By the second half of September, Blone Noble and Hot Hail! will be moving through the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada on the DOMINATOR 2026 tour, carrying enough synthesizers, theatrical posture, political irritation, and suspiciously good tailoring to make a normal Thursday night feel like somebody accidentally booked a cabaret inside a government bunker. For anyone wishing they could have stumbled into a club 45 years ago to catch Fad Gadget and Soft Cell on the same bill, this unholy pairing may be about as close as the 21st century is going to get.
Seattle’s Hot Hail! will support the September run, with NITE SCHOOL co-founder DJ Candy Whiplash curating each night from behind the decks. Her adventurous selections and assured dance-floor instincts will connect the live sets, sustain the audience’s energy, and give every stop the immersive character of a NITE SCHOOL night. More dates in the U.S. South will be announced soon.
Blone Noble belongs to the grand tradition of performers who understand that walking onstage in ordinary clothes and looking pleased to be there is an unforgivable waste of electricity. There is Bowie’s appetite for reinvention, Bryan Ferry’s immaculate poise, Frank Tovey’s art-school mischief, and some of the elegant strangeness associated with Japan and Dalí’s Car. Noble treats clothing, lighting, posture, movement, and staging as part of the music, creating performances that can resemble a nightclub, a fashion shoot, an art installation, or an occult ceremony. Beneath the polish sits a colder electronic foundation built for physical movement. Synthesizers stretch outward, rhythms tighten, and pop hooks creep into spaces where less sociable musicians might have installed a folding chair and lectured you about theory.
DOMINATOR carries a sexually charged absurdity and mechanical tension—certainly the flip side of Fad Gadget’s Coitus Interruptus—while the eerie Subterranean World turns toward a more enclosed and psychological direction. Blone Noble shapeshifts with admirable disregard for anyone attempting to file the project under one convenient heading.
Then there is Hot Hail!, the Seattle duo of songwriter Billy Sigil and DJ Emilio Cerrillo, who bring classic synthpop instincts, darkwave excess, post-punk politics, horror, humanity, and jokes good enough to survive proximity to the apocalypse. Hot Hail! describe themselves as the perfect music for starting, then quickly ruining, any party. This is their first multi-city tour, giving several towns the opportunity to learn exactly how efficiently that process works.
Their newest album, HOPE IN HELL, wrestles with the question of how anyone preserves sanity while fascism crawls back into public life wearing a fresh tie and insisting everybody calm down. The songs pair enormous hooks with political anger, proving that despair can at least have decent bass.
Drawing from the synth traditions of early Depeche Mode and Soft Cell, Hot Hail!’s WYRD takes the form of an address to an absent companion: the feminine self pushed down early, disciplined into silence, but never erased. The lyrics speak directly to this buried part of the self, allowing affection, recognition, and regret to occupy the same space. The arrangement leaves enough space for each admission to register, giving WYRD the feeling of a conversation postponed for years.
Candy Whiplash brings the full history and curatorial authority of NITE SCHOOL to the September bill. As the acclaimed series’ co-founder, curator, resident DJ, and creative director, she has spent nearly sixteen years helping shape one of Austin’s most respected underground music institutions. Candy and her late partner, Seattle-born DJ Scorpio RX, launched NITE SCHOOL at Beauty Bar before establishing its longtime home at Cheer Up Charlie’s, one of the city’s most influential queer live-music and DJ venues. Through acclaimed performances by artists from around the world, adventurous DJ programming, and a fiercely loyal community, the night became a cornerstone of Austin’s underground electronic music scene.
Candy’s work has always reached far beyond the DJ booth. She developed NITE SCHOOL’s distinctive minimalist visual identity and has overseen its branding, marketing, photography, graphic design, artist relations, and promotion. That combination of creative direction, musical judgment, and sustained care gave NITE SCHOOL a complete identity of its own while providing a platform for darkwave, post-punk, EBM, industrial, techno, noise, synthpop, and genre-defying electronic artists from around the world.
Behind the decks, Candy is known for emotionally charged, dance-floor-driven sets spanning French electronic music, goth, coldwave, darkwave, EBM, industrial, post-punk, no wave, mutant disco, Italo disco, synthpop, techno, and Spanish-language darkwave. Her selections connect foundational records with contemporary underground sounds, turning every changeover into an essential part of the evening and carrying the audience’s momentum from one live performance to the next.
Following Scorpio RX’s passing in January 2024, Candy revived NITE SCHOOL by popular demand, honoring the vision they established together while leading it into a new chapter. DOMINATOR 2026 marks NITE SCHOOL’s Seattle debut and carries its legacy of immersive programming, adventurous booking, visual imagination, and community-building into the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada.
For several nights in September, restraint is officially somebody else’s problem. Have a blast!
Tour Dates:
- 9.16 – Bellingham, WA – The Shakedown
- 9.17 – Seattle, WA – Kremwerk
- 9.19 – Spokane, WA – The Chameleon
- 9.20 – Calgary, AB – Dickens Pub
- 9.21 – Edmonton, AB – Starlite Temple
- 9.23 – Nanaimo, BC – The Globe
- 9.24 – Vancouver, BC – The Astoria
- 9.25 – Portland, OR – Shanghai Tunnel Bar
- 9.26 – Olympia, WA – Decay
- 9.28 – Tacoma, WA – Real Arts Tacoma
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