The new Fox Theater, the arty Red Poppy, and the hustlin' Demolition Men

Today the repurposed concrete building near the corner of Brannan and Seventh streets houses both Asphodel's business offices and a revolutionary recording and performing space filled with powerful bit-chewing computers, multivector surround-sound controllers, automated mixing consoles, industrial DVD units, and 360-degree digital video projectors. It's no mere music venue; Humon and Johnson describe it as a "research and development center for experiential engineering of surround cinema." Or, in simple terms, testing ground for technology that allows musicians and video artists to envelop audiences in a fully immersive, mind-saturating environment. With its retina-sizzling visual capabilities and unnerving subdermal bass frequencies, everyone from virtual-space psychonauts to 3D game programmers can use the machines to reprogram reality in ways that make contemporary virtual reality headsets look like Foster Grant sunglasses.

The aim of all this ambitious experimentalism is to create a mobile, adaptable technology that can spread its wings anywhere radical multimedia artists need it — not just inside Recombinant's San Francisco chrysalis. A May presentation at the Elektra Festival in Montreal and a September showing at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, represent two immediate steps in that direction. Asphodel and Recombinant could thus theoretically alter the very DNA of modern music and video performance. "We no longer live in the age of simulation, but of recombinant culture," cyberpunk theorist Arthur Kroker wrote. If that's true, Recombinant Media Labs might be the staging ground for a full-scale takeover. — John Graham