Secondhand Setlists

To be honest, the Shrine tends to engulf acts who are simply too small to play them, but Virtual Self, Nina Las Vegas, and AG Cook soared high above us all.

Cook’s playful pop music opened the evening, providing a quick sugar rush to a gathering crowd. For a show with heavy techno and electronic elements, Cook really leaned into the pop side of things. Dashes of SOPHIE here and a bit of “Teenage Dream” there hyped the crowd for what was to come (along with a bit of Nightcore-sounding moments that really took me back to 2008).

Nina Las Vegas came crashing in after Cook, accompanied by wild visions and illustrations playing on-screen behind her. At one point, she played something eerily similar to Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone”, priming myself and the audience for the night’s eventual headliner.

The star of the evening, Virtual Self, aka Porter Robinson, arrived to the roar of the crowd ready to please. His techno and Eurodance influences of this latest project are perfect material for a venue like the Shrine, which demands to be filled with the loudest sounds and hardest beats. To enhance his performance, Robinson put on a lightshow with enough lasers and synths to give the sun a run for its money. The spotlights beaming straight downward into the crowd, my friend Rachel remarked how reminiscent it felt of Kanye’s Saint Pablo tour, an event designed to immerse the audience in it all.

And Robinson did much the same here. In addition to playing Virtual Self’s video game inspired material, he even played one of the gaming community’s most beloved anthems: Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean”. For a night already seeped in alternate realities, “Simple and Clean” really brought it all to a different level.

By the end, a digitized, motherboard-esque voice enjoined you to engage with the experience. While it kinda creeped me out, it also felt a lot like the completion of a video game: the adventure finished, the final boss defeated, and the desire to do it all over again.