On West 4th Avenue on Saturday, July 23

What the hell happened to the rain? The sudden appearance of honest-to-God summer weather came as such a shock to my system that I might have actually started hallucinating at some point in the seven or so hours I spent wandering up and down West 4th Avenue during the Khatsahlano! Music + Arts Festival. Maybe there were trace elements of the psychedelic hippie spirit in the air, but there were moments when I didn’t know if what I thought I saw was actually real, but one thing was for certain: the folks at Zulu Records did a damn good job curating the all-local music portion of the 10-block event. There wasn’t a sub-par act to be found on any of the four stages.

Rich Hope kicked things off at 4th and Pine, holding down the 11:30 a.m. slot, which he noted was “an ungodly hour for rock ’n’ roll”. While it’s true that Hope’s brand of distorted blues raunch seemed a more suitable soundtrack to drunken roadhouse brawling than to a gloriously sun-soaked day in the heart of Kits, that didn’t stop him from barrelling through “Let’s Jump Around Some” and “I See Trouble” as if it were half past midnight on Beale Street.

In fact, the early part of the day turned out to be a bit of a blues explosion. At 4th and Maple around 12:14 p.m., D.B. Buxton was moaning like the long-lost love child of Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart while his band banged out a raw boogie. Kind of weird but also kind of awesome.

At about 12:49, my hallucinations began. On-stage at the intersection of 4th and Yew, a dude with the head of a horse was playing a synthesizer. He was either a figment of my imagination or the keyboardist for Hot Panda in a mask. The band’s carnivalesque music was topped with lyrics about the CIA. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I suppose if I can take UJ3RK5 seriously, I can tolerate this spirited silliness.

It started to seem as if every time I went by the Vine Street stage I would see Ian Brown manning the drum kit. He had already filled in for the absent Adrian Mack as Rich Hope’s drummer, and at 1:14 p.m., I caught him again, doing a fine job of propelling Catlow through surging indie rock featuring the sort of guitar work that suggested the group’s members have fond memories of ’90s indie rock.

There was no doubt that summer had at long last arrived in Vancouver by 1:38, when I went back to Yew Street to find Flash Palace playing. Postrock music tends to be either epic or cold and technical, but Flash Palace imbues its compositions with considerable warmth, their circling bass patterns and chiming guitars sounding almost tropical. Or maybe all that sunshine was really starting to get to me. Either way, the youthful quartet’s sound proved to be a perfect fit for a stage where part of the backdrop was the sailboats in English Bay.

While Flash Palace played, I watched a man who carried the fantastically horned head of a merino ram on his shoulders stroll by, a beautiful girl in a purple bathing suit on his arm. I am not making this up.

There were no animal-headed people in sight when Louise Burns and her mellow, rootsy band the Sunshine Boys struck up at 4th and Cypress at around 2 p.m., but the guy strumming the acoustic guitar looked like Devendra Banhart, and that’s close enough. Also, I swear to God, the plastic deer outside the Sitka store winked at me.

Back at the Yew Street stage, the Shilohs looked like they might win the award for least stylish act of the day, threads-wise, but the shorts-and-loafers-wearing quartet seemed unlikely to care about that. And what the hell do I know about fashion, anyway? What I do know is that Johnny Payne coaxes some tasteful tone and fluid leads out of his Telecaster, and anyone who makes me think of Tom Verlaine playing for the Byrds can wear any damn thing he wants to.

Down at Cypress, No Gold took the stage at around 3 p.m., going from spacey micro-synth ambiance to Afro-pop in the space of two songs. Yes, Afro-pop, from three very white Vancouver guys. That might have seemed weird in a world where Vampire Weekend and the similarly named Fool's Gold don’t exist. But they do, so it didn’t.

Back up at Maple, B-Lines made quite a racket. These boys have been touted as the standard-bearers of Vancouver's “weird punk” scene, but it just sounded like regular old punk rock to me. It had the kids in the front dancing, sort of.

Later on, at the same stage, the weather had taken a turn toward the cold and cloudy and either I was thinking more clearly or all the freakish beasts had gone into hiding. Which meant I could enjoy Mode Moderne without being distracted by man-animal hybrids. With its synth washes and melodic, up-front bass lines, Mode Moderne seemed tailored for anyone who identifies with the line “I've got the body of a man who reads poetry.” Frontman Phillip Intile also does a pretty good Ian Curtis impression. Well, vocally at least. He doesn't do the dance moves.

By the time the Evaporators hit the Maple Street stage some time after 5:00, the sun had made a return appearance. In his scarily tight patriotic-superhero outfit, Nardwuar did jumping jacks like some sort of garage-rock Jack LaLanne, surfed the crowd while playing his Ace Tone organ, and generally blew the roof off the mother (which was a pretty neat trick at an outdoor concert). In other words, business as usual, and one hell of a way to end a day that was an all-around success, otherworldly creatures notwithstanding.