After Sphere opened with fanfare in September of 2023, there was a lot of talk, in the electronic music world at least, about which electronic artist would be the first to play Las Vegas’ new space ship of a venue.
Presumably many would’ve jumped at the chance. Las Vegas is a dance music nexus, with billboards along Interstate 15 into the city bearing the faces of new and longtime resident artists at Marquee, Hakkasan, XS and other nightclubs on the Strip.
But ultimately it was a new face that made the cut, with Sphere announcing in July that Italian-American techno and melodic techno producer Anyma — who hadn’t previously had a residency in the city — would be The One.
With the news, talk shifted as people outside of dance music familiarized themselves with the artist, a sizable name within the genre, but still a relative unknown to the gen pop. Who was he, and what would he do, people asked? Meanwhile, talk inside the dance world was that this show was going to be, in colloquial terms, totally bananas.
Certainly the bar was set mighty high after well-received residencies from Sphere’s previous artists U2, Phish, the Eagles and Dead & Company. But those are bands, and this would be a DJ. Still, interest for Anyma was abundantly and statistically clear: tickets for the eight-night residency sold out the same day they went on sale in July, with Anyma reporting selling 100,000 tickets for these shows and more dates subsequently added, bringing the total number of shows to eight.
Officially and grandly titled Afterlife Presents Anyma: The End of Genesys, the figurative curtain for the show lifted Dec. 27, when the residency began amid one of the busiest times of year in Las Vegas, bringing ravers to Sphere for the very first time.
Two days later, on Dec. 29, attendees sporting ravey attire and the de facto Afterlife uniform of black leather everything and sunglasses inside milled around the venue between sets from openers Cassian b2b Kevin de Vries and Charlotte de Witte. (Anyma’s support acts are different for every night of the residency, with the Dec. 28 opener Amelie Lens becoming the venue’s first ever officially billed female artist.)
Anyma came onstage promptly at 11 p.m., appearing on top of a riser placed on the floor of the venue from which glowing cords emanated. The two other risers on each side of him each contained a cello and the robot arms that played the instrument throughout the show, emphasizing the machine vs. human quality of both the overall Anyma aesthetic and the show we were all about to see.
It was, in fact, bananas. Starting with a robot breaking through a wall of glass in tandem with the music, the performance ultimately turned several standard dance music conventions on their head. Many large-scale shows, for example, take place in seated venues like Madison Square Garden, Kia Forum and Red Rocks, but Sphere is arguably the only one where attendees in the seated areas (Sphere also has standing room on the floor) have a vested interest in staying butt-to-chair, given that the seats are programmed to shake and rumble with the bass. (Or in the case of live acts, the drums.)
Certainly many people were on their feet raving in place, but by and large this was a sit down show, making the experience at times feel more akin to a futuristic movie theater than a nightclub or any standard large-scale dance performance.
In ways, Anyma and the Dec. 29 special guest artists — Delilah Montagu and Ellie Goulding — were secondary to the visuals. You might not have even noticed they were there in person, given the focus demanded by the screen and everything happening on it. Born Matteo Milleri, Anyma has long been been half of the duo Tale of Us, with the pair cultivating a signature visual aesthetic via their own output and releases on their influential label Afterlife and its affiliated shows.
This sort of transhumanist aesthetic and human meets machine ideology is so well-suited for Sphere that one can’t help but assume it’s a not insignifcant part of the reason Anyma secured these shows. Any act playing the venue needs to have a well-established and world-building visual identity (which is part of the reason Sphere functions so well for legacy acts like the Dead, who have a huge visual history to pull from.) But Sphere’s mind-bending technical capabilities are providing Anyma and his team the opportunity to both show off and expand their epic, trippy, frequently dark and often beautiful cyborg narrative.
And expand they did. These are five of the best parts of the performance.
The Visuals, Obviously
Image Credit: Courtesy of Anyma
Where to even start. Sphere is ultimately all about an artist’s visual presentation, and previous residents have discussed feeling almost upstaged by the venue, or at least feeling a necessity to level up musically in order to compete with what’s happening on the screens.
But while Anyma’s musical performance was stellar (more on that in a bit), the star of the show was obviously the visuals, with the performance starting with the female cyborg character who’d appear throughout the show breaking through a wall of glass, which elicited cheers and created a moment of collective lift off. This robot then eventually flew to space (with her free fall creating a moment of exiting physical dizziness and disorientation) before being catapulted through realms including but not limited to a verdant garden (where the show’s other main character, a human man, made his first appearance), a lush cityscape that devolved into a fiery inferno, an arid desert and many other realms during the four-act show. Meanwhile other visual segments were more conceptual, with the screens at one point populated entirely by blinking eyeballs.
There was a sort of poetry in the presentation, with the human ingenuity and science and engineering powering Sphere mirrored by End of Genesys‘ narrative focused on the meeting of organic (the man) and robotic (his female counterpart), with humanity, at least in the show eventually winning out towards the end when the male character inserts a beating heart inside the female, a moment that drew cheers from the crowd.
The Special Guests
Image Credit: Courtesy of Anyma
Guests who appeared both onscreen and in the flesh included FKA twigs, who showed up in a segment where she danced underwater to the Anyma remix of her own “Eusexua,” Grimes, who appeared in a brief onscreen segment in which she writhed around in a glowing box, vocalist Delilah Montagu, who appeared live at the venue to sing her Anyma collab “I Believe In You.” Meanwhile, Ellie Goulding appeared both in the flesh and onscreen, singing an unreleased Anyma collab while close-up imagery of her face morphed hypnotically.
Loads of Unreleased Songs, Including a Forthcoming Ellie Goulding Collab
Image Credit: Courtesy of Anyma
Anyma’s “Hear Me Now,” and “Walking With a Ghost,” drew some of the loudest music-related cheers of the two-hour show, which was also populated with his remix of Fred again.. and Swedish House Mafia’s “Turn On the Lights again…” But a lot of performance was assembled from music that returned no Shazam results, possibly/presumably meaning that a good deal of fresh Anyma output is en route. The most significant forthcoming track is arguably “Hypnotized,” the aforementioned Ellie Goulding collab that Goulding showed up in person to help debut on Dec. 29. The slinky earworm marks the first collaboration between Anyma and the British artist, one of dance music’s most important and enduring voices, and will be released January 10.
Anyma’s Quick Cameo
As previously mentioned, the main characters in the visual show are the human man and the cyborg woman, who keep meeting up to embrace each other and exchange longing glances in various gorgeously rendered sci-fi locations. While other Sphere residencies have incorporated live footage of the band into shows, this was not the case with Anyma, who appeared onscreen only once at the end of the performance, when the man character briefly transformed into a digital (and shirtless) rendition of Milleri, tattoos and all.
The Historic Nature of the Entire Situation
Image Credit: Courtesy of Anyma
Electronic music is a sort scrappy genre that’s always fought for space in the mainstream, with varying levels of success over the last 40-plus years. Having an electronic artist in the venue, not to mention one who’s sold it out many times over, further demonstrates the wide appeal of the genre along with its overall health, especially in the live sector. It also underlined that, given that large-scale modern electronic live shows heavily incorporate big-ass stage setups and expansive visuals, Sphere is a very good fit for the genre.
