Anyma may have made one of the most talked about live dance experiences in recent memory, but he says he hopes the music that soundtracked it will ultimately become “timeless.”
“It’s the final evolution of the sound with the best artists I know, most of whom are my friends,” the artist told Billboard in a recent feature about his new album, The End of Genesys. “It’s inspiring that I could connect all my knowledge and influences into a record and make it contemporary and potentially timeless. That’s not up to me, but I think some of this record is really timeless, and that’s what really exciting.”
The new album features collaborations with artists including Ellie Goulding, Grimes, Yeat, Sevdaliza and Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun, with much of this new music also serving as the soundtrack to Anyma’s lauded 12-show Sphere residency that began in December and wrapped in March.
As the artist also tells it, this show and the sprawling visual world he’s long been focused on creating in tandem with his music is a response to what he was seeing elsewhere in the world of live dance and electronic shows.
“The reason why I went into the production of the visual experience was because I don’t really feel much from live events,” Anyma told Billboard. “Of course, the underground dance stuff is great, because that’s its own thing,” he continues. “I’m talking about the big concerts, the big festivals, the big productions. For me, even with the technology and the budgets available, I just went home with my ears hurting. It’s difficult to even grasp an artist’s perspective when the production is overwhelming.”
His idea was instead to create visuals that would allow him to “basically augment your purpose and your art with it. … That was the whole idea behind everything.”
The idea crystallized dramatically during the artist’s 12-date residency at Sphere, running from December through March. Fusing his own longstanding penchant for technology and boundary-pushing tech capabilities at the venue, which is built around a 160,000-square-foot LED screen that curves and reaches a height of 240 feet, Anyma and his team created a visually stunning production that incorporated themes of technology, nature, love, life and more.
The show’s head creative Alexander Wessely told Billboard that co-creating the show “was like re-learning a language while simultaneously writing poetry in it, trying to shape something new while staying in control of the chaos.”
But Anyma’s ambition to create something different did ultimately work. Not only was the show well-received by the hundreds of thousands of fans who saw it, its first eight alone grossed $21 million, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.
