Ten years ago, at All Tomorrow's Parties, a now-defunct music festival held occasionally in the rain-harangued British seaside town of Camber Sands, I attended a show by Lightning Bolt, a noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island. They had set up in the center of a grubby hall at Pontins, England's second-best-known budget holiday park. At the band's request, security had allowed only thirty or so festival-goers into a venue that could comfortably have accommodated a thousand, leaving plenty of room on the beery carpet for dancing, or possibly rioting. We clustered in the round as Brian Gibson began to flay his bass and Brian Chippendale, wearing a wrestler's mask, assaulted his drum kit, his voice blaring primally through a microphone taped to his cheek. The performance was disorienting, both intimate and savage, like the first moments after an accident, before time resumes its normal speed and the damage can be measured.

Small independent video game studios are growing in number and influence at PAX East, the annual videogaming show that's drawing tens of thousands of gamers to Boston's Seaport District. The Indie Megabooth at PAX East, which runs through today at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, features 84 studios this year, up from 16 indie developers with booth space just a few years ago. Indie games are attracting more veterans from large gaming companies, who want to follow their own vision, and the rudimentary graphics and sound often seen in the first indie wave is giving way to titles with striking artwork, music, and top-notch game play. Scott Sinclair, co-founder of Cambridge-based Molasses Flood LLC, was the art director for big game titles "BioShock" and "BioShock Infinite" at Quincy's Irrational Games before launching his own company several years ago. He and five other co-founders raised 251,647 on Kickstarter to fund "The Flame in the Flood," a post-apocalyptic survival game that follows a woman and her dog navigating a flood-swollen river on a raft.