Heavy vibes

MULTIPLE MANIACS Schwartz (from left), Beyer, Dixon and Wiedemann play their many-sided music in NYC.

Supergroups—good thing or bad? When all of the outsized egos are on the same page and working toward the same goal (Cream or Traveling Wilbury’s come to mind), the results can be wondrous. With other such combos (anybody remember Damn Yankees?), you end up with dreck. Luckily, Innervisions Live: A Critical Mass, while perhaps not as identifiably super as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, fits squarely in the former category. Consisting of a quartet of Berlin label Innervisions’ heavy hitters—Steffen “Dixon” Berkhahn, Henrik Schwartz, and Kristian Beyer and Frank Wiedemann of Âme—the electronic-dance-music megacombo will be making its U.S. debut when it plays at Blkmarket Membership and Uddermadness’ combined third-birthday party on Friday 22. (Coincidently, the coheadlining Wighnomy Brothers are also playing their premiere American gig.)

The four friends first worked together on the 2006 club smash “Where We At,” but it wasn’t until they were compiling the recently released mix-CD The Grandfather Paradox that the idea for the live project was born. “We only had two days to play around with certain ideas for that comp,” Dixon recalls. “So we basically connected three laptops—instead of the usual studio setup of one computer, and then certain people or instruments around that heart of the studio—and found out that this had a much better work flow. We were jamming with our three different machines, and we realized, Why not bring this to the stage?” The group made their debut at last fall’s Amsterdam Dance Event. “That gig was the best party I had in years,” Dixon claims. He would say that—but the various YouTube postings of that gig tend to bear him out.

“I love the ‘band’ angle of this thing,” Uddermadness’ Larry Ursini (better known in techno circles as Crazy Larry) says. “There’s a real live aspect—they do a different show each time—that you don’t often get with this kind of music.” He’s right: Most “live” electronic acts tend to sound pretty much the same as they do on record, give or take a fancy swoosh here and there. But, according to Dixon, Innervisions Live does aim for improvisation, at least up to a point. “We’re playing variations of [preexisting] tracks from Henrik, Âme and/or me,” he admits. “And we’ll play one song where we have everything totally planned, but then every other track is free-flow. Even the planned ones are specially reworked on the stage. Some of the tracks are reworked so heavy that people will not recognize them anymore.”

No matter—whatever these four touch turns to aural gold of the deep-tech variety. “But I would not reduce our stuff to ‘deep,’?” Dixon amends. “We try to explore the whole spectrum of house, just like it was in the early days when Lil’ Louis, for instance, produced a cheesy vocal song one week, and the next week a strong acid track. Nowadays people tend to focus too much on one single subgenre and repeat themselves over and over again, but if you follow what we do on Innervisions, you might see that we constantly try to surprise people.”

We stand corrected. But,whatever Innervisions’ sound, Uddermadness’ Ursini is one happy fella. “This party’s production side is gonna be immense,” he exclaims. “We’re having a custom sound system trucked in, we’ll have these massive LED panels for video, all kinds of lights.… We just figured, We have the talent—so why not do it all the way?”

Innervisions Live: A Critical Mass plays Fri 22.

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