Yale Delay, guitarist for the band IfIHadAHiFi, warns me, "When we play, danger happens!"

Not just musically, either. Throughout their three years of playing post-punk inspired rock, IfIHadAHiFi has played through four concussions, three hospital visits, a drummer setting himself on fire, an aneurysm and a broken toe.

Critics compare them to Devo, The Fall or Brainiac, but the band claims to be influenced not so much by music, but by professional wrestling, gin and most of all, each other.

IfIHadAHiFi formed up north in the Fox Valley after the group Pop Machine broke up. Delay, Awkward and bassist Mr. Alarm had a strong desire to play music together, and after the former keyboardist Noise Lesion left the group, Reno Loner soon joined up.

The four of them together form a rock and roll encyclopedia so large that allows them to interchange different genres of music into their environments of feedback, which can be best described as Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" with hooks.

"I like the idea of writing catchy pop hooks off of feedback," Awkward says, "It's finding something unlistenable and making it listenable."

"We come up with some weird sounds to build upon and we just jam around that," Loner says, "As far as lyric writing goes, we have an unwritten rule: Don't be sappy. Don't be stupid. Write about things that are interesting."

Those who listen to their first CD "Ones and Zeroes" will hear about such topics as building a girlfriend out of Radio Shack parts. It was sounds and topics like these that peaked in popularity during the early 1980s.

IfIHadAHiFi knows this type of music makes it harder to find an audience, and they don't care. They rely on the high quality of their performances which leads to positive word of mouth.

Their audience continues to grow with every performance and they feel that the Milwaukee scene will continue to expand as well. The talent, they say, is becoming really strong, and they would like to see the city become the next Seattle or Detroit.

Not a bad vision for the future coming from four guys from small-town Wisconsin. They feel that their adolescences spent in one-horse towns like Hilbert makes them stronger.

"Having us all come from small towns doesn't make us diluted than as some middle-of-the-road rock group from a big city like Chicago," Delay says. "The one punk rock kid in Hilbert has to be pretty sturdy in his musical tastes."

The band just came back from a tour, which brought their danceable feedback to cities such as Boston and New York, and is currently working on the follow-up to "Ones and Zeroes".

Loner promises much more experimentation with their sound. "It's more aggressive, yet more melodic", he says.