Filling Club Spaces With Dance Beats and Arena-Size Sound

Skrillex The producer and D.J. at the Brooklyn Bowl on Monday night, at the start of a week in New York: He calls these one-city club tours “takeovers.” His next stops are Amsterdam and Barcelona, Spain.

Oversize glasses, check. Asymmetrical haircut, check. Arm-pumping, climb-on-the-D.J.-desk enthusiasm, check. Lasers, check. And most of all: bass, check.

The Skrillex brand was intact on Monday night at Brooklyn Bowl, where the D.J. and producer Sonny John Moore, a.k.a. Skrillex, started a five-night run of shows in Brooklyn clubs — part of a multicity series of club tours he calls “takeovers.” (He did something similar in 2012.) It’s a brief scaling down before Skrillex gets back to playing for arena-size audiences on the summer festival circuit. In smaller rooms, he can boom even louder.

He promised, and occasionally played, some new material — including, midway through, a new song featuring Chance the Rapper with a brisk OutKast-like beat (uncharacteristic for Skrillex) and a blunt question as its refrain. He also declared that he intended to play a different set each night in Brooklyn. But opening night, he went on, would be a “throwback” — giving fans the Skrillex they are happily familiar with.

On Monday, the producer and D.J. Skrillex started a five-day New York tour, performing in a different club every night. Chad Batka for The New York Times

That’s a D.J. whose sets are built for repeated, unsubtle impact. Skrillex made his reputation as a prime mover in the American hijacking of the term dubstep, which started as British dance music using the murky subterranean moves of dub reggae bass lines below brittle, pattering beats. Skrillex latched on to dubstep’s divebombing bass lines and the way they can derail a dance beat, but he set aside British dubstep’s slow buildups and ominous suspense. Instead, he used dubstep’s bass drops as a quick kick in the head to other club styles, particularly electro house, and it worked. Sullen dubstep purists call his music brostep instead.

Skrillex’s music rarely deals in atmospheric buildups and gradual payoffs; it’s about immediate momentum. His mixes, and his D.J. sets, are often heaving, swerving, murk-free assaults, something like video-game shootouts among zaps of distorted bass, jabs of klaxon-like midrange synthesizers and cartoonishly wobbling “wubba wubba” interjections below. He did dip into reggae now and then — particularly his 2012 collaboration with Damian Marley, “Make It Bun Dem” — but was more likely to use a blunt four-on-the-floor beat as his foundation.

His set unfolded with a quick-changing barrage for starters, sometimes switching textures every 30 seconds and dropping in bits of his own tracks, like “Weekends!!!” The beat paused for the ballad-like vocals of “Holy Grail” by Jay Z featuring Justin Timberlake, and in a middle portion Skrillex allowed longer stretches of house to develop. Eventually, a monumental bass drop signaled the renewed pummeling of the set’s home stretch, full of squeals and thuds and familiar Skrillex tracks like “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” and his remixes of Benny Benassi’s “Cinema” and Avicii’s “Levels.” It was a blast, but a largely familiar one; perhaps later in the week he’ll reveal more about where he’s headed next.