Anyma’s Historic Sphere Residency: 5 Best Moments

After Sphere opened with fanfare in September of 2023, there was a lot of talk, in the electronic music world at least, about which electronic artist would be the first to play Las Vegas’ new space ship of a venue.

Presumably many would’ve jumped at the chance. Las Vegas is a dance music nexus, with billboards along Interstate 15 into the city bearing the faces of new and longtime resident artists at Marquee, Hakkasan, XS and other nightclubs on the Strip.

But ultimately it was a new face that made the cut, with Sphere announcing in July that Italian-American techno and melodic techno producer Anyma — who hadn’t previously had a residency in the city — would be The One.

With the news, talk shifted as people outside of dance music familiarized themselves with the artist, a sizable name within the genre, but still a relative unknown to the gen pop. Who was he, and what would he do, people asked? Meanwhile, talk inside the dance world was that this show was going to be, in colloquial terms, totally bananas.

Certainly the bar was set mighty high after well-received residencies from Sphere’s previous artists U2, Phish, the Eagles and Dead & Company. But those are bands, and this would be a DJ. Still, interest for Anyma was abundantly and statistically clear: tickets for the eight-night residency sold out the same day they went on sale in July, with Anyma reporting selling 100,000 tickets for these shows and more dates subsequently added, bringing the total number of shows to eight and the total number of tickets sold to 130,000.

Officially and grandly titled Afterlife Presents Anyma: The End of Genesys, the figurative curtain for the residency lifted Dec. 27, when the shows began amid one of the busiest times of year in Las Vegas, bringing ravers to Sphere for the very first time.

Two days later, on Dec. 29, attendees sporting ravey attire and the de facto Afterlife uniform of black leather everything and sunglasses inside milled around the venue between sets from openers Cassian b2b Kevin de Vries and Charlotte de Witte. (Anyma’s support acts are different for every night of the residency, with the Dec. 28 opener Amelie Lens becoming the venue’s first ever officially billed female artist.)

Anyma came onstage promptly at 11 p.m., appearing on top of a riser placed on the floor of the venue from which glowing cords emanated. The two other risers on each side of him each contained a cello and the robot arms that played the instrument throughout the show, emphasizing the machine vs. human quality of both the overall Anyma aesthetic and the show we were all about to see.

It was, in fact, bananas. Starting with a robot breaking through a wall of glass in tandem with the music, the performance ultimately turned several standard dance music conventions on their head. Many large-scale shows, for example, take place in seated venues like Madison Square Garden, Kia Forum and Red Rocks, but Sphere is arguably the only one where attendees in the seated areas (Sphere also has standing room on the floor) have a vested interest in staying butt-to-chair, given that the seats are programmed to shake and rumble with the bass. (Or in the case of live acts, the drums.)

Certainly many people were on their feet raving in place, but by and large this was a sit down show, making the experience at times feel more akin to a futuristic movie theater than a nightclub or any standard large-scale dance performance.

In ways, Anyma and the Dec. 29 special guest artists — Delilah Montagu and Ellie Goulding — were secondary to the visuals. You might not have even noticed they were there in person, given the focus demanded by the screen and everything happening on it. Born Matteo Milleri, Anyma has long been been half of the duo Tale of Us, with the pair cultivating a signature visual aesthetic via their own output and releases on their influential label Afterlife and its affiliated event series.

This sort of transhumanist aesthetic and human meets machine ideology is so well-suited for Sphere that one can’t help but assume it’s a not insignifcant part of the reason Anyma secured these shows. Any act playing the venue needs to have a well-established and world-building visual identity (which is part of the reason Sphere functions so well for legacy acts like the Dead, who have a huge visual history to pull from.) But Sphere’s mind-bending technical capabilities are providing Anyma and his team the opportunity to both show off and expand their epic, trippy, frequently dark and often beautiful cyborg narrative.

And expand they did. These are five of the best parts of the performance.