Music:
History EDM/Rave music in U.S.A:
I have encountered a lot of people to this day who are just beginning to learn the meaning behind the abbreviation “EDM.” EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music, and it’s sweeping the United States music industry, as well as the world. This term was used as early as 1985 in America, but didn’t catch on until the 1990s when DJs started using the lingo. EDM is a set of percussive music genres that largely stem from the production methods of disco, techno, house and trance music. This music became very popular around the time of the nightclub and warehouse scene in the 80s, as well as the earliest rave scene of the acid house movement. It basically started in the late 1970s with Donna Summer’s hit “I Feel Love.” Most music at this time was the traditional based acoustic orchestra, but this song changed music forever with the first use of synthesizers, as well as drum machines. These new sounds often ended up in other songs, and became very popular at this time. Then by the time the mid-90s came around, EDM was publicly noted, and its role in society began to take over. In today’s world, EDM is produced with software that contains sequence sampling and synthesizers, and is no longer created solely for dancing.
Although this music is the main type played at night clubs and is often referred to as ‘club music,’ club music and EDM are two distinct genres, despite the fact that their specific definitions vary from person to person. In broader terms, club music is based solely on what’s popular at the moment, whereas EDM is based on the attributes of the music itself. In EDM there is a wide variety of different beats, sounds and vocals that define the genre.
In the 1970s to 1990s live performances weren’t as common as they are today, and most nights went people went out, DJs were the ones supplying the sound. Many who attended these night clubs began to attend more often due to how well the DJ could make the crowd dance, and keep it going. At this time, DJs started creating their own songs, and by doing this they would take songs that were popular and remix them to something they could dance to. Remixes were a big hit amongst the club scene and music industry, and still are to this day. By creating remixes, DJs became more and more popular, and thus in the 90s they started to play indoor and outdoor venues known by the name of “raves.”
As this phenomenon of DJs grew and grew, music festivals and raves became more widespread. These DJs either performed live or they stuck to spinning a set. By now, the EDM scene has drawn thousands and thousands of attendees to shows, sometimes even 30,000 in a day. The more legal side of raves are held at public venues with ticket prices starting around $80 and going up to $450 for 3 day festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), with the price dependent on the venue and the headliners. In the United States EDM was introduced as “electronica” when it was first exposed to the public during the mid 1990s. However, it didn’t find mainstream success in the United States back then and, often, producers and DJs were forced to travel abroad to gain exposure and success. Then in the year 2011, a popular music magazine, Spin, stated in an article that the American dance music scene had finally reached critical mass, a “new rave generation” of mainstream consumers having emerged. After America finally opened its mind to EDM, it was everyone for themself to break out and show America what they had to offer with their own music. By now, even Top 40 artists have integrated EDM into their songs, just because it’s hot right now and most likely will be for a long, long time to come.
New York City Rave History:
In discussions of the American legacy of techno, the focus is invariably on its founders in Detroit. Now that the US mainstream has begun to embrace electronic dance music, or ‘EDM’, Michaelangelo Matos uncovers the forgotten history of the American rave scene, zeroing in on the moment when the British ‘Summer Of Love’ found its way to New York.
It was 1989 and Frankie Bones was looking forward to his first trip to England. Karma Productions, a crew in London that threw gigantic warehouse and outdoor parties dubbed ‘raves’, had offered the 23 year-old Brooklyn DJ a slot in the lineup for their July party, Energy Part 2. These things had gotten some media attention, both in the English music press (which had declared 1988 a ‘Summer of Love’ and were on their way to doing the same for ’89) and the broadsheets (thousands of kids dancing to faceless machine beats in fields: what?). But in America they were still a distant rumour.
Born Frank Mitchell deep in Brooklyn, Bones began by making freestyle and soon unleashed a flurry of house tracks under a variety of pseudonyms. The most successful was 1989’s “Just As Long As I’ve Got You”, credited to Looney Tunes, a collaboration with onetime rival roller-rink DJ Lenny Dee – born Leonard Didesiderio in Sheepshead Bay. “Just As Long” fit the hopeful vibe of England’s cresting rave scene.
“We were used to selling 3,000 to 5,000 units on our own,” says Bones. “Suddenly we were moving 10,000 units, and more than half were going to Europe. London was very interested in us.” Bones arrived in London anticipating 5,000 people. En route to the locale, someone handed him a pill. “I didn’t know what ecstasy was,” he told the rave zine Massivein 1995. “[We were] stuck in a traffic jam on a little country road with just two lanes and cars for miles.” As he came up on E, he heard one of his songs playing in another car, followed by another of his songs, playing in another car: “I pretty much lost my mind.” Ditto when the crowd turned out to be closer to 25,000: “That was probably my enlightenment.”
Bones’s 1989 “Call It Techno” was a mission statement: “It started in Detroit/But I’m out to exploit/The way I hear it.” Bones was ready to spread the word to music-loving outer-borough kids like him. He gave away promo mixtapes at south Brooklyn’s premier cruising spot, beneath the elevated train on 86th Street. Frankie handed out cassettes at spotlights to kids in passing cars with his younger brother Adam.
“He would make a speech at the beginning,” says Adam Mitchell, better known as Adam X (and, more recently, Traversable Wormhole). He imitates his brother’s cod-English accent: “Hello party people! I just came back from England! And I just experienced this thing, the rave!” Adam watched as his brother’s salesmanship paid off: “[We’d wait] 30 minutes and they’d be on the rebound. You’d start hearing LFO coming out of the car: ‘Cool. Got one.’”
On April 21, 1990, Bones opened Groove Records on Avenue U. “Other shops in New York were selling techno,” says Adam, “but they didn’t push it as a movement. My brother wanted to make a scene around it.” Soon after, Adam began working the counter, his brother returned from another trip to England. (“We were going back and forth, two weeks there, two here,” Bones recalls. “No recovery time, just a lot of non-stop flights and parties.”) This time, Frankie had some pills to share. Ten people gathered at the Avenue U store. “We pulled the gates down and turned the system up,” says Adam. “In an hour I was like, ‘Whooaa.’” So were the others. “The people in the group told their friends, I told my friends, and it spread like wildfire, the whole idea of it.”
“Parties were happening everywhere: at McDonald’s, in the subway, [in] diners. [It’s] hard to compare with the restrictive policy today.”
Pretty soon, Adam says, “We were doing 50 people in a gutted-out apartment on Coney Island Avenue. It happened so quick. By ’91, we were doing generator parties in the junkyards down by Foster Avenue, by the freight tracks, with 400 people showing up.” Bones began to call his parties Storm Raves. “By winter of ’92, Staten Island: 1,500 people,” Adam says. “By [autumn] ’92, we’re doing 5,000 people on Maspeth Avenue. That’s how fast it grew.”
“Parties were happening everywhere,” remembers Austrian techno producer-DJ Patrick Pulsinger, who moved to New York briefly in the early 90s and played regularly at the Limelight alongside another techno transplant, Detroit’s Jeff Mills. “At McDonald’s, in the subway, [in] diners. [It’s] hard to compare with the restrictive policy today.”
That raw energy transferred to the studio as well, and not just for Bones. Oliver Chesler was studying political science at SUNY Purchase when he went to his first raves; soon he befriended John Selway, a music-composition major. Together they made what Selway calls, “an epic rave overload – Euro-ravey, big chords, that early hard, dark sound.” Selway played it for his class.
“It completely blew away the whole class,” he says. “There weren’t actual letter grades, but I got a lot of props for that. I don’t know how much they liked it, but they were pretty impressed by the advanced-ness of it.” Another Brooklyn DJ, Jimmy Crash, issued the track – “Schizophrenic,” credited to Disintegrator – on his label, Direct Drive, in 1991.
New York rave’s biggest pop hit came courtesy of its biggest pop star, Moby, who spun at the winter ’92 Staten Island Storm Rave: “Go” reached No. 10 on the UK pop chart in October 1991. (He’d get even bigger with 1999’s bestselling Play.) But the most widely respected New York producer of the period was Joey Beltram, whose 1990 “Energy Flash” is one of techno’s most iconic records. So is “Mentasm”, from 1991, by Second Phase, aka Beltram and Mundo Muzique. That track’s ‘hoover’ noise was all over early-90s rave. One copycat track was “Tingler” by Smart Systems – an alias of Future Sound Of London. They made a similar noise rather than sampling Beltram, but Adam X then turned around and sampled “Tingler” for his own 1992 track, “Lost In Hell”, cheekily bringing things full circle.
Soon Manhattan clubs came calling. A London ex-pat, DJ DB, started a couple of nights; the one that clicked was NASA, every week at the Shelter from 1992-93. The big one was the Limelight, a deconsecrated Episcopal Church in Chelsea owned by Peter Gatien, whose other properties were Club USA, the Tunnel and Palladium. Promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 murder of drug dealer (and roommate) Angel Melendez, and the subsequent dismantling of Gatien’s New York club empire – the city of New York went after it, leading to years of legal hassles, followed by Gatien’s deportation to Toronto in 2003 – makes it easy to forget how central Limelight was to techno’s musical rise in New York.
Still, when Bones took the Storm Raves to Ninth Avenue near 13th Street in Manhattan on July 18, 1992, someone called the authorities, which then shut it down. “It was always suspected that the Limelight pulled the plug,” says Adam. “We stepped into their turf. Whenever we did a party when they did their club nights, we would empty their club out.” The same year, Bones was assaulted on a Sunday night near his apartment in Brooklyn. “These guys came up to him with bats and tried to kill him,” says Adam. The crime was eventually linked to Limelight promoter ‘Lord’ Michael Caruso. “Lord Michael [was] very Mafia connected,” explains Adam.
This was typical of New York nightlife’s Mob involvement. “Everything was controlled,” says Adam. “When we started doing Storm Rave, we had connections. We had to, because if we didn’t we’d get busted by the police.” During one party’s bust, Adam watched “these two Italian Mafioso guys” have a sit-down with a Staten Island club owner: “Like out ofGoodfellas. Next thing you know, the [Mafioso] guys own the club. Straight up took it.”
The July 18 mishap was righted in spades two months later. “The most satisfaction I’ve ever [gotten was] the Storm Rave when we had 5,000 people in a truck loading dock in Queens [on] September 19, 1992, after previously getting shut down, losing $32,000, thinking the whole scene was over,” Bones told Massive.
But soon, the Storm parties were over. The final blowout was on December 12, 1992. Bones nearly missed it. “It snowed two feet from DC to Toronto on December 11,” he says; he took Amtrak for 16 hours to make the gig. Tommie Sunshine, now a DJ but then a well-known party kid from suburban Chicago, told Montreal journalist Mireille Silcoff (her 1999 book, Rave America, is credited to a pen name, Silcott) about watching bug-eyed (and on at least four kinds of drugs) as Lenny Dee, spinning behind a 25-foot chain-link fence (regularly climbed onto by frothing dancers), would finish spinning a record and then, with a flourish, shatter it against the wall.
In 1991, Dee started Industrial Strength Records specifically to push the harder-faster-louder techno sound that was beginning to be called gabber – Dutch slang for ‘friend’. The music didn’t exactly walk up and shake your hand, though. This was for banging your head, even sampling Pantera on the 1994 gabber classic “Fuckin Hostile”. (Industrial Strength Records, at 21 years old, is the longest-running New York techno labels; these days it concentrates largely on sample packs.)
Bones, on the other hand, had had enough. “I went through a lot of shit after the Storm Raves shut down,” he told Massive. “’93 was kind of a bad year for me because the drug thing got so out of control that I checked myself in. Now I’m a lot smarter because of that.”
Adam and store employee Heather Heart – who also operated the influential fanzine Under One Sky – began managing Groove Records. Later, they and Bones moved the store to Manhattan, where it was renamed Sonic Groove. Adam and Heart also began to throw their own, smaller parties under the name Mental.
“We wanted to scale the parties down because the police were starting to crack down on [large] events,” says Adam. “On Kent Avenue, people were living in abandoned warehouses, so we did a party in one of them. It was fucking incredible: 500 people, the cops didn’t show up or nothing. You could just do whatever you wanted.” Bones fondly recalls a Mental “boxcar rave – we put 80 kids in a parked train.”
Mental wasn’t the only game in town. In the wake of Storm came a deluge of party-throwers: The McMuffin Family, Infinity, Guaranteed Overdose, Uptown Underground, the Caffeine Crew. One of the biggest called itself Park Rave Maddness. Adam and Frankie frequently spun at their parties.
“They could get all these amazing spots: Madison Square Garden, Felt Forum, Randall’s Island,” says Adam. “They had the money to do it right. It was real techno. These guys would only book proper shit. The scene got better because it got [to] this professional level of working.” Circus, a Park Rave party held on June 17 headlined by Robert Hood, DJ Skull and Patrick Pulsinger, drew 10,000 people. As Pulsinger recalls, “They had to hide all the mics from Frankie Bones, who gave a speech on techno anyhow – into his headphones.”
Left to right: Frankie Bones, Joey Beltram, Mundo Muzique, Mike Paradise, Ralphie Dee, Damon Wild, Howie How, Lil Carlosby Adam XAs the scene’s movers became more entrenched, the partiers grew younger — and flaunted it, donning pacifiers and candy necklaces. Even in a druggy scene, these ‘candy ravers’, or ‘candy kids’, were notorious for their chemical intake. “Once you get to the mid- to late-90s, you started to see puddles of kids on ketamine on the floor,” says John Selway. “You’re just like, ‘What’s the point?’”
That was the mindset Chesler played to under his alias the Horrorist. “Somewhere around ’96, I started to really get an itch to return to new wave and industrial,” he says. “There are really good techno producers with a lot of skill. The only way for me to stand out was to use my own voice and tell my own story. I did my first drugs around that time, so I [wrote] stories about drugs.”
Tales such as “Mission Ecstasy” – with its unforgettably blunt tag line, “Because I like fucking drugs” – and “One Night In NYC,” about an NYU student’s trip to the Limelight to pick up a guy who “fucks her all night” in her dorm room, were unsettling. Chesler shopped them to a number of labels. “Nobody wanted them,” he says with a laugh, “so I started my own label.” He called it, hopefully, Things To Come.
But things were beginning to wind down. In 1997, Nicky Fingers – a member of DOA (Disciples Of Annihilation), one of the star acts on Industrial Strength – died of a heroin overdose, a blow to that segment of the scene. Mainstream media attention also took its toll on a defiantly underground culture.
“The spread of ecstasy in America was getting really big, even outside of the rave scene,” says Adam. “Feds really started cracking down. They were on a mission to stop these parties: ‘No more armouries for raves. You can't have Randall’s Island no more.’”
The simpler, more loop-based production approach to techno that took hold around 1998 had turned the music stale. By 2000, raves were largely gone; you went dancing in clubs, and only those with cabaret licenses. A number of rave vets immersed themselves in electroclash. Selway’s label Serotonin issued the original, 1,000-copy pressing of Fischerspooner’s classic debut single “Emerge”. Later, DJ DB of NASA helped him get a deal with the Ministry Of Sound label.
The once thriving business of making and playing straight up techno in New York City was gutted. “It was all happening at once,” says Adam, who was forced to close Sonic Groove in October 2004, after its profits had plummeted to one-fifth of their height. “You have 9/11, you have the advent of high-speed internet, you have Final Scratch, you have the Euro getting so much higher than the dollar, [all] within a two-year period. We used to be able to sell imports for ten dollars. Now we had to sell records for 13 dollars.”
Berlin, it seemed, was where the action was, and a lot of Americans moved there – including Chesler, Selway and Adam X. In 2009, Adam released a flurry of 12"s anonymously under the name Traversable Wormhole, tracks with the same unfettered forcefulness that once typified New York City techno.
Today, that harsh futurism has long been assimilated into the club-music landscape. In the early 90s, though, things couldn’t have been more different. New York techno evolved from house music, but as Kerri Mason recently pointed out, a DJ like Danny Tenaglia could, as late as 2000, receive “tons of flak from the ‘old-school’ house DJ community for playing current, not-necessarily-house music,” including the Berlin techno artist Maurizio.
New York techno, for a while, was truly something else. “It was the new breed,” remembers Lenny Dee. Now, he says, “House music is techno music, and techno music now is more [like] house music. Pretty strange how all of that flipped about.”
Electronic Dance Music Genres:
[[HOUSE]] The groovy and most liked genre of EDM. A descendent of disco, it was born in the late '70s-early '80s in both Chicago and New York. Main substyles include deep house, acid house, progressive house, garage house, tech house, microhouse, Eurodance, electro house.
[[TECHNO]] The eccentric genre of EDM. Born in 1980s Detroit, Michigan, it has soulful vibes like house but is minimal and mechanical sounding. It is a common mistake to call all electronic music as "techno", and the bad habit remains today. Techno is less prevalent these days, as tech house and minimal have taken up its purpose.
[[TRANCE]] The emotional genre of EDM, with two origins.
- The early 1990s Euro trance started as an extension of New Beat, German techno, and ambient music. Pioneers started to make their music sound more ethnic and alien, giving way to what would be called 'trance' later. Euro-trance became more about melodies and breakdowns, less about spacey pads and alien soundscapes in the latter 1990s. Today, Euro trance crossed over with electro house, creating "electrance".
- Goa trance and psychedelic trance the music was born from experimental psychedelic rock productions in the late 1980s. Strong techno and EBM influence transformed that into what would become Goa trance and psytrance later. Unlike Euro-trance, the music remains spacey, hypnotic, and psychedelic.
[[BREAKBEAT]] This is the "turntablist" genre of EDM, with the broken 4/4 rhythm being prevalent. Substyles include big beat, hip hop, freestyle, electro hop (NOT electro house), and turntablism. Breakbeat is rather old, artists in the 1960 and 1970s have been making new music out of record cuts and instrumental beats. The practice still remains today, although mixing has gone to softsynth on PCs.
[[JUNGLE/DRUM'N'BASS]] A cousin of breakbeat, uses faster rhythms and drum patterns. This genre began in the UK in the late 1980s and has many influences, mostly of Jamaican origin. The music can be calm and jazzy OR it can be tough and aggressive. It still remains strong as ever today.
[[UK GARAGE]] Pronounced "gair-ridge" in the British tongue, this is an extension of American garage house music made in the UK in the early 1990s. Unlike garage house, this music relies more on R&B influence and Jamaican rhythms. Substyles such as broken beat, bassline house, 2-step, speed garage, future garage, grime, dubstep, and post-dubstep were born from UK Garage (or influenced by it)
[[DUBSTEP]] The eccentric substyle of UK Garage and 2-step that began in the late 1990s. Original dubstep relied on deeper Jamaican rhythms than UK Garage and 2-Step, and it was darker and subbass. Later dubstep gave way to booming vibes, big bass drops, and "wub" synths, creating the mainstream 'brostep' craze.
[[AMBIENT]] The listening vibe of EDM. Ambient is one of the oldest genres, dating back to the days of musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Substyles include: ambient, dark ambient downtempo, & glitch. Downtempo and its substyles (chillout, acid jazz, trip hop, etc.) introduce groove for a lounge experience. Glitch is the quirky one of the bunch, with industrial and clippy sounds for an eclectic, eccentric experience.
[[HARDCORE]] This is the "heavy metal" of EDM. The music was born in the late 1980s out of acid house, New Beat, jungle, industrial, and techno. The music was meant to evoke an angry chaotic dance fest. The most prevalent genres are rave, gabber (or gabba), hardstyle, dubstyle, speedcore & noizecore.
[[INDUSTRIAL]] This is the anti-thesis of ambient music, with goth and rivethead culture as influence. Beginning in the late 1970s, the music had no real defined structure with non-conforming productions (weird noises, eerie quietness, beeps, clicks). The 1980s refined the genre, with more synthpop and punk rock influence. Around this time 'New Beat' was born, but the music was more upbeat than other industrial styles. By the 1990s, industrial gave birth to different styles (industrial rock/metal, aggrotech, EBM, electro-industrial, futurepop). Trance music had a huge influence on later industrial music (and vice-versa).
[[SYNTHPOP]]This is simply electronic pop. Originating in Europe in the 1970s, this retro-analog music was born from the experimentation of rock and disco musicians. Synthpop remains alive today, part of most of today's pop music. Genres include: synthpop, electropop, New Wave, Hi-NRG.
Genres & Beat Per Minute (BPM):
*GENRE & BPM Range
*Hip Hop/Rap/Trip-Hop/Moombahton
60-110 BPM
*Dubstep
70-140 BPM
*Acid Jazz
80-126 BPM
*Tribal House
120-128 BPM
*House/Garage/Euro-Dance/Disco- House/Electro House
120-135 BPM
*Trance/Hard House/Techno
130-155 BPM
*Breakbeat
130-150 BPM
*Jungle/Drum-n-Bass/Happy Hardcore
160-190 BPM
*Hardcore /Gabba
180+ BPM
EDM Present & Most Popular EDM Festivals:
Ah, EDM fans. You’re a lively bunch. From the inception of raves in the 90’s to the massive festivals of the present, you’ve never ceased to throw the best dance parties the world over. For that, we salute you and pay homage to the great EDM celebrations you’ve made possible with this exclusive list of the World's Biggest EDM Festivals. Check out the top 15 EDM fests below or find the motherload of festival dates, lineup, info and more in our 2013 Music Festivals Guide.
Tomorrowland
Created by the same people behind Mysteryland in the Netherlands, Tomorrowland is Belgium's massive celebration of EDM festivities. Taking place in the magical "DreamVille" festival grounds near Brussels, Tomorrowland attracts more than 180,000 fans over three days of music, dancing, art and debauchery.
Where: DreamVille, Belgium
When: Late July
Outlook Festival
Outlook Festival is one of Europe's biggest electronic music festivals with one of the loudest music systems anywhere in the world. Outlook offers up some of the best in underground dubstep, reggae, garage and hip hop, where you'll occasionally find big names like Skream and Kode 9 each year. With over 100 artists in the 2012 lineup, Outlook Fest 2013 is looking to shaping up to be massive.
Where: Pula, Croatia
When: Early September
Global Gathering
Noted as "one of the essential festivals in the world" by Armin Van Buuren, Global Gathering is an annual 2-day dance music festival held in a different country each year. In 2011, the fest attracted over 250,000 and was thought to have one of the best lineups of any EDM fest in the world - get ready for an epic 2013 edition.
Where: Different city each year
When: End of July
Nature One
As Germany's biggest electronic music festival, Nature One is known to attract tens of thousands of European EDM fans each year for multiple days of electronic music mayhem. As a way to curate this fest, dance music nightclubs from around Europe travel to Nature One to set up their own music stages where they invite trance and house DJs to spin their unique flavor of EDM beats.
Where: Kastellaun, Germany
When: Early August
kaZantip
Taking the cake as the longest running EDM festival in the world, Ukraine's kaZantip festival lasts for 5 weeks with music playing 24/7. More than 150,000 "paradiZers" visit the festival grounds each year, bringing with them costumes and culture from around Europe. To spot a fellow "paradiZer," look for the signature orange outfits and yellow suitcases associated with the festival. This festival is known to feature non-stop techno and trance beats, which keep the crowd grooving throughout the day and night.
Where: Crimea, Ukraine
When: Late July - Late August
Electric Daisy Carnival
EDC is one massive party, always drawing huge crowds to its stages, carnival rides and dance floors. Making its home in the one and only Sin City, the 2013 event saw upwards of 250,000 fans over three days. Pretty much every big EDM superstar will be there, and with the infamous Vegas Strip just a few miles away, this EDM fest is one of America's finest parties. As of January 2013, EDC has expanded to New York, Orlando, Chicago and more to come. Check out our EDC 2012 Recap to see what you missed.
Where: Las Vegas, NV
When: Mid June
Creamfields
Creamfields is a fine example of the international love for EDM festivals. Bringing together the most renowned house, techno, dubstep, D&B and trance artists in the world, Creamfields makes a home in England each year, but also has sattelite festivals in countries across the globe - Australia, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Russia and the list goes on.
Where: Cheshire, UK & Cities Across the Globe
When: Late August in UK
BPM Festival
The BPM Festival is Mexico's answer to electronic music fans looking for a time and place to express their passion for EDM. While BPM doesn't typically attract all of the biggest names in electronic music, the festival does bring in a ton of house, techno and trance DJs (Steve Angello, Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, etc.) to the sunny shores of Playa Del Carmen.
Where: Playa Del Carmen, Mexico
When: January
Sónar
With three days and three nights devoted to electronic music and digital art, Sónar features legendary producers along side up and coming beatsmiths and solo artists. While the lineup at Sónar is said to focus on "IDM" (Intelligent Dance Music) rather than "EDM" (Electronic Dance Music), you'll still find the likes of Fatboy Slim, deadmau5 and Amon Tobin rocking the stage.
Where: Barcelona, Spain
When: Mid June
WEMF
WEMF (World Electronic Music Festival) takes place in Canada every year and is true to its name, hosting EDM talent from around the world for a three day, three night music extravaganza. With multiple outdoor stages, over 200 different DJs plus visual art and light displays, WEMF is one massive party, eh?
Where: Ontario, Canada
When: Mid June
Ultra Music Festival
Tiesto, Avicii, Calvin Harris, Bassnectar - just a taste of the huge names headline the 2013 Ultra Music Festival. Those names only should be reason enough to buy tickets to one of the largest and oldest EDM festival in the United States. This year, UMF will be celebrating its 15th birthday and expanding to two weekends of mayhem, so it should be extra raging. Check out the full Ultra Music Festival 2013 Lineup
Where: Miami, FL
When: Late March
Stereosonic
In 2011, Stereosonic Sydney broke the record for the largest festival ever held in Australia - since then, it has only gotten bigger. Making stops in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perthy, Sydney and Melbourne, Stereosonic is the ultimate place to experience Australian dance music culture. Everyone from Tiesto to Major Lazer was on the 2012 lineup and we can't wait to see what's in store for next year's event.
Where: All over Australia
When: Early December
Mysteryland
Described as "a peacock on ecstasy chasing you down the rabbit hole..." Mysteryland is the Netherland's take on the electronic music festival scene. Mysterland brings together the world's premier electronic music labels and production companies for a multi-day, multi-stage festival that highlights leaders of the electronic music movement. Taking place in a country with very liberal drug policies, you can expect to find burners, trippers, stoners and the like all enjoying the good times.
Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands
When: Late August
Sunburn Festival
When you think about electronic dance music, India is not the first country that comes to mind. Still, with a population over a billion, you'd expect the country to have plenty of EDM fans. The annual Sunburn Festival provides an outlet for the masses of Indian EDM fans who come together for a colorful celebration of music and art in the heart of Goa. Big names in house and trance such as Gareth Emery and Pleasurekraft are known to take the stage alongside Indian dance music superstars for multiple days of dancing under the hot Indian sun.
Where: Goa, India
When: December
Electric Zoo
New York City has a lot to offer when it comes to local EDM culture, and New Yorkers really know how how to party. Electric Zoo shows NYC's love for EDM with a festival taking place on Randall’s Island park each Labor Day weekend. With buzz names like David Guetta, Pretty Lights, Laidback Luke, and Hardwell on the bill, this party is actually a bit like a zoo...pretty damn wild.
Where: New York, NY
When: Labor Day Weekend
I have encountered a lot of people to this day who are just beginning to learn the meaning behind the abbreviation “EDM.” EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music, and it’s sweeping the United States music industry, as well as the world. This term was used as early as 1985 in America, but didn’t catch on until the 1990s when DJs started using the lingo. EDM is a set of percussive music genres that largely stem from the production methods of disco, techno, house and trance music. This music became very popular around the time of the nightclub and warehouse scene in the 80s, as well as the earliest rave scene of the acid house movement. It basically started in the late 1970s with Donna Summer’s hit “I Feel Love.” Most music at this time was the traditional based acoustic orchestra, but this song changed music forever with the first use of synthesizers, as well as drum machines. These new sounds often ended up in other songs, and became very popular at this time. Then by the time the mid-90s came around, EDM was publicly noted, and its role in society began to take over. In today’s world, EDM is produced with software that contains sequence sampling and synthesizers, and is no longer created solely for dancing.
Although this music is the main type played at night clubs and is often referred to as ‘club music,’ club music and EDM are two distinct genres, despite the fact that their specific definitions vary from person to person. In broader terms, club music is based solely on what’s popular at the moment, whereas EDM is based on the attributes of the music itself. In EDM there is a wide variety of different beats, sounds and vocals that define the genre.
In the 1970s to 1990s live performances weren’t as common as they are today, and most nights went people went out, DJs were the ones supplying the sound. Many who attended these night clubs began to attend more often due to how well the DJ could make the crowd dance, and keep it going. At this time, DJs started creating their own songs, and by doing this they would take songs that were popular and remix them to something they could dance to. Remixes were a big hit amongst the club scene and music industry, and still are to this day. By creating remixes, DJs became more and more popular, and thus in the 90s they started to play indoor and outdoor venues known by the name of “raves.”
As this phenomenon of DJs grew and grew, music festivals and raves became more widespread. These DJs either performed live or they stuck to spinning a set. By now, the EDM scene has drawn thousands and thousands of attendees to shows, sometimes even 30,000 in a day. The more legal side of raves are held at public venues with ticket prices starting around $80 and going up to $450 for 3 day festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), with the price dependent on the venue and the headliners. In the United States EDM was introduced as “electronica” when it was first exposed to the public during the mid 1990s. However, it didn’t find mainstream success in the United States back then and, often, producers and DJs were forced to travel abroad to gain exposure and success. Then in the year 2011, a popular music magazine, Spin, stated in an article that the American dance music scene had finally reached critical mass, a “new rave generation” of mainstream consumers having emerged. After America finally opened its mind to EDM, it was everyone for themself to break out and show America what they had to offer with their own music. By now, even Top 40 artists have integrated EDM into their songs, just because it’s hot right now and most likely will be for a long, long time to come.
New York City Rave History:
In discussions of the American legacy of techno, the focus is invariably on its founders in Detroit. Now that the US mainstream has begun to embrace electronic dance music, or ‘EDM’, Michaelangelo Matos uncovers the forgotten history of the American rave scene, zeroing in on the moment when the British ‘Summer Of Love’ found its way to New York.
It was 1989 and Frankie Bones was looking forward to his first trip to England. Karma Productions, a crew in London that threw gigantic warehouse and outdoor parties dubbed ‘raves’, had offered the 23 year-old Brooklyn DJ a slot in the lineup for their July party, Energy Part 2. These things had gotten some media attention, both in the English music press (which had declared 1988 a ‘Summer of Love’ and were on their way to doing the same for ’89) and the broadsheets (thousands of kids dancing to faceless machine beats in fields: what?). But in America they were still a distant rumour.
Born Frank Mitchell deep in Brooklyn, Bones began by making freestyle and soon unleashed a flurry of house tracks under a variety of pseudonyms. The most successful was 1989’s “Just As Long As I’ve Got You”, credited to Looney Tunes, a collaboration with onetime rival roller-rink DJ Lenny Dee – born Leonard Didesiderio in Sheepshead Bay. “Just As Long” fit the hopeful vibe of England’s cresting rave scene.
“We were used to selling 3,000 to 5,000 units on our own,” says Bones. “Suddenly we were moving 10,000 units, and more than half were going to Europe. London was very interested in us.” Bones arrived in London anticipating 5,000 people. En route to the locale, someone handed him a pill. “I didn’t know what ecstasy was,” he told the rave zine Massivein 1995. “[We were] stuck in a traffic jam on a little country road with just two lanes and cars for miles.” As he came up on E, he heard one of his songs playing in another car, followed by another of his songs, playing in another car: “I pretty much lost my mind.” Ditto when the crowd turned out to be closer to 25,000: “That was probably my enlightenment.”
Bones’s 1989 “Call It Techno” was a mission statement: “It started in Detroit/But I’m out to exploit/The way I hear it.” Bones was ready to spread the word to music-loving outer-borough kids like him. He gave away promo mixtapes at south Brooklyn’s premier cruising spot, beneath the elevated train on 86th Street. Frankie handed out cassettes at spotlights to kids in passing cars with his younger brother Adam.
“He would make a speech at the beginning,” says Adam Mitchell, better known as Adam X (and, more recently, Traversable Wormhole). He imitates his brother’s cod-English accent: “Hello party people! I just came back from England! And I just experienced this thing, the rave!” Adam watched as his brother’s salesmanship paid off: “[We’d wait] 30 minutes and they’d be on the rebound. You’d start hearing LFO coming out of the car: ‘Cool. Got one.’”
On April 21, 1990, Bones opened Groove Records on Avenue U. “Other shops in New York were selling techno,” says Adam, “but they didn’t push it as a movement. My brother wanted to make a scene around it.” Soon after, Adam began working the counter, his brother returned from another trip to England. (“We were going back and forth, two weeks there, two here,” Bones recalls. “No recovery time, just a lot of non-stop flights and parties.”) This time, Frankie had some pills to share. Ten people gathered at the Avenue U store. “We pulled the gates down and turned the system up,” says Adam. “In an hour I was like, ‘Whooaa.’” So were the others. “The people in the group told their friends, I told my friends, and it spread like wildfire, the whole idea of it.”
“Parties were happening everywhere: at McDonald’s, in the subway, [in] diners. [It’s] hard to compare with the restrictive policy today.”
Pretty soon, Adam says, “We were doing 50 people in a gutted-out apartment on Coney Island Avenue. It happened so quick. By ’91, we were doing generator parties in the junkyards down by Foster Avenue, by the freight tracks, with 400 people showing up.” Bones began to call his parties Storm Raves. “By winter of ’92, Staten Island: 1,500 people,” Adam says. “By [autumn] ’92, we’re doing 5,000 people on Maspeth Avenue. That’s how fast it grew.”
“Parties were happening everywhere,” remembers Austrian techno producer-DJ Patrick Pulsinger, who moved to New York briefly in the early 90s and played regularly at the Limelight alongside another techno transplant, Detroit’s Jeff Mills. “At McDonald’s, in the subway, [in] diners. [It’s] hard to compare with the restrictive policy today.”
That raw energy transferred to the studio as well, and not just for Bones. Oliver Chesler was studying political science at SUNY Purchase when he went to his first raves; soon he befriended John Selway, a music-composition major. Together they made what Selway calls, “an epic rave overload – Euro-ravey, big chords, that early hard, dark sound.” Selway played it for his class.
“It completely blew away the whole class,” he says. “There weren’t actual letter grades, but I got a lot of props for that. I don’t know how much they liked it, but they were pretty impressed by the advanced-ness of it.” Another Brooklyn DJ, Jimmy Crash, issued the track – “Schizophrenic,” credited to Disintegrator – on his label, Direct Drive, in 1991.
New York rave’s biggest pop hit came courtesy of its biggest pop star, Moby, who spun at the winter ’92 Staten Island Storm Rave: “Go” reached No. 10 on the UK pop chart in October 1991. (He’d get even bigger with 1999’s bestselling Play.) But the most widely respected New York producer of the period was Joey Beltram, whose 1990 “Energy Flash” is one of techno’s most iconic records. So is “Mentasm”, from 1991, by Second Phase, aka Beltram and Mundo Muzique. That track’s ‘hoover’ noise was all over early-90s rave. One copycat track was “Tingler” by Smart Systems – an alias of Future Sound Of London. They made a similar noise rather than sampling Beltram, but Adam X then turned around and sampled “Tingler” for his own 1992 track, “Lost In Hell”, cheekily bringing things full circle.
Soon Manhattan clubs came calling. A London ex-pat, DJ DB, started a couple of nights; the one that clicked was NASA, every week at the Shelter from 1992-93. The big one was the Limelight, a deconsecrated Episcopal Church in Chelsea owned by Peter Gatien, whose other properties were Club USA, the Tunnel and Palladium. Promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 murder of drug dealer (and roommate) Angel Melendez, and the subsequent dismantling of Gatien’s New York club empire – the city of New York went after it, leading to years of legal hassles, followed by Gatien’s deportation to Toronto in 2003 – makes it easy to forget how central Limelight was to techno’s musical rise in New York.
Still, when Bones took the Storm Raves to Ninth Avenue near 13th Street in Manhattan on July 18, 1992, someone called the authorities, which then shut it down. “It was always suspected that the Limelight pulled the plug,” says Adam. “We stepped into their turf. Whenever we did a party when they did their club nights, we would empty their club out.” The same year, Bones was assaulted on a Sunday night near his apartment in Brooklyn. “These guys came up to him with bats and tried to kill him,” says Adam. The crime was eventually linked to Limelight promoter ‘Lord’ Michael Caruso. “Lord Michael [was] very Mafia connected,” explains Adam.
This was typical of New York nightlife’s Mob involvement. “Everything was controlled,” says Adam. “When we started doing Storm Rave, we had connections. We had to, because if we didn’t we’d get busted by the police.” During one party’s bust, Adam watched “these two Italian Mafioso guys” have a sit-down with a Staten Island club owner: “Like out ofGoodfellas. Next thing you know, the [Mafioso] guys own the club. Straight up took it.”
The July 18 mishap was righted in spades two months later. “The most satisfaction I’ve ever [gotten was] the Storm Rave when we had 5,000 people in a truck loading dock in Queens [on] September 19, 1992, after previously getting shut down, losing $32,000, thinking the whole scene was over,” Bones told Massive.
But soon, the Storm parties were over. The final blowout was on December 12, 1992. Bones nearly missed it. “It snowed two feet from DC to Toronto on December 11,” he says; he took Amtrak for 16 hours to make the gig. Tommie Sunshine, now a DJ but then a well-known party kid from suburban Chicago, told Montreal journalist Mireille Silcoff (her 1999 book, Rave America, is credited to a pen name, Silcott) about watching bug-eyed (and on at least four kinds of drugs) as Lenny Dee, spinning behind a 25-foot chain-link fence (regularly climbed onto by frothing dancers), would finish spinning a record and then, with a flourish, shatter it against the wall.
In 1991, Dee started Industrial Strength Records specifically to push the harder-faster-louder techno sound that was beginning to be called gabber – Dutch slang for ‘friend’. The music didn’t exactly walk up and shake your hand, though. This was for banging your head, even sampling Pantera on the 1994 gabber classic “Fuckin Hostile”. (Industrial Strength Records, at 21 years old, is the longest-running New York techno labels; these days it concentrates largely on sample packs.)
Bones, on the other hand, had had enough. “I went through a lot of shit after the Storm Raves shut down,” he told Massive. “’93 was kind of a bad year for me because the drug thing got so out of control that I checked myself in. Now I’m a lot smarter because of that.”
Adam and store employee Heather Heart – who also operated the influential fanzine Under One Sky – began managing Groove Records. Later, they and Bones moved the store to Manhattan, where it was renamed Sonic Groove. Adam and Heart also began to throw their own, smaller parties under the name Mental.
“We wanted to scale the parties down because the police were starting to crack down on [large] events,” says Adam. “On Kent Avenue, people were living in abandoned warehouses, so we did a party in one of them. It was fucking incredible: 500 people, the cops didn’t show up or nothing. You could just do whatever you wanted.” Bones fondly recalls a Mental “boxcar rave – we put 80 kids in a parked train.”
Mental wasn’t the only game in town. In the wake of Storm came a deluge of party-throwers: The McMuffin Family, Infinity, Guaranteed Overdose, Uptown Underground, the Caffeine Crew. One of the biggest called itself Park Rave Maddness. Adam and Frankie frequently spun at their parties.
“They could get all these amazing spots: Madison Square Garden, Felt Forum, Randall’s Island,” says Adam. “They had the money to do it right. It was real techno. These guys would only book proper shit. The scene got better because it got [to] this professional level of working.” Circus, a Park Rave party held on June 17 headlined by Robert Hood, DJ Skull and Patrick Pulsinger, drew 10,000 people. As Pulsinger recalls, “They had to hide all the mics from Frankie Bones, who gave a speech on techno anyhow – into his headphones.”
Left to right: Frankie Bones, Joey Beltram, Mundo Muzique, Mike Paradise, Ralphie Dee, Damon Wild, Howie How, Lil Carlosby Adam XAs the scene’s movers became more entrenched, the partiers grew younger — and flaunted it, donning pacifiers and candy necklaces. Even in a druggy scene, these ‘candy ravers’, or ‘candy kids’, were notorious for their chemical intake. “Once you get to the mid- to late-90s, you started to see puddles of kids on ketamine on the floor,” says John Selway. “You’re just like, ‘What’s the point?’”
That was the mindset Chesler played to under his alias the Horrorist. “Somewhere around ’96, I started to really get an itch to return to new wave and industrial,” he says. “There are really good techno producers with a lot of skill. The only way for me to stand out was to use my own voice and tell my own story. I did my first drugs around that time, so I [wrote] stories about drugs.”
Tales such as “Mission Ecstasy” – with its unforgettably blunt tag line, “Because I like fucking drugs” – and “One Night In NYC,” about an NYU student’s trip to the Limelight to pick up a guy who “fucks her all night” in her dorm room, were unsettling. Chesler shopped them to a number of labels. “Nobody wanted them,” he says with a laugh, “so I started my own label.” He called it, hopefully, Things To Come.
But things were beginning to wind down. In 1997, Nicky Fingers – a member of DOA (Disciples Of Annihilation), one of the star acts on Industrial Strength – died of a heroin overdose, a blow to that segment of the scene. Mainstream media attention also took its toll on a defiantly underground culture.
“The spread of ecstasy in America was getting really big, even outside of the rave scene,” says Adam. “Feds really started cracking down. They were on a mission to stop these parties: ‘No more armouries for raves. You can't have Randall’s Island no more.’”
The simpler, more loop-based production approach to techno that took hold around 1998 had turned the music stale. By 2000, raves were largely gone; you went dancing in clubs, and only those with cabaret licenses. A number of rave vets immersed themselves in electroclash. Selway’s label Serotonin issued the original, 1,000-copy pressing of Fischerspooner’s classic debut single “Emerge”. Later, DJ DB of NASA helped him get a deal with the Ministry Of Sound label.
The once thriving business of making and playing straight up techno in New York City was gutted. “It was all happening at once,” says Adam, who was forced to close Sonic Groove in October 2004, after its profits had plummeted to one-fifth of their height. “You have 9/11, you have the advent of high-speed internet, you have Final Scratch, you have the Euro getting so much higher than the dollar, [all] within a two-year period. We used to be able to sell imports for ten dollars. Now we had to sell records for 13 dollars.”
Berlin, it seemed, was where the action was, and a lot of Americans moved there – including Chesler, Selway and Adam X. In 2009, Adam released a flurry of 12"s anonymously under the name Traversable Wormhole, tracks with the same unfettered forcefulness that once typified New York City techno.
Today, that harsh futurism has long been assimilated into the club-music landscape. In the early 90s, though, things couldn’t have been more different. New York techno evolved from house music, but as Kerri Mason recently pointed out, a DJ like Danny Tenaglia could, as late as 2000, receive “tons of flak from the ‘old-school’ house DJ community for playing current, not-necessarily-house music,” including the Berlin techno artist Maurizio.
New York techno, for a while, was truly something else. “It was the new breed,” remembers Lenny Dee. Now, he says, “House music is techno music, and techno music now is more [like] house music. Pretty strange how all of that flipped about.”
Electronic Dance Music Genres:
[[HOUSE]] The groovy and most liked genre of EDM. A descendent of disco, it was born in the late '70s-early '80s in both Chicago and New York. Main substyles include deep house, acid house, progressive house, garage house, tech house, microhouse, Eurodance, electro house.
[[TECHNO]] The eccentric genre of EDM. Born in 1980s Detroit, Michigan, it has soulful vibes like house but is minimal and mechanical sounding. It is a common mistake to call all electronic music as "techno", and the bad habit remains today. Techno is less prevalent these days, as tech house and minimal have taken up its purpose.
[[TRANCE]] The emotional genre of EDM, with two origins.
- The early 1990s Euro trance started as an extension of New Beat, German techno, and ambient music. Pioneers started to make their music sound more ethnic and alien, giving way to what would be called 'trance' later. Euro-trance became more about melodies and breakdowns, less about spacey pads and alien soundscapes in the latter 1990s. Today, Euro trance crossed over with electro house, creating "electrance".
- Goa trance and psychedelic trance the music was born from experimental psychedelic rock productions in the late 1980s. Strong techno and EBM influence transformed that into what would become Goa trance and psytrance later. Unlike Euro-trance, the music remains spacey, hypnotic, and psychedelic.
[[BREAKBEAT]] This is the "turntablist" genre of EDM, with the broken 4/4 rhythm being prevalent. Substyles include big beat, hip hop, freestyle, electro hop (NOT electro house), and turntablism. Breakbeat is rather old, artists in the 1960 and 1970s have been making new music out of record cuts and instrumental beats. The practice still remains today, although mixing has gone to softsynth on PCs.
[[JUNGLE/DRUM'N'BASS]] A cousin of breakbeat, uses faster rhythms and drum patterns. This genre began in the UK in the late 1980s and has many influences, mostly of Jamaican origin. The music can be calm and jazzy OR it can be tough and aggressive. It still remains strong as ever today.
[[UK GARAGE]] Pronounced "gair-ridge" in the British tongue, this is an extension of American garage house music made in the UK in the early 1990s. Unlike garage house, this music relies more on R&B influence and Jamaican rhythms. Substyles such as broken beat, bassline house, 2-step, speed garage, future garage, grime, dubstep, and post-dubstep were born from UK Garage (or influenced by it)
[[DUBSTEP]] The eccentric substyle of UK Garage and 2-step that began in the late 1990s. Original dubstep relied on deeper Jamaican rhythms than UK Garage and 2-Step, and it was darker and subbass. Later dubstep gave way to booming vibes, big bass drops, and "wub" synths, creating the mainstream 'brostep' craze.
[[AMBIENT]] The listening vibe of EDM. Ambient is one of the oldest genres, dating back to the days of musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Substyles include: ambient, dark ambient downtempo, & glitch. Downtempo and its substyles (chillout, acid jazz, trip hop, etc.) introduce groove for a lounge experience. Glitch is the quirky one of the bunch, with industrial and clippy sounds for an eclectic, eccentric experience.
[[HARDCORE]] This is the "heavy metal" of EDM. The music was born in the late 1980s out of acid house, New Beat, jungle, industrial, and techno. The music was meant to evoke an angry chaotic dance fest. The most prevalent genres are rave, gabber (or gabba), hardstyle, dubstyle, speedcore & noizecore.
[[INDUSTRIAL]] This is the anti-thesis of ambient music, with goth and rivethead culture as influence. Beginning in the late 1970s, the music had no real defined structure with non-conforming productions (weird noises, eerie quietness, beeps, clicks). The 1980s refined the genre, with more synthpop and punk rock influence. Around this time 'New Beat' was born, but the music was more upbeat than other industrial styles. By the 1990s, industrial gave birth to different styles (industrial rock/metal, aggrotech, EBM, electro-industrial, futurepop). Trance music had a huge influence on later industrial music (and vice-versa).
[[SYNTHPOP]]This is simply electronic pop. Originating in Europe in the 1970s, this retro-analog music was born from the experimentation of rock and disco musicians. Synthpop remains alive today, part of most of today's pop music. Genres include: synthpop, electropop, New Wave, Hi-NRG.
Genres & Beat Per Minute (BPM):
*GENRE & BPM Range
*Hip Hop/Rap/Trip-Hop/Moombahton
60-110 BPM
*Dubstep
70-140 BPM
*Acid Jazz
80-126 BPM
*Tribal House
120-128 BPM
*House/Garage/Euro-Dance/Disco- House/Electro House
120-135 BPM
*Trance/Hard House/Techno
130-155 BPM
*Breakbeat
130-150 BPM
*Jungle/Drum-n-Bass/Happy Hardcore
160-190 BPM
*Hardcore /Gabba
180+ BPM
EDM Present & Most Popular EDM Festivals:
Ah, EDM fans. You’re a lively bunch. From the inception of raves in the 90’s to the massive festivals of the present, you’ve never ceased to throw the best dance parties the world over. For that, we salute you and pay homage to the great EDM celebrations you’ve made possible with this exclusive list of the World's Biggest EDM Festivals. Check out the top 15 EDM fests below or find the motherload of festival dates, lineup, info and more in our 2013 Music Festivals Guide.
Tomorrowland
Created by the same people behind Mysteryland in the Netherlands, Tomorrowland is Belgium's massive celebration of EDM festivities. Taking place in the magical "DreamVille" festival grounds near Brussels, Tomorrowland attracts more than 180,000 fans over three days of music, dancing, art and debauchery.
Where: DreamVille, Belgium
When: Late July
Outlook Festival
Outlook Festival is one of Europe's biggest electronic music festivals with one of the loudest music systems anywhere in the world. Outlook offers up some of the best in underground dubstep, reggae, garage and hip hop, where you'll occasionally find big names like Skream and Kode 9 each year. With over 100 artists in the 2012 lineup, Outlook Fest 2013 is looking to shaping up to be massive.
Where: Pula, Croatia
When: Early September
Global Gathering
Noted as "one of the essential festivals in the world" by Armin Van Buuren, Global Gathering is an annual 2-day dance music festival held in a different country each year. In 2011, the fest attracted over 250,000 and was thought to have one of the best lineups of any EDM fest in the world - get ready for an epic 2013 edition.
Where: Different city each year
When: End of July
Nature One
As Germany's biggest electronic music festival, Nature One is known to attract tens of thousands of European EDM fans each year for multiple days of electronic music mayhem. As a way to curate this fest, dance music nightclubs from around Europe travel to Nature One to set up their own music stages where they invite trance and house DJs to spin their unique flavor of EDM beats.
Where: Kastellaun, Germany
When: Early August
kaZantip
Taking the cake as the longest running EDM festival in the world, Ukraine's kaZantip festival lasts for 5 weeks with music playing 24/7. More than 150,000 "paradiZers" visit the festival grounds each year, bringing with them costumes and culture from around Europe. To spot a fellow "paradiZer," look for the signature orange outfits and yellow suitcases associated with the festival. This festival is known to feature non-stop techno and trance beats, which keep the crowd grooving throughout the day and night.
Where: Crimea, Ukraine
When: Late July - Late August
Electric Daisy Carnival
EDC is one massive party, always drawing huge crowds to its stages, carnival rides and dance floors. Making its home in the one and only Sin City, the 2013 event saw upwards of 250,000 fans over three days. Pretty much every big EDM superstar will be there, and with the infamous Vegas Strip just a few miles away, this EDM fest is one of America's finest parties. As of January 2013, EDC has expanded to New York, Orlando, Chicago and more to come. Check out our EDC 2012 Recap to see what you missed.
Where: Las Vegas, NV
When: Mid June
Creamfields
Creamfields is a fine example of the international love for EDM festivals. Bringing together the most renowned house, techno, dubstep, D&B and trance artists in the world, Creamfields makes a home in England each year, but also has sattelite festivals in countries across the globe - Australia, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Russia and the list goes on.
Where: Cheshire, UK & Cities Across the Globe
When: Late August in UK
BPM Festival
The BPM Festival is Mexico's answer to electronic music fans looking for a time and place to express their passion for EDM. While BPM doesn't typically attract all of the biggest names in electronic music, the festival does bring in a ton of house, techno and trance DJs (Steve Angello, Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, etc.) to the sunny shores of Playa Del Carmen.
Where: Playa Del Carmen, Mexico
When: January
Sónar
With three days and three nights devoted to electronic music and digital art, Sónar features legendary producers along side up and coming beatsmiths and solo artists. While the lineup at Sónar is said to focus on "IDM" (Intelligent Dance Music) rather than "EDM" (Electronic Dance Music), you'll still find the likes of Fatboy Slim, deadmau5 and Amon Tobin rocking the stage.
Where: Barcelona, Spain
When: Mid June
WEMF
WEMF (World Electronic Music Festival) takes place in Canada every year and is true to its name, hosting EDM talent from around the world for a three day, three night music extravaganza. With multiple outdoor stages, over 200 different DJs plus visual art and light displays, WEMF is one massive party, eh?
Where: Ontario, Canada
When: Mid June
Ultra Music Festival
Tiesto, Avicii, Calvin Harris, Bassnectar - just a taste of the huge names headline the 2013 Ultra Music Festival. Those names only should be reason enough to buy tickets to one of the largest and oldest EDM festival in the United States. This year, UMF will be celebrating its 15th birthday and expanding to two weekends of mayhem, so it should be extra raging. Check out the full Ultra Music Festival 2013 Lineup
Where: Miami, FL
When: Late March
Stereosonic
In 2011, Stereosonic Sydney broke the record for the largest festival ever held in Australia - since then, it has only gotten bigger. Making stops in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perthy, Sydney and Melbourne, Stereosonic is the ultimate place to experience Australian dance music culture. Everyone from Tiesto to Major Lazer was on the 2012 lineup and we can't wait to see what's in store for next year's event.
Where: All over Australia
When: Early December
Mysteryland
Described as "a peacock on ecstasy chasing you down the rabbit hole..." Mysteryland is the Netherland's take on the electronic music festival scene. Mysterland brings together the world's premier electronic music labels and production companies for a multi-day, multi-stage festival that highlights leaders of the electronic music movement. Taking place in a country with very liberal drug policies, you can expect to find burners, trippers, stoners and the like all enjoying the good times.
Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands
When: Late August
Sunburn Festival
When you think about electronic dance music, India is not the first country that comes to mind. Still, with a population over a billion, you'd expect the country to have plenty of EDM fans. The annual Sunburn Festival provides an outlet for the masses of Indian EDM fans who come together for a colorful celebration of music and art in the heart of Goa. Big names in house and trance such as Gareth Emery and Pleasurekraft are known to take the stage alongside Indian dance music superstars for multiple days of dancing under the hot Indian sun.
Where: Goa, India
When: December
Electric Zoo
New York City has a lot to offer when it comes to local EDM culture, and New Yorkers really know how how to party. Electric Zoo shows NYC's love for EDM with a festival taking place on Randall’s Island park each Labor Day weekend. With buzz names like David Guetta, Pretty Lights, Laidback Luke, and Hardwell on the bill, this party is actually a bit like a zoo...pretty damn wild.
Where: New York, NY
When: Labor Day Weekend
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*first video is at limelight in 1991,courtesy of www.scotto.tv
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