Radon Ensemble

By the year 2000, rock saxophonist Steve Mackay’s profile has grown so low that music historians had written him off as dead. In 1970 Mackay had emerged as an enigma when he briefly joined Iggy Pop and The Stooges to record and tour behind their Funhouse album, but although he’s recorded sporadically in the following decades (including with Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes), it wasn’t until he joined The Stooges’ 2003 reunion that the cult figure earned a critical reappraisal (or, at the very least, an acknowledgement that he was in fact alive). It turns out that since the late ’90s, Mackay been playing with a noisy, ever-shifting experimental outfit called the Radon Ensemble, which he’ll perform with tonight as part of a 9 p.m. bill at Club Garibaldi arranged by and featuring Milwaukee’s violin-wielding prog-punks, The Danglers.