary Richards, is the event's curator. He dropped beats to a gradually growing crowd, whereas by the time our latter man made it halfway through his spin session, the room was seemingly at capacity. Seems many in attendance came for the producers' upbeat dance tracks, but a selection had their sights set solely on the rough and tough audible assault of Crystal Castles. Regardless, despite the uninspired digital imagery and my lukewarm opinion of the underage rave, from the second level stage right I had an excellent view of the audience. The crowd proved entertaining to say the least, among them a girl bearing a bear-head hat, furry with ears peeking out, a kid on crutches, repeatedly striking one of them in the air as he hobbled, a Napoleon Dynamite look-alike, and the usual shirtless and sweaty-chested dudes, the shoe-surrendering body-surfers, the fist-pumpers and, of course,  the glow-stick wielding variety.