KABUL (Reuters) – Afghans are used to having their days broken by a burst of gunfire or the boom of an explosion. But the barrage of drumming, bass beats and amped-up guitar solos that will hit the city next week may stop many in their tracks.

Sound Central, a one-day “stealth festival” that organizers hope will draw 1,000 to 2,000 young Afghans, will be the first music festival the country has seen since it plunged into three decades of violence in the late 1970s.

Afghan bands playing music from doom death metal to blues rock will be joined by musicians who have flown in from across Central Asia — Iran to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

The music will almost certainly be a new experience for most of the audience in a country where people seeking a change from traditional Afghan music tend to listen to western pop or sound-tracks from India’s big-hit Bollywood films.

“The real bottom-line aim of this festival is to ignite youth to be interested in modern music,” said organizer Travis Beard, who dreamt up the festival four years ago, and has been working on it in earnest for the last two years.

“What we are trying to do is to expose them to new kinds of music so they can get into those styles of music, and also just start playing music. Hopefully we’ll get some kids saying ‘Hey this is really cool! Dad can I get a drum set?’ or ‘Mum can I get a guitar’,” Beard said.

Beard is an Australian who first came to Afghanistan as a news photographer five years ago, joined a band in Kabul and rediscovered his love of music “after many years away.”

KABUL (Reuters) – An Afghan employee of the U.S. government opened fire inside a CIA office in Kabul on Sunday evening, killing an American and injuring a second, U.S. and Afghan officials said, in the second major breach of embassy security in two weeks.

The attacker was killed, and the injured U.S. citizen was taken to a military hospital with non-life threatening injuries, U.S. embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall said on Monday.

It was not clear if the U.S. citizens were victims of a rogue employee who had been won over to the insurgent cause, or just the escalation of an argument in a city were tensions are high and many people carry guns. There are precedents for both.

“There was a shooting incident at an annex of the U.S. embassy in Kabul last night involving an Afghan employee who was killed. The motivation for the attack is still under investigation at this time,” Sundwall said.

The Taliban could not immediately be reached for comment.

The shooting came the same month that insurgents took over an unfinished high-rise near the city’s heavily guarded military, political and diplomatic heart and showered rockets down on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters.

That attack lasted 20 hours, and the U.S. has blamed it on the Haqqani network of militants, who were long based in Pakistan’s lawless frontier regions although they now say they have moved back into Afghanistan.