Big Brother is watching you ... and these local bands

Judging by its scant extant promotional material, Welcome To Dystopia promises to be a lighthearted comedy about either a future totalitarian society or the secret U.S. government currently keeping us in line. Or both. But while the particulars of Four Humors Theater's production won't be revealed until the play opens at Bedlam Theatre this weekend, the musical lineup for its March 13 after-party is an open book. Since most of these musicians stick to basement shows where they're protected by radio wave-inhibiting concrete, The A.V. Club did some digging to introduce the five artists who best fit Dystopia Days' grim theme.

Datura 1.0
Musically active since taking the guitarist slot in ’80s MCAD noise-punk trio Duck Kicking Vulture, Matt Cisler found his true voice only after going solo early last decade. As Datura 1.0, the museum guard and martial arts enthusiast builds complex, otherworldly drones using laptop, circuit-bent devices, analog synths—sometimes even guitar. Cisler’s multileveled constructions have a way of making audiences forget their everyday cares—mainly out of fear. Nobody in town can beat him at using sound to conjure tentacled monstrosities and plagues of robot slugs.

Beseppy
Bethany Lactorin would be Dystopia Days’ odd man out even if she weren’t the only woman on the bill. As Beseppy, the violinist, singer-songwriter, and electronic musician often wallows in undiluted beauty. But beneath the juicy string harmonies, stylish, stripped-down beats, and Björk/Goldfrapp-update vocals beats the heart of an adventurer. She’s no stranger to pure abstraction, as on iridescent drone work "distPiano." Plus, Lactonin travels extensively, shuttling between Minneapolis and Prague, where she’s already gotten considerable love. Between living part-time in a former Eastern Bloc country and regularly standing in airport security lines, she's become intimately acquainted with bureaucratic excess and the headaches it creates.

Nervous Girls
Brett Bullion first gained local underground prominence while enrolled at Edina High as part of jazz-electronica fusion trio Tiki Obmar. He's since experimented relentlessly, exploring the possibilities offered by everything from the acoustic drum kit to tabletop sound modules. Nervous Girls finds the multi-instrumentalist skewing away from the dubby, cosmic funk he favors as core of Afternoon Records' Tarlton in lieu of cold, acid-tinged electro that evokes images of furtive conversations and rooftop observers.

S/M
For guitarist, cellist, and electronic musician Lorren Stafford, dystopia is old hat. Ask him if we’ll ever live in a global police state, and the 1994 McKnight Fellowship winner will almost surely explain how we’ve been doing so for 30 years. He’s not about to acquiesce, either: From the fetish wear he sometimes sports on big nights out to his rumored gun collection, the co-founder of EVOL Audio imbues his every public gesture with early industrial music’s left-libertarian politics and appetite for disruption. The likes of Throbbing Gristle inform what Stafford does in solo project S/M, too. But as with his other commitments—Richard For Cerebellum, Nautipuss, Low Orbit—Stafford folds in elements of drone, noise, metal, breakcore, action-adventure movie soundtracks, and the classical music he grew up with.

Marijuana Death Squad
Though sometimes-member P.O.S. describes Marijuana Death Squad as "really aggressive dance music," the Building Better Bombs side project draws more from noise and free jazz than from anybody's idea of mundane boogie bait. True, the loose assembly of local luminaries (including Skoal Kodiak drummer Freddy Votel) brings the funk; it's just usually enriched with a couple layers of cacophany. Easily Dystopia Days' most paranoid act judging by its almost-nonexistent online presence, the band compensates by occasionally venturing out to open for the likes of Solid Gold and Ryan Olcott's circuit-bending project, Food Team.