Ice Machine

Gesaffelstein provides a corrective to dance music’s heated festival scene.

- Carrie Battan

Many of today’s most prominent d.j.s and producers have found fame as jesters on the festival circuit. Think of Steve Aoki, the electro-house hype man, pumping up the masses at this summer’s Electroland, at Disneyland Paris. Or of Marshmello, the twenty-six-year-old d.j. who wears an enormous emoji-esque mask, and who will, this year and next, provide the soundtrack for the debauchery at the new club Kaos, in Las Vegas, for a rumored sixty million dollars. Mike Lévy, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchman who records as Gesaffelstein, has taken a more ascetic tack. Lévy, one of electronic music’s rising stars, has an ear for dance-music history and an affinity for brutalism, as well as a committed disregard for the appetites of the Everyman. His first album, “Aleph,” from 2013, was a master class in universe-building. A high-concept tone poem, the record took the frantic, four on-the-floor rhythms of techno and splattered them with screeching industrial textures, creating a sound that was better suited for the apocalypse than for the festival tent, although it had its place on a certain kind of dance floor nonetheless.