On a Saturday night in April at the Bushwick venue Elsewhere, Ash Luk and Lida P whirred over their machines in a flurry of action. The small room was packed with thrashing bodies in black leather and latex. The cool air reeked of sweat and poppers. A cake-sitting took place against one of the walls. Terence Fixmer and Douglas McCarthy's live set could be faintly heard from across the hall.

None of this fazed the duo. They barely looked up from their gear, seamlessly recreating tracks from their new album, InDreams, a drum machine-fueled odyssey of techno, industrial, trance and hardcore. Their sound was monstrous in scale as we cruised over 150 BPM, and I couldn't help but cheer when I heard a melody I recognized. The room and its soundsystem could barely contain the sheer force that is Minimal Violence. We needed a stadium, or, at the very least, much bigger speakers.

The duo weren't always quite so full-throttle. Their previous records, on labels like 1080p, Jungle Gym and Genero, were lush and expansive, but much more minimalist in their sound design. 2017's Acid Lakes EP, released on Lobster Theremin, marked a turn toward upbeat, acid techno that would lead to an equally ravey 12-inch (and eventually, their first album) on Technicolour. InDreams homes in on the hardest and darkest sounds of the dance floor, but there's an element of play to it as well. Tracks like "June Anthem" and "Last One At The Rave" evoke the campiness of '90s EBM, trance and industrial.

"I probably hold us back sometimes," Lida told me when I asked if she and Ash think of their music as being fun. It was the morning after their show at Elsewhere, and it had begun to drizzle outside the coffee shop.

"You're the voice of reason," Ash countered, sitting beside her. "There's some moments with InDreams, where there's very unabashed, obvious synth patterns. I feel like it's a really weird choice to aim at writing something that's kind of like an anthem, because most anthems are produced so well. But trying to do these very unrefined anthems has an element of risk-taking. Not all the tracks on the album are like that, but we really wanted to have a track that was fun, anthemic and captured a specific time period. It might not age well but it would be representational of the time it was released, or of the time it was referencing."

The power of the anthem goes hand-in-hand with the physicality of the live set for Minimal Violence. When I saw them play live last summer, they were flanked by the massive subwoofers at the now-closed venue Output, and I felt like I got whiplash. "The heavier stuff is more fun for us to play live," said Ash. "We want to be able to get into the sets and really be having the same experience as the people who are watching. We play with the intent of cultivating as much energy as possible, like a wind turbine."

There's a punk ethos to the way Minimal Violence approach production. They went into the project with the idea that they would play live first and record music second—"a band mentality," said Lida. "We had machines. We were ignorant of them, but we were determined to use them."

"We may have kind of started in above our heads a little," Ash admitted. "It's affected our writing process a lot, because I think a lot of people start off with the dance floor in mind, understanding how tracks work best, but our ignorance towards that has played into developing our sound. Our music is a product of our limitations."

Watching Minimal Violence live, it's clear there's an inherent respect and trust to the way that they interact. Even when reaching over one another to create a loop or adjust a filter, they move intuitively. "We've definitely nailed down a bit of a formula for how we work best together live, but with production, we're always changing and finding the areas that each of us are strong in, and allowing those areas to shift," said Ash. "It's learning to let go of ego."

"And being allowed to disagree," Lida responded. "Somebody may make something, and the other person's opinion is valid if they say something's not right about that, or we can do better."

Ash and Lida met while working at a sandwich shop in 2012, but it wasn't until a couple of years later that they decided they wanted to do something creative together. They pondered some sort of visual art or writing collaboration, but ultimately, Ash said, "music was the natural progression." Though the duo have deviating musical trajectories, they wound up in the same place by virtue of each other. Ash found their way to techno via happy hardcore and jungle in the '90s, then "entry point goth music" like Bauhaus, then minimal synth and so on. They recall hearing Frankie Knuckles' "Baby Wants To Ride" for the first time, and connecting the dots between minimal synth and house music.

Meanwhile, Lida grew up on "questionable punk" and various tastes that were influenced by friends. As she hit her 20s, she discovered Kraftwerk, Neu! and Robbie Basho. "And then I met Ashlee, who introduced me to a whole genre of music I hadn't ever really encountered, so I'm grateful for that," Lida said. "And then we progressed from there together."

Over the past several years, Vancouver has become known for its low-key, playful spin on house music, a sound shaped by labels like 1080p, Mood Hut and Pacific Rhythm. Though Vancouver house was gaining widespread prominence at the same time as Minimal Violence, they don't really consider themselves part of that scene. In 2015, they started booking noisier, harder music with the collective and platform Sacred Sound Club, a group of friends with similar interests who all came from a band background but were producing their own music, like Josh Rose (who records as Derivatives), Spencer Davis (Usd), Meagan Auger (Opponent Processes) and Morgan Trista (Stroke Order). When I pressed for more names, Ash wondered aloud: "Who were we playing with?"

"Were we playing?" Lida quipped.

What unites the house scene and the harder scene that Minimal Violence inhabits, they say, is a lust for machines, which Ash traces back to Vancouver groups like Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly. "Something that is inherently Vancouver about our music was our real interest in getting straight into hardware," they said. "Maybe it's derivative of the '90s industrial scene. A lot of gear started to get passed down when they were like, 'I'm gonna have a kid and sell my $9,000 drum machine to buy a house.' There's a hands-on ethos that's been passed down, too."

This happens horizontally as well. Deep Blue, the DIY studio and venue complex where Minimal Violence record, is home to "lots of interesting gear," Ash mentioned. "It's cool to be able to ask people, 'Hey, can I borrow this?' Infatuation, that's the word. It definitely rubbed off on us."

Collectively, the pair have spent a lot of time living in Vancouver. Ash grew up in Winnipeg but has lived in the city for over a decade. Lida was born there, moved away, and then returned for university. It's hard to imagine the aesthetic of the city, with its glass buildings, efficient monorail system and rainy atmosphere, not influencing the concept behind their new album.

InDreams explores the idea of "InDreams inc.," a fictional corporation that aims to "deconstruct the barrier between our dreams and waking reality." Put another way, Ash explained, they wanted to "challenge this assumed hierarchy of our physical reality over psychic reality. In this future, [this corporation] has the ability to market your psychic reality to you. If we were to toss this into a William Gibson or Philip K. Dick novel, it would seem like this crazy future thing, but now it's not so far off from something that could exist in ten years with the capabilities of VR."

Perhaps the duo will end up constructing such an experience themselves. InDreams is meant to be a lens through which to interpret their next releases, as well as a means of expanding the conversation beyond the music, through collaborations "in different art forms."

Ultimately, Minimal Violence is about pushing back against the constraint of form itself—moving your body to high-speed techno in a way you haven't before, reshaping theoretical ideas of cities and corporations and the future, channeling human essence through machines—but also recognizing your own ability to define the limits in the first place. The duo told me about the venue they played at Moogfest a few days before our interview, an old fruit-packing warehouse that Ash described as looking like "Tresor in Durham."

"It was a Thursday night, there weren't a ton of people there," they said. "It was a very intimidating feeling, because your presence alone has to fill that space if the space itself isn't full. When you're in a space that's so grand, you have to step up. It turned out being one of the best shows we've ever played."