NEW YORK - Surveying the tiny stage and low ceiling, Josh Dun sought to determine whether an adjacent pit could accommodate his signature back flip.

NEW YORK � Surveying the tiny stage and low ceiling, Josh Dun sought to determine whether an adjacent pit could accommodate his signature back flip.

A test run was in order.

�I can land right there?� the lanky drummer said during an afternoon sound check last month in the basement of Webster Hall � a cozy space inside the nightclub that has hosted once-obscure acts such as Mumford & Sons, Vampire Weekend and the National.

His band mate, Tyler Joseph, offered no support: �If you fall flat on your face, just get up and pretend like you�re not bleeding.�

Later that September evening, when the Columbus electro-pop duo known as Twenty One Pilots played to a full house, the gymnastics went off without a hitch.

The rising artists ought to be doing figurative flips, too.

Without seasoned management or a label, they have twice packed the Newport Music Hall � and, in the spring, sold out the 2,200-capacity Lifestyle Communities Pavilion.

Early hometown traction turned into a bidding war among 13 record companies that ended in February when they signed with a Warner Music Group subsidiary.

The two spent the summer opening for the chart-climbing California rockers of Neon Trees and returned last week from South Korea, where they performed before 8,000 people at a festival headlined by French disc jockey David Guetta.

A homecoming show planned for Friday at the pavilion sold out in four days � more than a month in advance.

Neither musician has any formal training.

�You have to have a little bit of confidence,� said 23-year-old Joseph, seated backstage a few hours before he would leap atop an upright piano, strut across a bar and flail about in a zip-up skeleton mask. �We started from nothing.

�I know we�re good enough to be up here.�

Full-court press

Swagger isn�t alien to Joseph, who, despite his tattoos and thrift-store apparel, might be remembered more as an athlete: He played point guard for Worthington Christian High School in 2008, the year his basketball team placed second in the Division IV state tournament.

A jocular type, he once sang �about girls and how ridiculous they are� during a class assembly.

�He�s kind of the life of the party,� said mother Kelly Joseph, a math teacher in the Olentangy school district.

After seeing a songwriter perform at a High Street club during his teenage years, her son sensed that his future had been significantly redirected.

He dug out an old keyboard � a castoff Christmas gift � and began mimicking radio melodies. His parents supplied recording software.

By graduation, Joseph had turned down a basketball scholarship from Otterbein University in Westerville to pursue music.

His family was stumped.

�They looked at me and said, �What does that mean?�??� Joseph recalled. �And I said, �I literally have no idea.�??�

While taking a few classes at Ohio State University and performing solo, Joseph started a band with two friends, Nick Thomas and Chris Salih.

The Twenty One Pilots moniker was inspired by an Arthur Miller play that Joseph had studied in a college theater class � the 1947 work All My Sons, in which a character knowingly supplies defective airplane parts that result in the deaths of 21 World War?II airmen.

Joseph�s busy colleagues couldn�t sustain the musical commitment, but Twenty One Pilots had found a fan in Dun, a self-taught Columbus drummer turned on to the group�s spastic, spacey style.

�I loved everything about the band, except for one thing: I wasn�t in it,� said Dun, 24.

The high-energy music remains heaped in pulsating keyboards and dramatic choruses bearing Joseph's manic singsong cadence that challenges a standard tempo�s capacity � as if theatrical pop pianist Rufus Wainwright, perhaps on a caffeine rush, were covering an Eminem tune.

An all-or-nothing attitude still marks the duo, which once played empty basements; lugged a piano up three flights of stairs during a blizzard; and attracted so few to a Chicago hall that the promoter couldn�t pay.

With fortunes more recently shifted, the two spent the summer in Los Angeles recording with writer-producer Greg Wells (Adele, Katy Perry). Orders for Twenty One Pilots� debut album, Vessel, will begin Saturday.

Building momentum

Like most other musicians, Dun and Joseph keep an active presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where their videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of clicks.

Other strategies were simpler � and, for a young band, atypical. They avoided excessive promotion and performed only sporadically in Columbus, instead playing in nearby cities where momentum helped them build to increasingly larger central Ohio gigs.

Fans did the marketing.

�There�s something so much more powerful about when someone takes it upon themselves to share,� Joseph said. �We�d play in front of five people � and those people told five people.�

He and Dun hired a videographer last year, with footage of growing crowds working like bait.

�They get the importance of how easy it needs to be (for fans) to get ahold of content,� said Mark Eshleman, who continues to film the band via his Columbus production company, Reel Bear Media. �And it had a big impact into labels noticing what�s going on in Ohio.�

Chris Woltman, an OSU graduate who spent more than a decade in executive roles at RCA and Columbia Records, took notice.

�There was such a level of interest and intrigue,� said Woltman, the group�s manager. �It became the band everyone was talking about.�

Twenty One Pilots signed with Fueled by Ramen, a pop-punk label whose roster has included Top 40 mainstays Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Gym Class Heroes and Fun. � the latter an emotive trio whose We Are Young this year reached No. 1.

�There�s so much going on between the musicality and the stage presence and the different types of music being fused together,� said Katie Robinson, senior marketing director for Fueled by Ramen.

The band�s work has resonated with fans such as Nicole Smith, a Gahanna resident who made the 12-hour drive to New York for the September show.

�When I�m listening to them, I hear nothing else,� said Smith, 19. �I look up to them.�

Local dreamers

Joseph, whose speaking voice is higher than his songs might suggest, prefers to channel �real things, like struggle and pain, depression � things we all have to learn to get over.�

At this level, words have a liability.

Holding On to You, the band�s first single, finds the vocalist imploring the hopeless to � put a noose around� bad thoughts. On Guns for Hands, he condemns suicide but acknowledges it as a byproduct of free will.

�You have the ability to control that aspect of yourself, whether or not you live or die,� Joseph said. �Now, let�s take that energy and that focus, and point it at something else, like art or painting or music.�

Both are graduates of Christian high schools, but their act isn�t religious. It centers on self-reliance, pride and humility amid fast-moving events that might soon gain the band a wider platform.

�Part of it�s totally overwhelming,� Dun said. �I�m still going to respond to everybody on Facebook.�

And for good reason: In a YouTube clip with footage from the pavilion show in April, Joseph narrates: �You created our big break. Thank you.�

After the Webster Hall show, trash cans and lampposts along E. 11th Street in New York were plastered with Twenty One Pilots stickers that read �Power to the Local Dreamer� � a fitting outlook as the twosome lies between taxi and takeoff.

�It�s balancing this whole I-can�t-believe-things-are-happening� mentality, Joseph said. �At the same time: Bring it on.�

kjoy@dispatch.com

@kevjoy