When talking about the L.A. avant-experimental electronic music scene at the moment, you could easily drop names until you get blue in the face and you still wouldn’t have made your way half way across that huge list of intense artists, DJs and musicians that are rocking every sound system from the West Coast to Bangladesh right now. Be it Flying Lotus, Samiyam or the rest of the Brainfeeder crew, these guys are at the forefront of what’s happening music-wise in the U.S. right now.

So when the Berlin club Icon, who also maintains very good connections with the well known UK label Ninja Tunes and oftentimes hosts concerts with the best of the label’s artists, such as Mr. Scruff, The Herbaliser or Bonobo and is therefore always worth a visit, announced that The Gaslamp Killer and Nosaj Thing would play at their venue, it was clear what to do that night.  

The headlining Gaslamp Killer cleverly moved his set to the middle of the night so that the crowd wouldn’t already be exhausted when he got on stage. And man, that guy really knows how to rock a show. Some might think that a DJ is supposed to be this quiet guy with a lot of love for good records who mainly stays in the background and that doesn’t distract all too much from the music that’s being played. Not so with The Gaslamp Killer. This man is a hairy, sweating, raving, limelight hogging lunatic who just bounces around on stage like a hummingbird on speed and who dances harder to every track than the most ruffneck guys in front of the stage. He’s just loving every single records that he’s playing to bits and it’s pure ecstasy to watch the guy go berserk.

In the end, his set had it all. Rare Dilla gems, dubstep bangers, crazy experimental electronic tunes and flea market rarities that no one in the crowd had ever heard of before. After The Gaslamp Killer, excuse me, The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer, had finished his show everybody in the audience just wished that every DJ could be like him.

Up next was Nosaj Thing, and boy were those some big footsteps to step into. Nosaj Thing’s album Drift is easily one of my favorite albums of 2009 and was released on Alpha Pup, home to other big names, like Busdriver, Daedalus or The Glitch Mob, so for me, he was the real headliner of the evening. His album is a very densely atmospheric, almost cinematic record that doesn’t really seem like it was supposed to be played at clubs, so it was very exciting to see what Nosaj Thing would play in his set that night. To my and a lot of other peoples surprise he played almost all of the tracks on his album and it worked out just great. Sure, the tempo all of a sudden was way different from what had been played before, but it was amazing to get to hear his fantastic tunes on a big audio system and to really get to dive deep into this sea of sounds. After his own tunes he switched over to some faster tracks and really got the crowd moving.

So if you either feel like totally loosing it or like floating in thick layers of sounds, you should not miss out on these guy’s shows. L.A. is in the house!