The question has been asked more than once, but never answered in a fashion that completely clears things up. So it’s somehow fitting that the Glitch Mob’s Josh Mayer doesn’t take the Fifth when the subject of the Blade comes up, but doesn’t shed a lot of light on his band’s biggest live weapon, either.

“Part of it is having people wondering, ‘What the fuck is this thing?’ ” Mayer (aka Ooah) says, on the line from his Los Angeles home. “But I’m all for giving people a little bit, and not completely leaving them in the dark. The Blade is our instrument—we play the Blade. It’s a set piece that houses a ton of things that are just basically triggers. We’re triggering hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sounds off of iPads and tactile pad controllers, all set up through the Blade, all running back to this big system that we built with a buddy of ours. It’s a super crazy, complex little world of computers running into sound cards, running into digital converters—all these network-y, workplace, interface things with all kinds of pads and different configurations that flip over to different sounds. It’s a super tech-y, nerdy playback rig.”

And he’s not done breaking things down there. The Blade, Mayer argues, enables the Glitch Mob to build on the constantly shifting strains of EDM heard on the band’s countless singles, mix tapes, and EPs, and two albums, including last year’s epic Love Death Immortality.

“A lot of bands will have these huge complex computer systems that are playing all these backing tracks—stuff that they can’t play live,” he says. “We’ve basically designed the Blade to where we’re playing the whole thing. We’re playing all kinds of things—melodies, bass lines, percussion.”

If that explanation says a whole lot without saying anything, that’s probably the point. A simpler way of describing the setup might be to say that the Blade makes a case that the Glitch Mob—which includes Edward Ma (aka edIT) and Justin Boreta (simply known as Boreta)—is doing something more on-stage than pressing Run Program on an iBook. That’s something that’s obviously a sensitive topic with Mayer.

“People sometimes wonder if we’re up there faking something, or just standing in this thing,” he says. “It’s interesting how, nowadays, the idea of some artist on-stage not doing anything is such a thing. And that’s sad. Even when deejaying was not cool and popular, everyone up there was doing something. There was no idea of someone standing up there and not doing anything—what we like to call the Milli Vanilli. Even today, we’ll get people going, ‘Oh yeah, I went and saw the show, and those guys were faking it.’ ”

Consider that a statement that the New Orleans–raised Mayer respects the business of playing live as much as he does the process of making records.

“I was really into punk and hardcore, and also ska for a while,” he says. “It was a pretty big underground scene in New Orleans, and that was really eye-opening for me. I loved the rawness of it all. There was no one at the shows telling kids not to do something. There were all these cool, old, warehouse-y–type venues down in the French Quarter, and I can never remember seeing a single security guard. There was no ‘Don’t jump off a balcony or else you’re out of here.’ I remember thinking, ‘How is it that we can just do this, and no one gives a fuck?’ It was just this mentality of ‘Do what you wanna do.’ ”

And that’s translated to the Glitch Mob. Mayer proudly notes that the three-piece has taken a defiantly DIY approach to everything it does, from making records independently to working with friends on both the business and artistic side of things.

That approach definitely coloured Love Death Immortality, which finds the Glitch Mob playing by no one’s rules but its own. Crafted entirely on computers, the record roars all over the EDM map. The prog-rock-meets-Justice banger “A Mind of a Beast” kicks things off in assaultive fashion. The Glitch Mob visits the dark side of the moon with the spacey and ethereal “Becoming Harmonious”, pulls out the synth smart bombs for the military-march bombast of “Can’t Kill Us”, and hits the superclub dance floor for “I Need My Memory Back”. Guest vocalists abound, with friends of the band—Aja Volkman, Metal Mother, and Yaarrohs—sometimes evoking the spirit of Pat Benatar, and at other times bringing a delicate sultriness to the proceedings.

Although it was two years in the making, Love Death Immortality never felt like a difficult birth. Determined to escape the distractions of Los Angeles, Mayer, Ma, and Boreta rented a property in the otherworldly desert community of Joshua Tree, California. That would have a huge impact on the writing and recording process.

“We’re not the kind of guys who do things one way every time,” Mayer says. “We like to experiment with everything from exploring sounds to where we write our music. What we found out for this record is that we really loved the desert—the whole area was really alien, with almost this Mars-like feel to it. That helped take us out of our comfort zone during the initial process of conceiving the record, figuring out what we wanted to say, and what the record was going to be like. We felt like Joshua Tree was a good place to hit the reset button, and it turned into a great, really cool experience, to turn off phones and the Internet and all that stuff for a while.”

By “all that stuff”, he presumably doesn’t mean the Blade. Or maybe he does. What is certain is that Glitch Mob fans know plenty about it, while knowing nothing at all.

The Glitch Mob plays the Vogue Theatre on Friday (May 22).