We Survived the 2014 Los Angeles Halloween Weekender

This time twenty years ago, both Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella and HARDfather Gary Richards were JNCO-wearing, flyer-wielding rave promoters breaking into warehouse spaces to throw parties on weekends in Los Angeles. Since then, America's "EDM" explosion has made Rotella and Richards two of the most influential and powerful men in all of electronic music. Never before, though, have they gone so boldly head-to-head as this past weekend. Halloween in LA pitted Insomniac's Escape - All Hallow's Eve (San Bernadino, October 31 and November 1) against HARD Day of the Dead (Pomona, November 1 and 2). We went to both and lived to tell the tale.

It started with Escape on Friday. The long road out to San Bernadino was a slow one. LA traffic + Friday + Halloween = a lot of staring at bumpers while you eke your way eastward down the 10. By the time I finally made it in, the party was well under way and the costumes were tremendous - ghoulish and garish and spilling over with fake blood and overflowing body parts. These events really are a lesson in anatomy - I've learned as much about the human body at raves as I have about music.

The NOS Events center is a petite and compact space -- All the big stages, four in total, were housed in hangars or tents and the there was an air of intimacy when held in comparison to the grandiosity of EDC. I was immediately struck by the lack of Insomniac's signature production design on many of the stages. Gone were the glowing neon scenes of fantastical fairytales, replaced with more basic design. EDC Orlando is this week in Florida, so perhaps their focus was split, but the aesthetic of the stages is one of Insomniac's strongest attractions, so the general lack of it was a disappointment.

The exception to this was main stage, named The Slaughterhouse, designed around the gaping maw of a deranged feline clown. It stacked up Benny Benassi, Tiesto, Dash Berlin, Sander van Doorn, and Afrojack consecutively on stage. If you looked up an Insomniac line-up from six years ago, you might have found the same roster. For better or worse, Insomniac stays true to its rave roots. The programming favors the nichier scenes that made it: Trance, techno, drum & bass, and larger room house sounds, and that is what you'll consistently find programmed at their events. They maintain the 90s rave vibe and, in many ways, are guardians of that scene.

The Cannibals' Tea Party stage maintained an impeccable line-up of techno (and a bit of house) all night long. MK, The Martinez Brothers, and Richie Hawtin sandwiched a set of top-notch pacing and mixing by Hot Since 82. His sets can sometimes lapse into the mundane, but he set the stage for Gaiser and Hawtin to bring down the house with some hard hitting techno.

Elsewhere, 12th Planet dropped some bass towards the end of his set that had the entire building rattling - You could hear it struggling to stay up amidst the vibrations, and everyone within earshot immediately veered their walking path towards the hangar. Dance kids are like moths to light with bass vibrations, as soon as we feel it, the raver id takes over and we zombie-walk towards the source. As the rave closed for the night, it began to rain, hard, and thousands of soggy ravers were released onto the streets of San Bernadino.

On Saturday, we migrated thirty miles west to (usually) sunny Pomona, California, where HARD continued their rumspringa away from the LA Historic State Park. The Fairplex might be one of the best venues yet – All the stages had enough room to breathe and it really seemed like a massive occasion.

HARD was a police state, though. Drugs dogs lined the entrance, the friskings were particularly handsy, and the Pink Stage featured the darling implementation of a watchtower from which policemen kept an eye out for plumes of smoke arising from the crowd. It's very discomforting to party while a crew of uniformed police watch you from above. It all came to a head when a security guard accosted me, extricated the freshly lit spliff from my hand, and escorted me out of the hangar with instructions not to return for an hour. I'm a grown-ass man…at a music festival…in California. C'mon, guy.

He couldn't keep me out of the Pink Tent, though. Not with that line-up. Wax Motif and Huxley rang in the evening with garage vibes. Wax is known for being a chameleon of sorts, and he segued into Hux's set like an absolute pro. Later on, Jimmy Edgar's unique brand of hip hop-informed techno paired well with a headress-free Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs set that was heavily techno-driven.

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Roving report from correspondent David Garber:

My first foray into the festival landed me at the branded 7UP untz mecca AKA the Green Stage. Throughout the weekend, this haven played host to a number of eclectic underground acts ranging from Brooklyn's Curses to San Francisco beatmaker Charlie Yin AKA Giraffage. During his debut HARD appearance, Yin serenaded a substantial crowd with a buffet spread of dreamy computer beats, moving through a number of his well-received remixes (that Janet Jackson flip still goes off as well as it did over a year ago) and Tumblr-y originals. To my surprise, the producer dropped the age-old tune "Sandstorm" by Darude in its entirety. There wasn't a single visible frown in the crowd. Trolling? Nostalgia? Who knows. Good work, Giraffe-man!

Next up was heavily tipped UK duo Snakehips. If you've been following these dudes' career thus far you know they've been thriving in mystery and near-anonymity. I was curious to what they looked like, only to be disappointed in their unveiling as two average-looking white dudes. I was also disappointed that their set was bit, um, average. Still, dancers seemed to find enjoyment in their endless array of R&B sounding remixes and disco-tinged basslines. When the opening notes of their "Wanderlust" remix started booming people were-a-hollerin'. I swayed gently in the corner while sipping an iced coffee.

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The days of neon are officially over. I have never seen a dance party with so much black. It's rad. In particular, Bixel Boys' FREELIFE shirts were ubiquitous. I saw at least 30 of them over the course of the weekend. It's like the LA future house provocateurs are amassing an army of pseudo health goths to carry them to the promised land.

Then came the North American debut of the mysterious and much lauded ZHU. He's been aggressively hyped over the past few months, and I was skeptical about his ability to capitalize upon his productions with DJ sets. I was wrong. Zhu was very, very good - He plays a succinct style of spooky, deeper future house and exhibited a habit of re-appropriating mainstream pop samples like Lana Del Rey and Tupac. His remix of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" captured the moment perfectly. When I turned around towards the end, I realized that his crowd has swelled exponentially since I showed up. Zhu has arrived and it looks like he's worth the all the fuss.

Holy shit. Gesaffelstein. The Frenchman's sets could suck the warmth out of any room. They're so dark and heavy that they turn any space into a chaotic, dystopian rager in flashing black and white. He's a master of churning, industrial beats and jarring breaks. If you thought Nero at their hardest were still a little too soft for you, let the fashionable, moody, Kanye-producing Frenchman take you to those dark places.

When Prydz and Deadmau5 get together, they can't help but play some techno. Their set was meditatively paced, but wavered into a drop-heavy bout of electro-house after some time. It's not a Deadmau5 set without a self-indulgent movement or two – As I walked away, he was in the midst of a lengthy piano solo number that must have put half the crowd to sleep. Rumors were that some tension between Mau5 and Prydz was the reasoning behind their set being shortened from 3 hours to 1.5, but we can't confirm any of that.

Day two and the Dirtybird BBQ rolled into Los Angeles bright and early. A missed flight by Christian Martin meant that Justin Jay stepped in to open the proceedings, making him the only artist to play both Escape and HARD. Props. Kill Frenzy and J.Phlip set the tone with far too much quality to be performing so early. There's such a high standard at Dirtybird that even their upstarts are guaranteed to kill it.

Ooah-ooah's are the scourge of dance music. Please stop. I hate them. Every time I hear them emerge from a dancing crowd, I'm filled the the fire of a thousand raging suns. Is this a fucking bat mitzvah? Get your shit together.

Props to Sunday's mainstage photobomb champion. The cameraman for the big screen feed had been generally up to the standard festival creepery, zooming in on girl's butts and the like. And then this guy managed to sneak himself into the shot on five or six separate occasions. The crowd roared with an increasing appreciation every time:

My unhealthy obsession with Tchami led me to the main stage for the first time all weekend. This time last year, he had never played in the US. Now he's made it to a late-afternoon set on one of the biggest stages of them all. His style of 'deep house for main stages' was turned up a notch to accommodate his surroundings, but in doing so he lost a little of the depth that is a defining feature of his music. The next few months will be interesting for the Frenchman - Will he set his sights on superstardom or further whittle away at his signature sound? I've seen him three times since the Summer now, and I'll say that his DJ sets fall shy of the exceptional standard he sets with his productions.

Back at the Dirtybird barbecue and things had gotten a notch more rowdy. Special guest Cajmere dropped one one of the best sets of the weekend – A masterfully mixed lesson in left-field house music. All day long behind the decks at the BBQ, colleagues and friends had been milling around, boozing and having a laugh. When Cajmere hit the stage, everyone stepped back in reverence to the man as his silhouette jacked ever so slightly a jacket and shades. It was incredible.

The thing with Dirtybird is you know they're having as much fun on stage as are the people in the crowd. By the time Justin Martin and Claude VonStroke played, they were certifiably sloshed, passing a magnum bottle of Grey Goose back and forth as they enjoyed their long-awaited ascent to the top of house music. The whole day, despite the lack of any actual barbecue action going on, was a celebration for the San Franciscan label. That said, the only person who is still allowed to play Justin Martin's remix of Henry Krinkle's "Stay" any more is Justin Martin.

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Roving report from correspondent David Garber:
Bassnectar and the spooky audio-brand of Day of The Dead are a match made in heaven. The bass-deity frantically traversed through many of his new album cuts and his on-the-fly reworks of everything from Rick Ross' "Hustin" to an outrageous remix of Bone Thugs N Harmony's "Thuggish Ruggish Bone." His grab bag of sounds was deeper than ever as he made sure that, after final set of the weekend , the crowd was left with an empty tank. At this point, I don't think people had any mind left to get fucked but the nectar made sure to get it in all the way to the last drop.
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Oh, and then Calvin Harris played. I didn't watch it. Sorry. only made it to the main stage once all weekend. HARD does a good job of corralling the basics into a closed off, massive field and saving the rest of their stages for the good stuff. It makes it feel like two different festivals, but that's cool with me.

HARD's mission since the beginning has been to extricate dance music from the rave. Their no-kandi, no masks, no trance policies seemed alienating when they imposed them a couple years ago, but now HARD has developed into a unique cultural space of it's own. Whereas Insomniac stubbornly sticks to what it knows, HARD is ever-changing, always looking for the next sound – From electro to dubstep to trap to nu-garage, they've always on the cutting edge of emerging trends.

Both events splitting the market meant that there was plenty of room to dance at both festivals. It was amazing – After a certain point in life, you realize that there's very little joy in listening to a dance set while smushed up against so many people that you can't move without elbowing someone in the nether-regions. Tired legs are better than black eyes.

If this was a competition, Day of the Dead would be the winner. It's not really a fair fight, though – Escape is most definitely a secondary concern for Insomniac, and DOTD is one of only three annual HARD events. Still, it's enthusing to see two totally distinct festival brands able to hold successful events on the same weekend in one town. The real winner is dance music, particularly in Los Angeles, as it develops more and more scenes to push this whole thing forward. Well, either that or LiveNation, the monolithic entertainment megacorp that owns both companies.

And hey! Despite all of the morose imagery and Halloweeny badtimes vibes, nobody died! Way to go, ravers.

Jemayel Khawaja is THUMP's Managing Editor - @JemayelK
David Garber is THUMP's Associate Editor - @DLGarber