While most of my friends are in London or Paris for study abroad, I’ve come to Glasgow. “Why Glasgow?” you may ask. Well, I certainly didn’t come for the endless rainy days or the high murder rate. The artsy-fartsy revival of Glasgow from its shipbuilding days is the talk of the town these days. Most notably, there is a dizzying music scene where there’s always something for everyone. Taking a walk through the lanes of central Glasgow, a traveler’s ears are bombarded with musical notes gushing out onto the pavement—from pubs and clubs to the street-side bagpipes and accordions.

A few weeks ago, I attended day one of Instal 08, an annual underground and experimental music festival, at the Arches, a cavernous venue under the Glasgow central train station. The theme of the show was “Self-Cancellation,” exploring the ways sound can cancel itself out. Naturally, there were some tepid performances. One artist put on ear plugs and started making some static sounds with a computer, and another blew into a tuba as it filled up with sand (good in theory but otherwise sleep-inducing). There were also some intensely cool pieces like “Asymptotic Freedom” by John Butcher, who made ethereal music, harnessing feedback on the mike by putting a saxophone really close to it.

Then there was “Archisonic” by Mark and John Bain, who used “seismic sensors, home built electronics, oscillators, and building.” I’m not entirely sure what happened since I couldn’t see over anyone’s head. It seemed, though, that there were really strong and really low sound waves reverberating through the arches. I could feel all my bones shaking, and my kneecaps felt weird and gooey. My teeth were having a rave inside my mouth and my tonsils were jiggling so much I started coughing. I honestly felt scared for a moment, especially when the vinyl tablecloth I was standing near started slapping my thigh. If I ever were abducted by aliens, this is probably what it would feel like.

The last event of the evening, “Acid/Nylon”, was the centerpiece. The creator of the piece, Gustav Metzger, was a leading figure of the Auto-Destructive Art movement in the ’60s. He thought that art should be destroyed to reflect humanity’s path to self-destruction. Pete Townshend of The Who attended lectures by Metzger when he was a student at Ealing Art College, and he later credited Metzger with inspiring his trademark guitar-smashing. One of Metzger’s most well-known pieces in the ’60s was Acid Action Painting, which involved corroding large sheets of white, black, and red nylon by squirting hydrochloric acid.

“Acid/Nylon” relayed the same idea, this time incorporating sound. Two performers in yellow rubber suits and gas masks were set up on a table with a microscope behind the screen that separated them from the audience. Attached to the microscope, a projector blew up the contents on the Petri dish onto the screen. Small microphones were attached to the Petri dish, emitting a wave of hissing static and car motor noises. At first, there was only a dark patterned texture of the nylon on the screen. The pattern stretched downward as if it were melting. The clunkity-clunk of the car noises built up and then, violently, a bubble of light ripped out from the center of the fabric as the acid burned through the nylon until the whole image was engulfed by a screen of white light. Sometimes it was a smooth bubble, and sometimes it looked sticky, like stretched bubble gum. Sometimes it would bubble out explosively and sometimes it just sat there like oozing lava.

The grace of the dancing nylon on the screen, along with the tinny static that felt like someone sticking their pinkies inside my ears, made me feel as if I really had been abducted by aliens. I looked around me. My fellow abductees were bathed in a blue hue, eyes transfixed by the screen. One of them, I noticed, was a small old man, who turned out to be none other than Gustav Metzger himself, looking positively delighted. As the show flicked to a close too soon, an announcer in a British accent reminded us, “We got quite a bit of acid back here, so please get out if you don’t want to die.” The audience quickly filtered out of the Arches.

When I stepped out onto the street, my ears were killing me. I couldn’t even make out what a couple of neds—Scottish guys with shaved heads and tracksuits who will probably beat the crap out of you if you offend them in any way—shouted at me, but I suppose that’s the norm anyway. Amid the light drizzle of the night, I walked home, daintily stepping over streams of piss and puke on the streets of Glasgow, ready to rest my gooey kneecaps and dream of acid and nylon.