Check Out These Unbelievable Photos of SOPHIE Live at Glasslands in Brooklyn

Music is playing.

To see the electronic act SOPHIE live is to abandon certain ideas. First of all, you must abandon the mystique of SOPHIE, who has studiously kept the press at bay with jokey interviews (if any at all), a lack of identifying details, and a request that he not be photographed. You must accept that this guy wearing a black mock turtleneck and a chain, this guy with one floppy swoop of curly hair is going to shepherd you through the night.

To accept this, you must also abandon your idea of what DJing is all about. Generally, there are two main schools of DJing: the “lose yourself in the interminable groove” kind and the “nothing but the hits” kind. SOPHIE is neither. SOPHIE is the “blast noise at the crowd for uncomfortably long before switching to an upbeat single” kind. SOPHIE will draw out a chainsaw-like drone and pound at the same squeaky window cleaner sound for way too long, cribbing from the interminable groove school. He's big on songs with bouncy, pitched-up, J-pop style vocals, and he'll let those ride, pulling from the nothing but the hits school. He'll play what sounds like an amateur Stomp rehearsal, with trash can banging noises going in, like, four directions at once. I am fairly certain SOPHIE would not only piss off a lot of DJ purists but that he is also a terrible DJ. Seeing him live at Glasslands last night, there were several drone lulls where I looked around to see people checking their phones.

I am also fairly certain SOPHIE is the one of most incredible DJs I've ever seen. I haven't found myself dancing with such an enthusiastic lack of abandon in a long time. By playing music that doesn't always even sound like music and doesn't offer people a particularly coherent way to dance to it, SOPHIE makes us (should we buy into it) abandon posture and embrace stupidity. Sometimes dancing to his set felt like dancing to a performance of someone sitting on a piano keyboard, and I mean that in an incredibly enthusiastic and positive way. Those were the highs. At its best, SOPHIE's set was a pummeling, arresting experience. Have you ever stood behind a waterfall? It's sweet, and the roar of it drowns out everything else. That's what SOPHIE is like.

It's not all perfect: Sometimes there was a sense that SOPHIE was just playing individual songs and then using those long drone interludes to create a sense of noise while he picked out his next track. Maybe that is deliberate. SOPHIE is a welcoming, stupid, playground-like DJ musical experience, but it is also an off-putting, mischievously irritating one.

What you see is not what you get with SOPHIE—literally, in the sense that you see nothing of SOPHIE before entering SOPHIE's world. The reasoning for this, as explained in an interview with Pitchfork last year, is actually one of the best takes on making music in the Tumblr era I've seen: “Aesthetic aims should be secondary to conceptual aims, otherwise you end up with music that is driven by stylistic references rather than its conceptual or musical ideas, or actual content,” SOPHIE wrote. SOPHIE's music is self-consciously distancing itself from sounding like anything else, if it can help it. Even if the opening act (the excellent Dubbel Dutch in this case) lulls you into thinking this will be a normal dancing type of occasion, the long drone of noise hinting at a Drake remix that never really materializes to start the set should disabuse you of that notion.

The bottom line is that the weirdness of SOPHIE can put even the most talented scribe at a loss for words, which is why I decided it would be important to take lots and lots of pictures to capture the experience. SOPHIE has a rule that he doesn't want press photographing him, but that wasn't going to deter me. I was able to snap these six incredible photos that capture the experience (along with a seventh, above):

A crowd revels. Let us embrace revelry.

Is this cloud of smoke SOPHIE? You decide.

Opener Dubbel Dutch on the ones and twos.

Music is playing, alternate take.

Lose yourself in the music, the moment.

Sounds, pictured.

Kyle Kramer has "Bipp" stuck in his head, but, now that he thinks about it, he's not sure he actually heard it played last night. He's on Twitter - @KyleKramer

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