Following the Sphere’s grand opening in September 2023, there’s been a lot of discussion, at least in the electronic music world, about which electronic artist will be the first to play at the new Spaceship venue in Las Vegas.
Presumably many people will seize this opportunity. Las Vegas is the center of dance music, and billboards along Interstate 15 into the city feature the faces of new and old artists from Marquee, Hakkasan, XS and other nightclubs on the Strip.
But it was a new face who finally made the cut, with Sphere announcing in July that Italian-American techno and melodic techno producer Anyma (who had never lived in the city before) would be The One.
As the news broke, the conversation shifted as people outside of dance music became familiar with the artist. Still relatively new to music. People asked him who he was and what he would do? Meanwhile, the buzz within the dance community is that, in layman’s terms, the show is going to be completely insane.
Of course, after Sphere’s critically acclaimed residencies with previous artists U2, Phish, the Eagles and Dead & Company, the bar is set very high. But those were bands and this would be a DJ. Still, interest in Anyma is strong, and the statistics are clear: Tickets for the eight-night residency sold out on the day they went on sale in July, with Anyma reporting that 100,000 tickets have been sold for those shows, More dates were subsequently added, bringing the total to eight performances and a total of 130,000 tickets sold.
Formal and grand title Afterlife Presents Anyma: The End of GenesysThe show kicked off on December 27 and the residency brings revelers to the Sphere for the first time during one of the busiest times of the year in Las Vegas.
Two days later, on December 29, between the openers of Cassian b2b Kevin de Vries and Charlotte de Witte, attendees milled around the venue dressed in carnival attire and black leather afterlife uniforms with sunglasses underneath. . (Anyma features a different support act each night of the residency, with Dec. 28 opener Amelie Lens becoming the venue’s first-ever officially promoted female artist.)
Anyma quickly took the stage at 11pm, appearing on top of a riser on the venue floor with glowing wires emanating from the riser. The other two risers on either side of him each contain a cello and robotic arms that play the instrument throughout the show, emphasizing the overall Anyma aesthetic and the machine-versus-human quality of the show we’re about to see.
In fact, it’s a banana. Beginning with a robot breaking a glass wall to the music, the performance ended up subverting some standard dance music conventions. For example, many big shows take place at seated venues like Madison Square Garden, the Kia Forum, and the Red Rocks, but the Sphere is arguably the only venue that gives attendees a seat in the seating area (there’s also standing room on the Sphere floor) . (Or in the case of live performances, drums.)
Sure, a lot of people were standing around cheering, but overall it was a sit-down show that at times felt more like a futuristic movie theater than a nightclub or any standard big dance show.
In a way, Anyma and Dec. 29’s featured artists — Delilah Montagu and Ellie Goulding — are secondary in importance to the visuals. Given the focus the screen demands and everything happening on it, you might not even notice they’re there in person. Anyma, born Matteo Milleri, has long been part of the group Tale of Us, with the pair developing a signature visual aesthetic through their work, which they release on their influential record label Afterlife and its affiliate shows .
This combination of transhumanist aesthetics and human-versus-machine ideologies suits Sphere so well that one can’t help but think it’s a big reason why Anyma gets these shows. Any show playing at the venue needs to have a well-developed, world-building visual identity (which is part of why Sphere is so effective for traditional acts like Dead, who have a huge visual history to draw from.) But Sphere’s Idea-Bending’s technical capabilities provide Anyma and his team with the opportunity to showcase and expand their epic, psychedelic, dark, and beautiful robot narratives.
They really scaled up. Here are five of the best parts of the show.
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The visual effect is obvious
Image source: provided by Anyma
Where to start. The Sphere is ultimately about the artist’s visual presentation, and previous residents have discussed feeling almost upstaged by the venue, or at least feeling the need to step up musically in order to compete with what’s happening on the screen.
But while Anyma’s musical performance was excellent (more on that later), the star of the show was clearly the visuals, with the show starting with the female robot character who broke through glass walls throughout the show, causing cheers and A moment of collective takeoff was created. The robot then ends up hurtling into space (her freefall causing moments of physical dizziness and disorientation) before being catapulted into a realm that includes, but is not limited to, a verdant garden (where the show’s other protagonist, a human, Made his first in a four-act drama, lush cityscapes gradually evolve into fiery hells, arid deserts, and many other realms. Meanwhile, other visual segments are more conceptual, with the screen at one point being entirely occupied by blinking eyeballs. .
There was a poetry in the presentation, human ingenuity and science and engineering powering the Sphere end of creationThe story focuses on the encounter between organic (the man) and android (his female counterpart) and humanity, which in the end, at least in the show, wins out, with the moment when the male character inserts a beating heart into a woman’s body grabbing attention. .
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special guest
Image source: provided by Anyma
On-screen and real-life guests include FKA twigs, who appears in a clip dancing underwater to her own Anyma remix of “Eusexua”; Grimes, who appears in a brief on-screen clip, The clip shows her writhing underwater. Meanwhile, Ellie Goulding appeared on screen herself, singing an unreleased Anyma collaboration, while close-up images of her face hypnotically morphed.
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Tons of unreleased songs, including an upcoming Ellie Goulding collaboration
Image source: provided by Anyma
Anyma’s “Hear Me Now” and “Walking With a Ghost” elicited some of the loudest music-related cheers during the two-hour set, which was also peppered with his remixes of Fred.. and Swedish House Mafia’s ” “Turn On” Lights Again…” But a lot of the show was made up of music that didn’t come back to Shazam results, which could/probably means a lot of fresh Anyma output is on the way. Arguably the biggest track to come is the aforementioned “Hypnotized,” a collaboration with Ellie Goulding, who was on hand to help make its debut on December 29th. A first collaboration between the British artist, one of the most important artists in dance music.
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Anma’s quick cameo
As mentioned before, the protagonists in the visual show are human men and robot women, who constantly meet, embrace, and exchange longing glances in various gorgeously rendered science fiction scenes. While other Sphere residencies have incorporated live footage of the band into their shows, this was not the case with Anyma, who only appeared on screen once at the end of the show, when the male character briefly transformed into a digital version of Millery (Topless).
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the historical nature of the whole situation
Image source: provided by Anyma
Electronic music is a scrappy genre that has always fought for a place in the mainstream, with varying degrees of success over the past 40-plus years. Having an electronic artist on the scene, not to mention one who has sold out multiple times, is further evidence of the genre’s broad appeal and its overall health, especially in the live realm. It also highlights that Sphere is a perfect fit for the genre, given the heavy use of large stage settings and expansive visuals in large-scale modern electronic live shows.
