Aliens, orchestras and bass: Unity stuns in Sphere debut

The aliens have landed in Vegas, and they’ve got the munchies.

The Strat only comes up to the kneecaps of the towering extraterrestrials as they loom over the Strip, their long, green legs as outsize as the 160,000-square-foot screen that captures their movements in 16K resolution.

One of them clutches a pizza box the size of Summerlin, munching along to British house music duo Anti Up’s ode to the alcohol-absorbing, post-party delicacy (“When does the club shut? / All I want is pizza / I just want some pizza / God, I’m really drunk.”)

Down in front, a live orchestra plays along, supplying rubbery bass lines and thunderous percussion while a phalanx of dancers in hazmat suits sway to the beat, waving glowing red marshaling wands.

We look up: A flying saucer hovers high above us.

But even if the thing has traveled here from a galaxy far, far away, it couldn’t be any more far out than what’s going down at Sphere right about now.

Friday night has turned into Saturday morning, and we’re halfway through the debut of Unity, the first collaboration between electronic dance music behemoths Insomniac and Tomorrowland, who produce some of the world’s biggest EDM-centered fests.

A novel, two-hour-45-minute production, Unity begins with an immersive visual presentation divided into six parts — each themed after one of the companies’ events, accompanied by a live orchestra — culminating in a DJ set to close the show.

Among its many aims — overstimulation being chief among them — Unity chronicles how this once-underground scene has developed into a cultural force capable of drawing hundreds of thousands of fans to gargantuan fests and packing a state-of-the-art, 20,000-capacity room like Sphere again and again (Unity continues Saturday and Sunday, returning for six more shows in September and October).

Early on, we hear a recorded message from the Insomniac hotline in the mid-’90s promoting one of its Nocturnal Wonderland raves, back when you had to call and get directions to the party because they frequently took place in unlicensed spots.

The music played during this portion of the show reflected that era, dance floor classics like Underworld’s “Born Slippy” and Celeda’s “The Underground.”

Electronic dance music has stormed into the mainstream ever since, and Unity features both the songs that took EDM to the pop charts — David Guetta’s “Titanium,” Avicci’s “Wake Me Up,” Swedish House Mafia’s “Save the World” — and the big-tent fests that provided those acts with the platform to reach crowds of 100,000-plus.

For Insomniac, this meant visuals that highlighted signature events like Beyond Wonderland, where hookah-huffing caterpillars blew smoke rings amid teacup-shaped hot air balloons, and the autumnal Escape Halloween, which aimed for goose bumps via grimacing clowns with blood-smeared faces and armies of skeletons shaking their meatless legs to dubstep favorites Subtronics and Knife Party, as skeletons are known to do.

Tomorrowland countered with often beatific, fantastical panoramas based on themes from past festivals like the underwater world of Planaxis and the icy Orbyz.

“Prepare to be astonished,” a narrator intoned at the outset of Tomorrowland’s Adscendo suite, in which cities floated on air and imaginations took flight right along with them.

Through it all, the crowd remained largely seated, though that quickly changed when British drum and bass duo Chase & Status closed the show with a live set that got thousands on their feet.

“This (expletive) is incredible!” Status (Will Kennard) beamed as he took it all in.

Was he talking about the envelope-pushing technology engulfing him on all sides at a sold-out Sphere?

Electronic dance music’s rise to mass popularity?

Those pizza-loving aliens?

Yes.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.