Dylan Brady - Needle Guy EP

If you’ve ever heard the name 100 gecs, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with experimental and eccentric music. The duo - comprised of Dylan Brady and Laura Les - has been making waves in the music scene over the last several years with their wild and chaotic live shows, whether headlining shows in their own right or opening up for My Chemical Romance on their Black Parade Tour (as they did in San Francisco last year).

Member Dylan Brady is a DJ in his own right, having released several albums, demos and EPs over the better part of the decade as an electronic musician and DJ. This year brings his latest entry, Needle Guy, a four-song EP clocking in just around fifteen minutes, released in collaboration with Atlantic Records and his own label, Dog Show. The four tracks toe the line between the traditional and unconventional; “Stay High”, for example, feels like the traditional dance music you’d hear at a big house rave while retaining a charm that recalls MySpace-era bedroom pop. Opener “Throat Song” uses an odd vocoder effect to manipulate what sounds like a play on Tibetan throat singing. In a way, he does what a lot of great producers in this scene do: take quirky and sometimes unlistenable noises and tweak them until the dance floor is moving.

“Ashley”, the track that would feel the most at home on any dance music festival’s main stage, finds him collaborating with AFROJACK as they fluctuate between a bombastic house beat and euphoric synth lines. You can practically see the crowd jumping off their feet. Closer “Needle Guy” bookends “Throat Song” as it brings back the sometimes-grating vocoder noise, the song’s title repeated over and over as the synths descend into madness about halfway through. These tracks will fit in on any dance floor just fine.