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Beck/Sukia
If you paged through any glossy music magazine this summer, you don't need to be reminded that Beck Hansen is the single greatest pop force since Al Jolson, or at least Paleface. Suffice to say, the sideburned surrealist is worth the dead trees. His opening act, however, is a lesser-known quantity. Sukia is a group of synth fetishists -- two, I think, though we won't know for sure until we see them onstage -- whose self-imposed mission is to recreate skin flicks and grade-Z adventure movies for the ear, without the visual content. Picture, if you will, the following footage from the off-off-back-lots of Hollywood: a guy in a cleft-headed rubber alien suit presiding over a flimsy, spray-painted computer embankment; an impossibly buxom nurse in a micro-uniform straddling a patient in traction; a woeful tag team of would-be superheroes bedeviled by lumpy midriffs and shaving rashes. Now: What do you hear? Blips, gurgles, canned beatboxes, and twang-guitar grinds? Why, that would be the deranged sonic expanse of Sukia, the first offering from the Dust Brothers' Nickelbag Records. Like a sleep-deprived Wurlitzer soloist conducting a cable-access telethon, like Martin Denny serenading a grove of white plastic Christmas trees, Beck's opening act promises to probe the outer reaches of convention. (James Sullivan)

Beck and Sukia play at the Warfield, 982 Market St., on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15; call 775-7722.