I was skeptical when I first heard about Electric Zoo. An electronic music festival in New York City? Yeah, right. Then I learned that Made Event was producing it. If anyone was going to make it happen, it was going to be them. After all, they’ve produced and promoted almost every other big electronic music event in NYC, including bringing both DJ Tiësto and Paul van Dyk to Central Park. But this was Made Event’s first attempt at a festival. I wasn’t sure if they could pull it off.

I’ll cut to the chase: Electric Zoo took place this past weekend and went off without a hitch. All the “festival basics” were taken care of: enough bathrooms; six free water fountains. Each stage had it’s own feel and different decorations, including disco balls, fog machines, a pair of school buses and colored lights. The main stage had a giant projection screen with visuals that were synchronized to the music. You could really appreciate the effects during the later sets that took place after the sun went down.

All the speaker systems were nice and loud. There were a couple of places between stages where two sets would clash terribly, butting heads into a cacophonous mess. But I suppose that’s to be expected with two DJ’s performing only a few hundred feet away from each other and both blasting a heavy four count.

The festival was easy enought to get to (no small feat, considering the geography of New York City), and both days had fantastic weather. Randall’s Island had enough open space to let concertgoers enjoy the outdoors and fresh air. My biggest complaint? Nine dollars is simply too expensive for a cup of beer. And six dollars for a Red Bull? But I understand it’s a music festival. Prices for everything are always inflated.

Anyway, what about the music?

 

The line-up was a very solid mix of performers (see above). They ranged from world famous headliners to musicians I’d never even heard of. And their styles were scattered across the spectrum of electronic music. Like any music festival, part of the fun was discovering new artists. So Made Event did the right thing in booking performers from every sub-genre of electronic dance music: disco, drum and bass, house, trance.

Some highlights of mine include discovering the heavy sound of Chris Lake and seeing DJ Medhi, Busy P and Steve Aoki play back-to-back-to-back on the same stage. James Murphy and Pat Mahoney played a fun disco set (using real vinyl, of course); and David Guetta‘s closing performance on Sunday night was the perfect end to a great weekend. My ears are still ringing. What’s the future for Electric Zoo? The promoters say they’re trying to make it an annual event. Let’s hope so.

 

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David Guetta – Memories feat. Kid Cudi

 

Were you at Electric Zoo? What did you think? Who did you see? Let us know in the replies.

If any of the tunes contained in this post happen to suit your taste, the artist would probably be thrilled if you considered buying them on iTunes, Beatport, or Amazon. Share
by Nick DiLallo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Disco Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.