Music

Anyma has been spending a lot of time at Sphere amid his ongoing residency, but the producer’s first meeting with the venue in April of 2023 didn’t go exactly as planned.  
“We had an appointment to go at 3:00,” says Anyma’s agent, CAA’s Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi. “I show up there, and he doesn’t show up. I’m calling like, ‘Dude, where are you? We have this appointment.’ He’s like, ‘I’m in a studio session, just hit me up after.’” 

So, Rais-Shaghaghi stepped inside a smaller version of the Las Vegas venue erected in Burbank, Calif., that’s used as a demonstration and testing space. There, he says, his mind “was blown by the capabilities of what it could do.” He walked back outside, called Anyma, the electronic music artist born Matteo Milleri, and said, “Dude, you need to see this. This is built for you.” 

Trending on Billboard

Milleri went to check it out the very next day and, after seeing Sphere’s capabilities, called Rais-Shaghaghi with a directive: “You have to get this done.”

Fifteen months later, in July 2024, Anyma was announced as the first-ever electronic headliner at Sphere, the cutting-edge venue that opened in Las Vegas in September 2023. Anyma’s show opened Dec. 27, with its first eight dates selling 137,000 tickets and grossing $21 million, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The final four shows will happen Feb. 27-28 and March 1-2.

With Vegas already an established destination for dance music, there had been a lot of talk about which dance artist would be the first to play the venue.  

“It’s a big approval process, and for it to be probably the hottest venue in the world, you’ve got to understand the list of people that want to go in there,” says Rais-Shaghaghi, who started working with the melodic techno artist in 2023.  

Anyma had a particularly strong case for being a fit. Visuals are a crucial element at Sphere, which centers on a 160,000-square-foot LED screen that curves and towers to a height of 240 feet. Anyma had already done significant visual world-building, carving out a singular and well-established aesthetic in both his solo output and as one half of the duo Tale Of Us. (Anyma released his debut album, Genesys, in 2023 with Genesys II coming last year. Both were released on Interscope Records.) Technology has also been deeply embedded into his output, with the producer over the years releasing NFTs that debuted art from the Anyma project, with the artist and his team using this project to blur the lines between show visuals and fine art.

Incorporated during live shows, this imagery melded concepts related to futurism, transhumanism, space, life, death, rebirth, apocalypse and intimacy and set them to a style of pummeling melodic techno favored in places like Burning Man and Tulum that’s grown in global influence and mainstream popularity over the last few years.  

Anyma also had a strong track record of moving hard tickets, a historically soft area for many electronic acts. Tale Of Us’ Afterlife event series, headlined by the duo and featuring a collection of support artists, has happened around the world and featured imagery on massive screens as large as 65 feet tall.  

Eight Afterlife shows in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico held between February and May 2024 sold 228,000 tickets and grossed $19 million, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. Afterlife (which is also the name of Tale Of Us’ label) also sold 37,200 tickets and grossed $4.2 million over two shows at the L.A. State Historic Park in October 2023.  

“When we were starting to really push boundaries and break records with attendance and sales, it was like, ‘Where do we go next?’” says Rais-Shaghaghi. “Then I started hearing about Sphere… It’s an almost 18,000-capacity venue. Who has done that business, not only in North America, but globally?”  

Anyma having done that kind of business, he continues, “Was a huge factor, because Vegas is a destination. People from all around the world are going to [Sphere]. If you’re planning to do a show there, you have to do at least six to 10 shows for the financials to make sense, and if you’re doing 10, that’s 180,000 tickets. You can’t just be like, ‘I did L.A. and New York and blew them out.’ You have to have a global business. We’ve done stuff in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, South and North America. We had that.”  

In terms of why the residency ultimately landed with Anyma and not Tale Of Us, Rais-Shaghaghi says, “Anyma is really the visual component of the project, and the one that really created all the NFTs, storylines and the visual elements. The focus really became building that into, in a sense, a movie that Matteo directs and creates. It just made the most sense because of the characters, because of the storyline and obviously having a vast amount of music that he was working on and exploring a bit outside of the techno underground world.” (In regard to the future of Tale Of Us, he says “both guys are super-focused on their solo projects right now.”) 

Knowing the creative universe Anyma created could be dramatically expanded at Sphere, Anyma’s team began planning and production for the show shortly after Milleri and Rais-Shaghaghi first saw the venue’s capabilities at the April 2023 meetings in Burbank. Rais-Shaghaghi says he doesn’t have an exact number for what the production cost to make, but says “it’s millions,” adding that “if anyone else wanted to create this show without having the creative genius of someone like Matteo and his incredible team and had to outsource it and build everything [from scratch], it would probably be, in my opinion, a $15 million to $20 million dollar show.” 

Visuals were developed by Milleri, working in partnership with Anyma’s longtime visual creative director and lead CG artist Alessio De Vecchio and head creative Alexander Wessely, a Swedish artist whose resumé includes work on The Weeknd’s Afterhours Til Dawn Tour, multiple Swedish House Mafia videos and more.  

“Matteo creates entire worlds rather than just shows, and that aligned with my own interest in dissolving the lines between the physical and the digital,” Wessely says of creating the Sphere show. “Evan Baker, Matteo’s manager, initially connected us, and once we started talking, it quickly became clear that this was going to be something different.” 

Anyma

Courtesy of Anyma

In more ways than one, certainly. Sphere is a technological marvel that offers visual storytelling opportunities no other venue can. As such, it requires that much more from the creators of those visuals.

“The Sphere is a cathedral of technology, and building inside it felt like constructing a new reality from the ground up,” Wessely continues. As the project’s head creative and stage designer, as well as director of selected visual pieces, he says he had to “navigate an entirely new way of working. The 180-degree projection required rethinking everything: how we design space, how we frame motion, how we manipulate perception. It was like re-learning a language while simultaneously writing poetry in it, trying to shape something new while staying in control of the chaos. 

“I’ve worked across different scales, whether in theatre or massive commercial stages, but this was something else entirely,” he continues. “The scale, the complexity, the unpredictability, it felt endless. At times, it felt like the project was pushing us as much as we were pushing it. Overwhelming in the best and worst ways. But in the end, that’s what made it so rewarding.” 

The intensive production process ultimately produced a show titled Afterlife Presents Anyma: The End of Genesys, which finds Anyma playing his music in tandem with visuals centered around a storyline that Wessely says is about “the relationship between humans and technology, where one ends and the other begins.” Visuals feature two characters, a female robot and human man, who appear in intensely detailed and stunningly intricate settings that span the desert, space, a futuristic city, a forest and more, with interstitial scenes projecting images of things like thousands of blinking eyes and countless human bodies floating across the screen. Meanwhile, artists including FKA Twigs, Grimes and Ellie Goulding make memorable appearances in the imagery. The overall effect is often stunning.

As Anyma, De Vecchio and Wessely worked out the creative, Rais-Shaghaghi’s role was largely, he says, “making sure with the team that we were always going by the guidelines, restrictions and limitations with Sphere… You can’t just go and create it and be like, ‘Alright, here it is.’” Among the many tiny technical details to consider were background images “that the human eye would never catch,” says Rais-Shaghaghi, “but if they put it in the system and the system flagged that they weren’t in [the right] resolution, it becomes a giant conversation.” 

With only four other acts — U2, Phish, the Eagles and Dead & Company — headlining Sphere thus far, there was only a small number of teams to reach out to for advice. “As a whole, everyone was being very helpful and open to have conversations,” says Rais-Shaghaghi, who adds that Anyma’s team can now be a resource as well. “This is a brand new, state-of-the-art venue that everyone is learning how to use in real time. I think we were one of the [teams] that’s probably created a lot of guidelines for other people to follow because of everything we experimented with and have done.” 

As for Anyma, after the residency wraps in early March, he’ll play major festivals including Ultra in Miami, Tomorrowland in Belgium and Hungary’s Sziget. With his Sphere shows featuring much unreleased music and debuting a track with Ellie Goulding, it seems there’s also more coming from the artist, who Rais-Shaghaghi says is, as the Sphere show suggests, perpetually future-focused.   

“The most interesting thing about him is he’s always thinking about the next thing,” Rais-Shaghaghi says of what’s next. “And obviously, this is such a high bar to set.”