The city of Madison and the community of music fans within it have attracted a wide variety of electronic musicians this fall, on stages both big and small. From the Orpheum to Segredo, from trance to trap, Madison loves to revel and dance amidst electric vibes. Yet, some performers stand out from the rest, shattering the mold of dance music in favor of a more creative and expressive concert experience.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about artists making new steps to distance themselves from the culture of big room EDM that nurtured their rise to popularity. Meanwhile, The Glitch Mob, who will be gracing the Orpheum stage this Sunday, has been breaking that mold since their formation almost a decade ago. This week I spoke with Justin Boreta, one of three musicians who make up The Glitch Mob, about their ongoing mission to bring their vision to life. The band’s latest album, Love Death Immortality, dropped earlier this year. According to Boreta, the album’s title describes the feelings that the album is meant to evoke in the listener.
“It’s a very epic feeling and it has elements of life, love, death,” he said in a phone interview. “Things that bring us all together.”
Beginning with their 2010 debut album Drink the Sea, The Glitch Mob made waves in the electronic scene. Ripe with melody and emotion, their unique sound set them apart from the sudden explosion of dubstep in the U.S., which blew over from the European electronic scene and quickly snowballed into a culture that catered to fist-bumping partiers everywhere. But even in the midst of a music scene fixed on constant new releases, remixes and singles, The Glitch Mob took a step back from the limelight for a couple of years to create Love Death Immortality.
“The current climate is based around constantly releasing and staying in the public eye. I think the reason is that everything moves so fast—on the Internet, and in life in general,” Boreta said. “We believe in the power of people sitting down and putting an album on in the car or hearing the full story of the album at a concert. That’s what we did it for, that’s bigger than everything else.
“We wanted to take the whole live show to another level,” Boreto said. “For us, touring and our live show is the pinnacle of all of this.”
The production of live shows is important to most electronic performers, but Boreta maintains that to The Glitch Mob, the live show is everything.
“We really wanted to put on a crazy live show that has full, powerful, high energy dance music but also has the heartfelt cinematic storytelling that we discovered when we were writing Drink the Sea,” Boreta said.
However, what really sets The Glitch Mob’s live shows apart is the “D.I.Y.,” hands-on approach that has been important to the band throughout their career. Their new live setup, called “The Blade,” is literally one-of-a-kind, complete with custom electronic instruments designed by the band.
“The whole stage setup was all custom built. In the past we had always built our whole live show ourselves. We went to Home Depot to figure out all the lighting ourselves. Now we work with people, but it’s all very hands-on,” Boreta explained to me. “All of the iPads are jailbroken, and we write and operate a lot of custom software. There’s really no other way to play it. We want to play music a certain way and there’s nothing [commercially available] that can do it. It’s out of necessity that we push the technology to do things that it hasn’t done before.”
The Glitch Mob have brought their music to life on festival stages around the world in addition to their own headline tours. These live settings, while vastly different from each other, are both important to the band.
“The festivals are amazing because the show there gets to be as big as humanly possible. But the festivals set a very quick ‘in-and-out,’” Boreta noted, before explaining what makes the band’s headline tours special.
“At a headline show, we get to go deeper and the set is more varied. We get to take everyone on a journey with us in an intimate setting. It’s two pieces for us, ying and yang.”
A increasing number of musicians have recently publicly expressed a newfound distaste for the culture of “big room” dance music, a culture that is still growing rapidly in the American mainstream.
“It’s funny because we are actually off in the corner as far as the acts that play at the big electronic festivals,” Boreta said about The Glitch Mob’s place in the scene. “We’re definitely the weirdos, just by the nature of what we do.”
Although The Glitch Mob has always been worlds away from the dance music and “music for DJs” that saturates the current scene, Boreta commented on the issue in a refreshingly rational light.
“The interesting thing about having a saturated market is that at the same time that there is a lot of incredibly homogeneous, boring music happening right now that sounds all the same, there’s actually some insanely creative, cool music right now,” he posited, as we spiraled off-topic to discuss great new releases from artists like Caribou, Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke. “The really creative stuff boils to the surface, while the music that’s just meant for partying in the moment will not be remembered in a couple years.”
Simply put, what The Glitch Mob brings to the table is an honest and expressive listening experience, both at their live shows and on the album. Even more impressive is that they have achieved this entirely on their own terms, as the band has released all of their music on their own record label.
“We’ve been independent since day one,” Boreta said. “On a major label you get this huge bank and this huge distribution. We pay for everything ourselves.”
Despite the attractive benefit of signing to a major label, operating on their own terms was pivotal to the band in bringing their creative vision to life.
This Sunday, the Orpheum Theater will be host to the culmination of almost a decade of unabridged creativity.
“We get to have our music and our live show come to the world exactly how we want. There’s no one telling us how people are going to hear the music,” Boreta said.
What will make this weekend special is the honest expression and emotion that The Glitch Mob delivers, directly from their own minds to our ears.
“That’s most important to us,” Boreta concluded. “We would choose that over having a fat paycheck any day.”
