Arcade Fire, Kanye West, and Interpol may have been headliners at this year's Coachella, but a handful of underground acts from Los Angeles made sure that festivalgoers kept shaking their asses all weekend long. These DJs and producers hail from the city'sburgeoning "Beat Scene," a loose musical collective that centers around electronic experimentalist Flying Lotus and the sweaty Low End Theory parties, held each week downtown.

SPIN was there to check out five of the best artists from the scene, including Daedelus and Tokimonsta, who flexed a broad mixture of banging hip-hop and dark, soulful dance. -- Chris Martins

MEET THE DJs>>

Arcade Fire, Kanye West, and Interpol may have been headliners at this year's Coachella, but a handful of underground acts from Los Angeles made sure that festivalgoers kept shaking their asses all weekend long. These DJs and producers hail from the city'sburgeoning "Beat Scene," a loose musical collective that centers around electronic experimentalist Flying Lotus and the sweaty Low End Theory parties, held each week downtown.

SPIN was there to check out five of the best artists from the scene, including Daedelus and Tokimonsta, who flexed a broad mixture of banging hip-hop and dark, soulful dance. -- Chris Martins

MEET THE DJs>>

Nosaj Thing (who's real name is Jason Chung) grew up listening to L.A.-based hip-hop like Snoop Dogg, and the rap influence courses through his music to this day. During his Friday night Coachella set (opposite headliners Chemical Brothers), Nosaj cracked open a wide array of burbling digitalia and spacey textures while sampling everything from Busta Rhymes' "Dangerous" to the xx's "Islands." Of the whole Los Angeles Beat Scene at Coachella, Nosaj's set offered the prettiest tunes — haze-swathed and emotive even when underpinned by the heavy boom bap.

Alfred Weisberg-Roberts (who goes by Daedelus) focused on double bass and bass clarinet as a jazz student in college, and his formal training informs his arty, wild approach to dance music — the most cerebral of the fest. During his early morning Sunday set, Daedelus (sporting a mauve coat, tie, and mutton chop side burns) delivered patchwork jams featuring jittery bass hits, baroque melodies, hyperactive percussives, and samples from obscure female vocalists from the '30s and '40s. Gear freaks, take note: Daedelus played his songs on his sample-cuing device of choice, the Monome, like a bonafide rock star.

Jennifer "Tokimonsta" Lee was the lone female presence out of the Beat Scene's boys-heavy club, and while she appeared soft-spoken at first, she proved to be an absolute menace behind the boards. Like Daedelus, Lee comes from a classical background (she studied piano as a kid), but her music is far more loose and atmospheric, with melancholic guitars, grainy vinyl static, and dusty blues vocal samples.

Ras G (born Gregory Shorter Jr.) is the most experimentally inclined of the Beat Scene crew — as fearless as Captain Beefheart's Don Van Vliet or Sun Ra — and his Saturday afternoon performance was one of the wildest DJ sets of Coachella. His songs were crammed with megaton bass, air-horn blasts, and disjointed rhythms. But the dreadlocked dub addict wasn't only about clank and clang: he tied his avant-garde electronic funk together with strands of space jazz and stony Madlib-esque hip-hop. It was oddly spiritual.

When Take claimed reign over the Oasis Dome on Saturday, the DJ announced, "I'm gonna ease you into how I do it, since we're all feeling sluggish." That turned out to be a gross understatement: The first notes that rang out over the crowd were bone-rattling bass, punctuated by eardrum-piercing effects. His secret weapon? The custom sound system designed by L.A. promoter Pure Filth, which is also used at the weekly Low End Theory parties. Overall, Take delivered a perfect mash-up of rap swing with IDM smarts, as if Squarepusher were mixed by DJ Shadow.