Something about wobble bass encourages honesty. And in that honesty, a crowd moves like a single living thing, and the movement, that near-feral energy bouncing back and forth between the DJ and the crowd, is the actual thing an Excision show is for. The lasers are just pointed at it, and the subwoofers are just vibrating it. We’ll talk about this. First though, I’ll be honest myself: I’m not the reviewer usually sought after for this show. I haven’t been to a proper EDM show in longer than the careers of the people I came to see. Live music work of late has found me in hardcore metal screams instead of CD-Js and 808s. But you don’t forget your first “real EDM show”, no matter how many guitars ruined your hearing since then. The last time I saw a huge DJ video wall in person, VHS tapes might have been involved. I came out on a freezing Monday night because I specifically wanted everything missing from thousands of hours pouring EDM albums new and old out of headphones into my skull: I wanted back to that direct to skull experience. That’s why I’m the ideal reviewer for this show.
You don’t come to EDM shows to listen to albums. You come to join an organism. I’ve been through the scene and the sounds long enough to remember when the underground started seeping into the festival grounds and was met with scoffs, “why pay to watch someone stand there and play their album on a machine?” The implication, of course, that you ought to watch someone else play their album on different machines. I won’t waste time with the objections: we’re up on three decades of overwhelming, wubbing proof past them. Let’s talk about organisms instead. The writhing, all-consuming, and primal kind.
It works like this, in case you haven’t been: you come into a room with cool looking lights, some pre-show music playing, and stand around with people you don’t know while you wait for something to start. With me so far? They’ll make you wait outside while they test lasers and other things. It was cold outside. But when I was inside, they were testing videos and things: synchronized images on the video walls with precisely timed orbs and splooshy liquid flows creeping across mountains, then robots and stuff. It was a small spoiler of what was to come, as they aligned projectors and a technician paced the stage and barked in his radio. It’s fine; they didn’t use any of those videos in the show anyway.
While you wait, people are going to talk to you: they want to talk to you. They need to know if you’ve been to an Excision show before, and want you to know you’re in for a treat, and some others will tell you they’ve never even been to something like this, and others still want to give you things, like colorful, unrelated stickers. Bracelets for some, especially if you are the sort whose wrists are lined with plasticky circles of string and beads too. A hand meets a hand, clasped together, and each slides a bracelet to the other with a simple spoken affirmation: “unity”. I promise we’ll talk about the music. We already are.
The first DJ stepped out. You’re supposed to call them artists. We can fight about it later. I don’t think Bryan Cruz cares enough. He came to be RZRKT (“resurrect”), and that’s what he wants to be remembered as: those letters and that effect. He has a hype man, but didn’t use him. I always wonder about the hype man. Some talk in a nonstop patter to pump energy in, a proud lineage of constant word flow going all the way back to the Jamaican sound system. Some dance their way around, building the energy with kinetics to suggest this is music you move to. RZRKT did both, himself. I’m not going to say he doesn’t need a hype man: I’m saying he did what his music needed up against the job of being the first sound to move you around. It’s hard work because EDM shows in general and electronic bass in particular start like this: pre-show music > silence with some cheering > skull-penetrating sound and now it’s time to go. Someone has to start that jet engine. It’s the same volume as one, if you were unsure.
RZRKT talks more than you might have expected. He doesn’t stop the sound, he twists knobs and faders to interject into it. There’s one pattern he often threw out I hope was heard well: shoutouts. He dropped several new tracks on us, some from his string of 2025 singles, and one from a track dropped right as he went on tour. But he’d often mention, “This comes outta my boy _____” and “shoutout to DJ _____”. They’re blanks to me because I don’t remember them: I was one human away from the center stack of subwoofers and lucky to remember my own _____’s. I didn’t recognize the names at the time, and that’s usually the point. Shoutouts go to co-producers and people who were there on your way up, and you for them. Some make it, some don’t, some others don’t want to. You show love to those you collab with and those you kicked back with, and that goes straight into your wall of sound synths and drums, which he provided in plenty.
RZRKT’s set was focused on the sound he’s becoming known for, which drives hard and edged, trusting in moments of brighter layers and swirled synths to provide variance. But you don’t become a rising darling of Subsidia’s roster by brooding over excessive melody in your live sets: you bring pounding bass that moves consistently. He drove all this through the speakers and his available time with sweating force, providing sound just on that edge of dissonance sewn with love for his people and craft. He continued this right down to the end of his set when he evoked his earned goodwill of crowd energy not to earn final accolades but to “give it up for Sippy!” The artist culturing the organism knows it doesn’t want pauses, so he gives passes. Sippy’s set starts immediately without a breath between.
Sippy takes over the decks with a huge smile. The video walls flash quickly to show us her face in giant form: it’s smiling, and that smile lasts the whole set until it’s as imprinted on your face as the wubs in your ears or the video walls’ neon pink and army of marching Sippys with fuzz-framed glasses is in your eyes. She brings that kinetic form I talked about: she dances right from the start, moving left and right across the clear table and straying back far enough to make the videographer at her back creatively dodge. She whirls to him and dances that way a bit, then it’s back to the tables in time for the next tweak and runway to the next track in the set. Sippy answers the objection that EDM performers have spaces during their songs that run autonomously. She spends that time putting her body into the music and dancing with everyone: she encourages the organism by merging to its motions. Her sound does the same. Her singles and albums travel tempos and melodic feels. Her live set takes concepts from tracks like “What is a Gremlin?” and turns them into an assault that grabs your eardrums and tosses them like basketballs through bassy vibrating hoops.
She promised ahead of this tour she’d be experimenting with tightly coordinated visuals and video effects for the first time. She’d been spending considerable time with the production team and learning a lot. What she learned is how to grab our shoulders and shake us into dancing with her sidestepping jumps and perfectly on-beat bunnies. The sound would be almost cutesy paired as it is with bright marching clones and bunnies and neon-lit urban streets, but she brought well-built drops to push her motion on the stage out to us and remind everyone this music hits hard. It’s just that hers smiles while doing it. She sees her giant self on the video walls at one point, laughs, and spends some time turned around to watch them dance with her. We like it too. Dion Timmer rushes out, trademark long blonde hair flowing under his beanie, as Sippy queues him up. He half-tackles Sippy in a big hug, a thanks among friends for the energy she built by getting the floor dancing with smiles we’re still wearing.
Dion Timmer wants to join in the fun now. His bevy of anime-inspired visuals are gated behind a Windows XP loading screen. The bass is already at work, but it’s building intensity on top of intensity as the video wall lets us know: “VERY EXTRA” has to load. There’s a loading bar and everything. He can’t just give you very extra, you need charge-up time. The loading bar might just be for us, actually: people are starting to move more and more as he builds the energy and provides a really clear drop. VERY EXTRA has loaded on us. He gets headbangers wiggling the front rail in no time, with his hard pushes that drop fun hints of his creative range and slightly unhinged dips that remind you why artists like Zeds Dead and Excision collab with him for breakout hits. Through his verbal interjections inside and around tracks and pumping out a few newly released and unreleased pieces, he gets the energy he wants: a dancing mania built on inspiring you to keep moving.
He makes sure his sound is an onslaught built around dance momentum, complete with occasional removals of the beanie and letting his long blonde hair whip like its own laser show as he demonstrates how much we ought be losing it to these beats. We obey: he knows how to move us and that’s why he’s here, in this spot of the set. We are, after all, only halfway through the sets. He’s not content to sit in the middle rut, RZRKT and Sippy on one side and Volpe and Excision on the other. He wants to make you find energy to sweat out more dancing and sound absorption until you’re happy to be exhausted and somehow not that tired anymore. He ends his set on a high point, the last track holding up energy to match his enthusiasm on the mic and headbanging until it finally oozes its last wobbles out of the speakers. There’s an ear-ringing silence now: Ray Volpe is about to turn on the Volpetron.
Ray Volpe’s set features a pause and a black video wall at the start. He’s not out here yet. First, words flash onto the video wall with block lettered urgency. VOLPETRON, ARE YOU THERE? IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP. Volpetron, an enormous robot the video wall renders as standing up and crashing through the city like a bass music monster, serves as Ray Volpe’s oft-heard producer’s tag and seeming alter ego. Though really, I’m not sure he means it to be him so much as the consequence of his music. More on that in a moment. First, we need to talk about cool robot lasers. The visual production leading up to this was about personality and artists coming into their own with experimentation to match up to their moods and craft. RZRKT soaked the video wall in reds and fire-driven Terminator-looking coolness, Sippy brought us manic delusions of bunnies and neon, Dion brought us a convention’s worth of anime. Ray Volpe comes with a visceral image already assembled: Volpetron is a giant robot and he’s happy to be out destroying things, including us. The video wall reminds us of this at one point: “The drop you are about to hear is brought to you by our very generous sacrifice:” a moment of dark black is pierced by a chaotic swirl pattern, exploding bass drop through our stomachs and the floor below us, and a single word burned into our retinas: “YOU”. We’re happy to be destroyed.
And the sound really is a lot: there’s no let-up, no meandering on the path to finding which new kind of saw wave or synthesizer squeal will delight us into headbanging or squirming next. He reinforces this many times in word and deed. His first words in the mic were to remind us he has 45 minutes, and “let’s go." Simple, straightforward. He has 45 minutes to make us move, and he’s going to spend that time focused on good music that earns it. He again proves he means business when a hook’s lyrics blaze on the giant screens: “Every dubstep song has a fake out drop / losing will to live / can we f*cking stop?!” He’s... not wrong. The fake out drop is a popular way to froth up crowds in dubstep, the idea being when the real drop hits you ought to lose your minds. No fake outs here: Ray Volpe gives you the drop when you feel it coming, and when it does come, it hits like the truck you knew it would, but you didn’t think the truck would be purple and green and scream in your face while it ran over you, the tires wobbling and pushing the crowd organism around in frenzies. His opinions continue as fast and pointed as his changeups and hooks, with “R.I.P. BROSTEP” appearing on a cartoonish grave across the video wall while he pummels us with another honest-to-God stomach-disturbing drop. His more subtle throughline of honesty is Volpetron itself: as he merrily stomps through cities and bodies with his backwards ball cap and suspiciously Ray Volpe-looking facial hair and glasses, we see a figure standing with, riding, sometimes running in possible terror from Volpetron, and it’s without question an animated Ray Volpe. Maybe the real Volpetron was the friends we danced to breathless with along the way. Or maybe I’m over-analyzing and should enjoy the thousands of robot lasers.
Either way, his point is clear: the organism isn’t here for a replay of the DJ’s album: they’ve heard it and love it. They’re not here to be bedazzled by the DJ’s ability to sound like they’re about to deliver but instead slink away for another 8 bars. They’re here to be told when the destruction is coming, know it’s coming, and be destroyed. Simple as. Ray cleanly wraps his set after taking us through some of his known classic signatures and unreleased brand new stuff. We’re satisfactorily obliterated. Another ear-ringing silence is due: Excision is coming next to close out the show.
Jeff Abel makes us wait. And when he’s done making us wait, we’re tunneled through a futuristic... crypt? Temple? It’s hard to say, but the video walls are straining to blast us through an experience the veejays of old would have given their last 17” CRT for. The music is ominous and building, but it’s already in motion. There’s no long dawdling with pianos and pads, it’s more like we’re on a bullet train that we’re pretty sure is also a rocket ship and also there’s probably another rocket ship strapped to it. I don’t know… the analogy kind of falls apart when you have a show of five high-caliber bass DJs that are just going to build on each others’ energy like this. Jeff takes the stage, and now Excision is underway. The sound, as you can imagine, is beyond intense. But there’s another quality to it, and you have to understand the sound of the scene to quite name it. I don’t mean that in the “oh-you-love-dubstep-name-your-top-20-artists” kind of way. Just standing (preferably dancing) inside the organism for this show would grant you the observation. It’s clean. I don’t mean there’s no distorted wubbling: that’d be illegal at a bass music show. I don’t mean the drops don’t have that special filthiness that dubstep has brought to the sound. I mean the edges are polished and precise, not like your grandmother’s silver teapot she never used was, but like a scalpel headed to the open heart surgery theater is. And it’s a good thing, because an Excision is exactly what he delivers.
Just as Volpe brought us the honesty of “here’s the drop, and knowing it’s coming can’t save you”, Excision brings the truth that you don’t have to hide sounds in the loudest possible boom, you just need to bring musicality to the wobbling that sounds like it should be there. This is where the cleanness of what Excision produces and performs comes from: he has a musician’s ear and a DJ’s mind. He wants to bring you melody that moves you and mimics the organism. Like the organism, the melody likes other stuff, too. Almost no one here listens to “just dubstep” or “only electronic bass” or even “EDM exclusively”. There’s definitely more than a couple metalheads here. Trust me, you just know. There’s some people with various pop, rock, rap, and whatever else on their shirts.
The dancing isn’t just the shuffle dancers with their clever kicks and twirls, by the way. There’s moshers, running into each other with exuberant force: the palpating heart of the organism in its utmost of motion. These people smile a lot and help each other up when they inevitably fall. They don’t bash into each other to aggress, but to release themselves and provide release to others. You don’t go to the pit for the great view of the performer, you go for the great view of yourself out of breath and having primal fun. I had fun.
The dancing is also the people swaying and bobbing restrainedly, perhaps uncomfortable with spectacle or just thinking they’re too bad a dancer to do more. They aren’t. Almost nobody is. There’s people playing with scarves, twirling them with graceful enthusiasm that’s fun to watch. And I don’t know who started this trend of bringing the Japanese fans laced with glow lights and waving them on the crowd, but bless their souls forever. They just fan around to people they don’t know, providing you oasis from the vibrating heat of the dancing organism. If you look warm, they’ll fan you. You smile in thanks, they smile and keep fanning, happy you’re happy. I looked warm.
There’s a magical few who are simply lost, gone. Their eyes are closed as reverential private joy washes over their smiling faces. At various times, something hits and feels right and some just glide in and out of this euphoric state. You hear the sounds, you can’t not do that, but you don’t hear the sounds the same way. The vibrations match your brain waves and you feel apart yet also a part of what throbs around you. Sometimes, you look over and see someone else caught in a wash after you, like it’s rippling through the crowd. I look, I smile.
Excision began the back end of his set. He started some genre-defying. That’s an abstract term at best for any genre hailing out of the dub and sound system lineages, where every sound was once built on another entirely different sound, and then sounds were built on those, until the truth of the sound was more tautological than reference. Anyway, he was playing the Cranberries. Yeah, those Cranberries. It was great; we sang along because everyone knows the lyrics to “Zombie”. He wound in other stuff as well. Keep in mind, this is long form sampling, which means there’s all kinds of wild wobbles and bass sounds and sharp synths swirled into very familiar riffs. It’s like a mini-remix that disintegrates in real time, and we’re here for it. The disintegration is just as fun as the reference. Will he morph it into another tune we know? Or one of his classics? Or some other DJ’s work he’ll pay respects to? Or some chaotic sound that’s just for us to feel more than hear? The anticipation doesn’t kill us, because the drop already did.
He’s done now, having finished on a wildly bassy and moving version of one of his classics, complete with cut-in callbacks to the first track he played for us. The sound is absurd. Pre-show music comes on, and you don’t remember Becky Hill mumbling like that. You take out your earplugs, and they’re really gross. You should have done that nearer the trash can. People around are laughing. Some are milling to the exit, some are mad dashing to be out early and avoid traffic, some are playing with the balloons. Oh, yeah. There were balloons. Not a lot of them. Confetti, too. Lots of that. The point is, there was a lot to do and touch at this show. But the best thing to do was let the sound course through you, make you move with a kind organic community, experience an excision from Excision, and touch a part of your happiness that needed a hundred decibels of wubz to put in the right place. We’ll go back, and soon.
