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DCIST: "Aligning Minds create soundscapes. Their atmospheric music evokes isolated locales, rainy nights in the city, frost covered fields in the early morning sun. At the show we caught, Aligning Minds didn't need to create a locale so much as to enhance it -- the work was already done for them in the leaking and chilly fourth floor at Love on a drizzly Wednesday night. Introduced to this electronic live performance duo by innovative local promoter 88 DC, DCist went to the Gathering last week to see what they were all about. When we first approached Aligning Minds, we found two guys bobbing their heads at twice the beat of an eerie melody they were creating live on laptops and a multitude of other technological gadgetry. Of course, they were bobbing in anticipation of the intricate beat they were about to drop. With the addition of a compelling bassline that reverberated throughout the floor, we settled in to take in a set of isolating, enveloping, minimally beautiful and painstakingly crafted tunes from Aligning Minds.

The musical palette of Aligning Minds includes jazz, classical, techno, breakbeat, drum and bass, industrial and more. For simplicity's sake, we'll refer to their collective sound as "intelligent dance music," or IDM. They are more ambient at times than IDM pioneer Aphex Twin, and more beat oriented than much hyped DJ Shadow. Unlike the other acts on 88's floor at Love, Aligning Minds are not "DJing" -- they do not spin other musicians' records. Rather, they create and then perform live electronic music by programming, synthesizing, sequencing, and the live manipulation of sounds and beats. Their music is a testament to computer nerds everywhere.

Throughout the night, Aligning Minds dropped fuzzy basslines complemented by crisp piano melodies, echoing vocals over complex drums, lush melodies coupled with jarring industrial noises. Put simply, they create music out of juxtaposition.

Its hard to write about electronic music and not mention blips and bleeps at some point. And granted, Aligning Minds have glitchy blips and bleeps in abundance, but they also bring to the mix various natural sounds -- guitars, pianos, chimes, tablas and human voices, to name a few. Moreover, even the non-organic technological elements of their songs have a musicality to them that transcend the usual jargon. Most of their songs start sparsely, while slowly adding and subtracting elements in a way that creates a simultaneously alienating and sensual sound. Their songs are layered and textural epic journeys, never ending quite where they start out.

If you let it, there is a certain trance-inducing quality that occurs when listening to so many elements at once. The crowd seemed to be taken in as well. Despite the contention that the convoluted beats of IDM make it relatively undanceable, the crowd at Love danced throughout their set, losing themselves in the hypnotic beats and musical storytelling of these two talented musicians."