Cascadia Calling 2025.08.04

"you know there's going to be security, right?"

My hectic travels are almost finished, but before I camp out in Seattle for a few weeks, I’m headed off to Las Vegas (The City That Shouldn’t Be™). I’m making my annual pilgrimage to DEF CON, the world’s largest hacker gathering. While DEF CON is a hacker conference, it also always has a stacked bill of electronica and nerdcore performers every night. I was saddened to learn that my favorite act from past years, Zebbler Encanti Experience, wouldn’t be performing this year, but I’m still looking forward to several nights of killer music.

ZEE is one of those acts that can’t be done justice by recording, but that set should give the viewer a sense of the audio/visual experience. The music and visuals are high energy and engaging and the band’s infectious stage presence always build’s a room’s energy and sustains throughout their glitchy, pounding sets. There’s an impish quality to their vibes on stage that’s hard to describe, but suffice it to say that I’ll miss Zebbler running around the stage with a DEF CON flag grinning like a maniac.

One thing that sets ZEE apart is that they’re explicitly not just a musical group. Zebbler has built custom video rigs and teaches at Berklee in their Electronic Production and Design department. (Though to many in the public he may remain better known for other work.) The tight coupling of the visuals and audio also create a more holistic sensory experience. In a space like DEF CON where it’s easy to be teeth-to-the-stage if you want, the whole sensory overload of dancing plus the pulsing bass creates a complete world that it’s easy to get lost in.

One artist who I’m stoked will be performing this year is DJ Jackalope. Jackalope is notorious in hacker circles for the intensity of her sets. It’s a well-earned reputation. A few years ago, Jackalope was performing in a repurposed event room when the drop ceiling collapsed under the wave pressure of the bass and a few panels came crashing down. No one was injured, so I’m safe to regard this as a sign of an extremely dope night.

Jackalope’s commanded loyalty from the fans over the years with a kind of easy, joyous stage presence and a sonic maximalism that you can see on display in this set. The unrelenting wall of sound and unrelenting good vibes make for pure euphoria in person.

Nerdcore, as the genre name implies, caters explicitly to the traditionally uncool. It’s an interesting constraint and it means that some of the best music of the genre still comes off as at least a bit cringe. It takes a artistic guts to write and produce music under those circumstances. The ones that are the best at the genre manage it, somewhat ironically, by being suffused with incredible amounts of personal charisma.

It also helps, of course, to have some cred in the scenes the artist is referencing. In the case of int 80 and c64 of Dual Core, they’re both long-time hackers as well as musicians. I’ve been a Dual Core fan for many years and I appreciate that they take the application of music to hacking seriously and manage to create some banger tunes for the irredeemable nerds among us.

NOTE: There won’t be a column next week. I’ll likely post a placeholder of some kind, but regular columns will resume on August 18th.