Show Review, Photos: Excision Brings Mind-Shattering Show Back To San Francisco
Excision
w/ HOL!, Smoakland b2b Hairitage, Luci, Crystal Skies
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
San Francisco, CA
March 14th, 2026
For the second night in a row, Canadian producer Excision brought his epic display on earth-shattering bass music to a sold-out crowd at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. By this point, Excision (Jeff Abel) is a Bay Area mainstay - it seems like he’s made a trip out to perform in Northern California every year since 2011, with his spots on festivals going from support to headliner, while his own headlining shows push the visual and auditory limits of what a dubstep/bass music/headbanger/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it concert should be.
From the second the show started, just past seven PM, an amalgamation of rising stars in the genre took the stage for sets filled with trippy visuals, an ungodly amount of lasers, and songs with basslines and drops that could blow out the array of subwoofers nestled in the front of the stage at a moment’s notice. While I sadly missed Crystal Skies and Luci, I showed up in time to watch Smoakland rip through a b2b set with Hairitage (for the uninitiated - b2b means that two DJs play on stage together, lobbying songs back and forth to one another on the DJ decks). Main support was provided by HOL!, who I had the opportunity to see open for Kayzo several years ago. Pyrotechnics blasted across the stage throughout the nearly hour-long set as the crowd reacted with intensity to every beat dropped.
Excision has been on my bucket list of artists to photograph for a very long time. Why? There is simply no artist out there who is visually and sonically pulling off the kind of show that he is putting out there. This is a show that has clearly taken well over a decade to craft, utilizing every possible square inch of venue space to immerse the crowd. LED screens line the walls at the front of the venue on either side of the stage. Cryo tanks are placed in front and around the crowd, blowing plumes of cool vapor into the audience at the appropriate drops. Shapeshifting flames comprised of blue, orange, red, and green hues create a heat wave of epic proportions. There is an ungodly amount of lasers used that rival the amount used by Gareth Emery during his “Laserface” shows. All of this is in tune with some of the loudest, percussive, in-your-face heavy bass music that this scene has to offer. An Excision show is an orgy of pyrotechnics, lasers, speaker-breaking drops, and overstimulation. I loved every second of it.
There is a good chance that if you’re a fan of this kind of music, you have already seen Excision live in some form or another. If you haven’t, I don’t know what you’re still doing here reading this. Go and see one of his shows. The photos don’t do it justice.
Excision’s next performance will be at Ultra Music Festival in Miami, FL on March 28th, 2026. For more information and to buy tickets, click here.
