Opinion: Anyma Made History at Sphere (Whether You Like It Or Not)
Even though Anyma entitled these shows ‘The End of Genesys,” they were the genesis of a new era of dance music.
Dance music hasn’t made history too many times. Very few moments throughout the evolution of the genre compare to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock — moments that changed the trajectory of music forever.
One that does compare is Anyma’s string of performances at Sphere Las Vegas. What started as a single New Year’s Eve celebration sprouted into eight sold-out shows, the first Vegas residency for a dance artist outside a club.
Anyma made history in that sense, but if his residency is going to match the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, his effect has to go much further than being the first to do something. The effect has to match that of Daft Punk at Coachella in 2006.
“It changed people’s lives including mine. Forever,” Steve Aoki said of Daft Punk’s Coachella set in the documentary Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert. Jason Bentley follows it up by saying, “From that point on, dance music needed to have a giant spectacle on stage. You could love it or you could hate it, but the fact is, nothing was the same after that performance.”
Over the last few years, Anyma has established a reputation for giant spectacles. He’s brought gargantuan digital visual presentations to iconic events around the world, including Coachella, Printworks, and Zamna Tulum. But of all those epic locations, Sphere has the most advanced video screen in history. It’s a 15,000 m2 (160,000 ft2, 4 acres) 16K resolution wraparound LED screen with over 170 million pixels.
The only artists who performed in there before Anyma were rock bands like Eagles, U2, and Phish. As amazing as those bands are, they all came up in a time before LED screens. Creating epic digital videography is not a part of their history or their identity as it is with Anyma.
So, when he had the chance to bring his celebrated, ambitious vision to this state-of-the-art forum, he created a visual spectacle unlike any in dance music before, which created a type of event that dance music had never seen before:
A dance music performance focused on the visuals, where the audience gets the best experience being seated. No one had done this before, and the reactions were in line with Jason Bentley’s commentary:
“You could love it or you could hate it…”
All innovators are initially detracted as much as they are celebrated simply because most people are intimidated by new ideas. When the Beatles were rejected by Decca, label executives said, “The Beatles have no future in show business,” before they became the most famous band ever. Well, on this Instagram reel from EDM Maniac showing the first night of Anyma, there are over 13 million views and 450,000 likes, but almost all the highest-performing comments are negative:
“Why tf would I want to be in some shit like this” - 12.8k likes.
“This gives me weird vibes idk” - 4,225 likes.
The highest-performing comment alluded, negatively, to what made the residency truly historic:
“Can we just admit that their music’s not that great and people just go for the visual aspect. It’s pretty obvious when no one’s dancing.” - 38k likes.
A few years ago, before Sphere was an option, dance music would have scoffed at such an event. Even though dance artists like Kaskade and Illenium were headlining seated stadiums, the general culture was that attendees used the space they had to dance. The visuals were prominent following Daft Punk’s influence, but they weren’t the centerpiece.
The screen sets Sphere beyond any other venue, though, and people paid good money for those tickets. Not only did Sphere build haptics into the seats that enhance the music, but by sitting, instead of being distracted by transient dancers bumping into them on their way to the toilet, attendees can focus and fully appreciate the visuals, just as Subtronics did:
“That was so far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life, the most beautiful, immersive, mind explodingly jaw dropping, so far ahead into the future I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to that. There’s nothing to compare it to. That’s a whole entire new way to experience art,” Subtronics wrote on Threads after seeing Anyma’s Sphere show. “Call it a new life goal.”
The fact that this new type of event inspired Subtronics, it's safe to say that numerous other artists were inspired, too. As that initial wave of artists channels their inspiration, they will devise their own versions of this new event like a beautiful domino effect.
Also, consider that Subtronics’ music sounds nothing like Anyma’s. How will he transmute hyperactive dubstep that has adrenaline-fueled bassheads head-banging on rails into a seated, visual-forward environment?
These are the questions that historic moments spark, and we’re the lucky ones who get to enjoy the answers. No one could have predicted the effect Daft Punk had on dance music after Coachella, but everyone knew that set was special.
Anyma’s Sphere shows are special. It already didn’t matter what any haters said, but it matters even less because of the inspiration the other artists have taken. Artists shape the culture, and after Anyma’s residency, electronic music will be a different shape.
