Review: Cashmere Cat bends pop to his strange whim at the Wiltern

Is Cashmere Cat the most pop-curious experimental producer going today, or the weirdest guy still able to get the Weeknd and Selena Gomez on the phone?

The 29-year-old Norwegian producer, born Magnus Høiberg, is a liminal figure in pop music right now. A former youth DJ prodigy, he’s produced singles for Kanye West and Ariana Grande — works that paired a hyper-modern sound design with strong R&B and trap-music rhythms.

To judge from the crowd at his sold-out Wiltern show on Friday night, he’s clearly on an ascent to something like Diplo or DJ Snake’s status as a superstar producer/performer.

But there’s also something in him that resists the attention and makes him subvert the pop-star company he keeps. On Friday, he turned his cameo-packed new record “9” into a shadowy club gig that moved more like a DJ set than a showcase for a rising star. Whatever this new tide of post-EDM and woozy hip-hop is right now, Cashmere Cat defines it.

After a pair of opening sets from the like-minded, genre-agnostic producers Kingdom and Sophie, Høiberg took the stage with a setup that showed off his dual roles. Behind him, there was a house-sized rack of colored spotlights and fog machines, as befits a major new pop force.

But in front, there was just a humble table with a few pieces of DJ gear. He didn’t sing; he was alone for most of his set, and his only real movements onstage were the times he turned his back to the crowd and walked around the pillars of light behind him.

The sheer firepower on “9” — Grande, the Weeknd, Gomez, Camila Cabello, Kehlani, Ty Dolla Sign — proves that he’s got a vision that resonates across pop and experimental worlds. But Friday, he proved that reserve can be its own kind of charisma.

The songs are definitely there.

The single “9 (After Coachella)” started as a misty, sad trap-pop single but took a hard left turn into clanging noise that was as anxiety-wracking as anything Trent Reznor ever produced. It’s maybe the weirdest move on any hit song in 2017, and it’s kind of reassuring that the kids are into that antagonism. “Wild Love” took a mournful vocal melisma from the Weeknd and digitally turned it inside-out, so as to be almost unrecognizable in its source material.

It’s a brave, bold trick he uses throughout “9,” taking super-recognizable voices and rendering them alien. Sometimes even two at once — “Trust Nobody” buffed Gomez and Tory Lanez’s vocals into a computerized sheen. The tactic evoked Harmony Korine’s film “Spring Breakers,” in the way he took famous pop-star faces and bent them into his own avant-garde aesthetic.

Høiberg is obviously an extremely skilled DJ, but he’s not showy about it. And that’s the challenge of a set like this. At this point in his career, Cashmere Cat’s somewhere in between a DJ and live performer without quite committing to either format. It’s a very modern vantage point, but it’s also kind of a conundrum.

Skrillex can solve it by wilding out onstage or hosting Justin Bieber for a guest vocal. But Høiberg’s not that kind of guy. While he cuts a striking figure onstage — long blonde hair disguising his features, a drapey military coat underlining his chilly demeanor — his live show isn’t much to actually watch yet.

For all his brilliant sonics and hit-making acumen, in person, it all still looks like a normal DJ gig. And he may be a hair short of the material he needs for a major headline tour — he still had to pad the night out playing Drake tunes he didn’t add too much to.

But still, Friday’s show heralded a new era in pop and electronic music, where a lone DJ can be front and center onstage and where every kind of club music can be diced into something strange and new and even elegaic. At his set’s close, he climbed on top of his rig to take a video of the scene on his phone. It was the most he acknowledged the crowd all night, and the kids went wild for it.

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