When San Francisco-based trio NVO described their genre to me as “live electronic music,” I immediately scoffed. Electronic music is soulless and meaningless and, to recycle some words I’ve already used to describe my least favorite genre, emotionally dead inside. This stuff is for obnoxious tech bros and spoiled suburban kids.

In the case of NVO, their music is not dead inside. I was dead wrong.

Featuring traces of G-funk, shimmering production values and acoustic drumbeats to give the grooves an organic feel, their music does feel alive, fresh, and distinctly apart from the smorgasbord of electro projects cluttering the Bay Area. The track “Sidewalks” off their latest EP Night Vision Odyssey is particularly enticing with its soaring synthesizers, trance-inducing rhythm and psychedelic vibe coloring it all, filling your mind’s eye with flashes of neon pinks and blues and greens, taking your imagination on sci-fi journey through space and time.