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06/17/2019

Noisia at 45 East, June 28th / Preview

 By MATT HANSEN // Dutch electronic trio known for video game music stops by with local producer Noer the Boy

For a genre so preoccupied with the future, nearly all modern Electronic Dance Music dutifully circles the past. Every new style innovation spawns a bubble that begins to stagnate as soon as it has a name. Producers with Vegas residencies tread water on four-on-the-floor formulas that were sweaty when Paul Oakenfold was entertaining beachside crowds two decades ago. Synthwave nostalgia acts still clutter up Coachella, while Dubstep endures long after devolving into that wub noise that signals the plot twist in every summer movie trailer. But long before the jungle becomes a jingle, before drum & bass becomes pointless beat porn, you can smell the exhaust of Noisia striking out for parts unknown and unnamed.

Christened in 2003 after a serendipitous discovery on a shelf of videotapes (Noisia is “vision" upside-down), the Dutch trio went by a host of monikers and opened three record labels before consolidating their myriad mutations under one banner. Unified by crunchy, tactile bass tones and bionic polyrhythms, their chimerical output is almost too radical for the most hardcore dance floors, but ideal for hovercraft racing and demon-slashing (they’re a mainstay on the Wipeout franchise soundtracks, and scored the 2013 Devil May Cry reboot). Nine years on, the 16-bit remix of their single “Machine Gun” from their debut Split The Atom still sounds like something stolen from an impossibly brutal future; whereas the asymmetrical robot-mosh of “Dzenghis,” a recent collaboration with legendary beat-smith Amon Tobin, could be the birth of a whole new style bubble.

Performing live, Martijn van Sonderen, Nik Roos and Thijs de Vlieger don’t so much reproduce their devastating studio heaviness as unleash it in its final form which, in the confines of 45 East, promises to go off like turning an orca loose in a jacuzzi. Pace yourself, they may just be replicants. 

21+, tickets $10-$15

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