Recap Daedelus and Nosaj Thing at Majestic Theatre

While producer Daedelus—aka Alfred Darlington—kept his signature mounds of orchestrated samples intact Monday night at the Majestic Theatre, he replaced his meandering hip-hop-fused beats with skull-rattling rhythms and bouncing bass drops that sounded like cannons at point-blank range. In other words, the Los Angeles electro-wizard’s dub-stepping live show was worlds apart from his more refined recorded work. Still, despite how abrasive and glitchy his attack, duck-faced girls found a way to grind on each other, and at least one guy grooved away with seizure-like dance moves, aided by a set of glow-sticks.

Kicking off his set with an interpretation of the Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory's lovely "Golden Ticket/Pure Imagination" theme, Darlington robotically jerked and bobbed as he hammered away at an intimidating grid of buttons called a Monome. The A.V. Club looked on in bewilderment as Darlington’s blurry hands plugged away at the 256-button contraption, triggering sounds, dropping beats, and swooping in cascades of noisy loops.

Clad in a waistcoat, dress-pants, and a massive set of sideburns, the messy-haired glitch-smith rarely left his Monome, except to glance at his laptop or mess with a smaller sampler with only 64 buttons. In between bits from original tunes like “Sundown” from 2006’s Denies The Day’s Demise and “Hrs:Mins:Secs” from 2008’s Love To Make Music To, he slashed apart and remixed myriad other artists, including like Broken Social Scene, M83, and even the Smashing Pumpkins, warping it all into a continuous mix. Darlington even delivered a few new, slower cuts entitled “Order Of The Golden Dawn,” “The Finishing Of A Thing,” and “Righteous Fists Of Harmony” from an album to be released later this year. Stage banter was virtually non-existent (except for when opening act Nosaj Thing would jump onstage next to him and yell things like “Madison make some noise!”), but after Darlington wrapped up his lengthy set, he thanked the audience for its “kindness.”

After an excellent opening set from Los Angeles sampler-and-string duo Jogger, Nosaj Thing sent the room into tremors with his eclectic blend of dub-step and house music. Constantly hunched over, twitching knobs, and mashing buttons, mastermind Jason Chung quickly sent the room into a massive dancing fit. In an intelligent move (and at the request of the artists), the Majestic closed its balcony for the evening, which forced almost everyone onto the floor. The house speakers buzzed and rattled as they struggled with massive, quaking bass hits. The mighty opening set lasted a whopping hour and half, and was broken into two parts. The first hour was dominated by tunes from Chung’s 2009 debut Drifts, but the second half was a mash-up of remixes that included Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs,” Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph,” and a remix of The Xx’s “Islands” that easily rivals the original.

While it’s always hilarious to watch people dance like goons at an electronica show, it was also encouraging to see a crowd paying just as much attention to the less digestible, original material as it did to instantly gratifying sample-play.