‘Jungle Juice,’ ‘Dissolve,’ ‘Space Boss’: if any of those tracks have come up in your rotation or at a festival stage you caught this year, the name behind all of them is Liquid Stranger. His Electric Helix tour runs 47 U.S. dates from January through April, and it comes through Higher Ground in South Burlington on February 10.
About the Show
The full bill for “Liquid Stranger Presents: Electric Helix” includes support from Sully, Twopercent, and CHOZEN. All three acts are confirmed across nearly all 47 stops on the tour, so by the time it reaches Vermont, this is a well-worn road show. Martin Stääf, the Swedish producer behind the Liquid Stranger project, started from underground European club dates and built from there — founding WAKAAN Records and SSKWAN, the boundary-pushing experimental bass labels, and running the WAKAAN Music Festival. Press sources have called him “the pioneering architect of freeform bass,” and Relentless Beats credited him with having “practically created a whole genre himself.” What those phrases cover is a lot of sonic territory: dubstep, downtempo, experimental bass, and what sources describe as “otherworldly soundscapes,” ranging from “introspective downtempo meditations” to “floor-splintering bass” in a single night. The tour description says performances “leave no audience unchanged,” which is promo language, but for a sound that spans this much territory at this volume, it is not wrong. He has performed at Red Rocks Amphitheater and collaborated with Excision at Lost Lands festival. After Higher Ground, the tour continues to Hollywood Palladium in March, includes an Ultra Music Festival appearance in Miami in late March, and wraps at WAMU Theater in Seattle in April.
Venue & Logistics
Higher Ground’s ballroom in South Burlington, the North Country’s consistent anchor for mid-size national electronic tours, holds 750. For bass music at this scale, the room size is part of the equation. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show at 8:00 p.m.
Tickets
The show is all ages. General admission standing room starts at $30 face value. General on-sale went live November 6 at 10 a.m. local; presales ran the prior day. Ticket limit: six per customer. Buy tickets