[July 10, 2014] EDM in DFW: Falling into step with dance music [Fort Worth Star-Telegram :: ] Tweet (Fort Worth Star-Telegram (TX) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) July 09--DALLAS It's Saturday night -- actually early Sunday morning -- and the Lizard Lounge is as jammed as a downtown freeway at rush hour. The young, casually dressed crowd is packed in to see a guy who, outside of this setting, could be the poster boy for anonymity. His name is Nathaniel Rathbun, but everyone here knows him by his DJ name, Audien. In the world of EDM, shorthand for electronic dance music, this 22-year-old has star power. Over the course of two hours, Audien's mixes pack the dance floor with bouncing bodies. Some people are jumping, hollering and raising their hands in both hypnotic salute and sweaty submission. For Alejandro Lampropulos, it's a bit unexpected. He's familiar with Audien's music, but the 28-year-old computer engineer from Buenos Aires, who lives in France, didn't think he would see DJs of this caliber while on a business trip to Texas. "It surprised me that there was a place like the Lizard Lounge," says Lampropulos who has gone to EDM clubs or festivals on three continents. "I thought there might be EDM nightclubs, but I never thought that important DJs would play there." Surprises like his are becoming a thing of the past. North Texas may not sport the sprawling dance palaces and mega-festivals like those found in Las Vegas or Miami, but EDM has become an increasingly bigger part of the musical landscape. From the annual, multiday Lights All Night Festival that takes over the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in December to acts such as David Guetta and Mystery Skulls being added to such rock-oriented festivals as Suburbia and Homegrown, EDM is making its presence felt. The Lizard Lounge is even planning to open a smaller, satellite branch, 29 Eleven, on Main Street in Deep Ellum, sometime in the fall, while the Lights All Night organizers are putting together occasional events called Lights Up High in what used to be the Ghostbar on the 32nd floor of the W Hotel. It's all part of a national trend as EDM has become inescapable. Last month's three-day Electric Daisy Carnival festival in Las Vegas drew an estimated 140,000 per day. At California's multigenre Coachella festival, it was the EDM performers that were drawing bigger crowds than rock headliners like Arcade Fire. Bonnaroo, the large-scale Tennessee rock fest, this year featured a crossover "super jam" session with DJ Skrillex and friends Janelle Monae, Lauryn Hill, the Doors' Robbie Krieger, rapper Mystikal and Cage the Elephant lead singer Matt Shultz among others. And it's not just on stage where EDM is triumphing. At this year's Grammys, French DJ duo Daft Punk's Random Access Memories album -- which spawned the hit collaboration with Pharrell, Get Lucky -- was awarded Album of the Year as well as Best Dance/Electronica Album. More recently, Coldplay collaborated with the DJ Avicii for the band's latest single, Sky Full of Stars. Even if you don't know your Afrojack from your Zedd, you've probably heard both of them in Bud Light commercials, or Martin Garrix's hit Animals in the ad for the Madden 25 video game, Diplo's Express Yourself in a Doritos spot, or Shy Kidx's Orion pimping Toyota. Such corporate connections are one reason why top-tier DJs haul in enough to rival the GDP of small nations. In 2013, Forbes estimated that Calvin Harris made $46 million that year, more than Jay-Z and Katy Perry. Right behind in the Top 10 are Tiesto ($32 million), Guetta ($30 million), the disbanded Swedish House Mafia ($25 million), Deadmau5 ($21 million) and Avicii ($20 million). Yet, with the possible exception of Skrillex who made the cover of Rolling Stone earlier this year , unlike other pop stars, they're faceless. (Daft Punk and Deadmau5 emphasize the point by hiding their faces inside headgear.) For Dallas EDM fan Travis Warner, 29, it's a sweet taste of cultural revenge. He remembers how blown away he was as a pre-teen when the first Daft Punk disc came out in 1997 and few others quite got it. "It was a new sound for some reason that I connected with," he remembers. "Everybody made fun of it. Now, [Daft Punk] has got No. 1 albums and Pharrell and everything." For another fan, Lisa Van Slett, 33, of Dallas, who loves going to festivals, it's about the emotional journey. "I like how the DJs can manipulate the feelings of the crowd and they make it emotional with ups and downs." "It's really weird how it got super popular," says Fort Worth DJ Max Reeves, 26, whose stage name is Maxy. "This whole festival culture is becoming a niche thing to be into. Everyone wants to go to a festival ... You don't have to be familiar with the artist to go out there. You can just go out, dance, and have a lot of fun." "It's part of a generational zeitgest; it's becoming like Woodstock," Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Doug Elfman told USA Today. "For people in their twenties, dance music is just part of their culture and language." But that doesn't mean there hasn't been pushback, both from those who don't like dance music at all and fans who feel that a lot of EDM -- which they say now is full of anonymous vocals, predictable escalating crescendos followed by the required big bass drops -- has put dance music into an easily marketed corporate straitjacket. Gone is the experimentation of the underground electronic-music scene and the soulfulness of the original Chicago house-music and Detroit techno subcultures from which it all sprang. "We're getting a lot of watered-down stuff," says Reeves. "The big-room [style] all sounds the same and it's completely saturated the music." Saturday Night Live mocked EDM with an Andy Samberg digital short in which he is a DJ who, in the shadow of his laptop, plays video games instead of music and fries eggs on his podium while guys in suits bring him big bags of money -- and the crowd goes wild anyway. TV host/author/chef/carnivore Anthony Bourdain, on his highly rated CNN travel show Parts Unknown, savaged dance-music culture in an episode on Las Vegas in which he explored how EDM has upended the entertainment landscape in Sin City. He seems to despise it as much as he does vegetarianism. "Anointeth thyself with gel and heavenly body spray," he intoned. "Let there be high fiveing and the hugging of many bros, for this is the kingdom and the power." Some of the most scathing criticisms have come from some of the genre's biggest stars. "It's already been going down the last couple of years, for me," Deadmau5 (real name Joel Zimmerman) told the London Evening Standard recently. "Disco had a longer run than EDM has, to be honest about it, and that died in a [expletive] hurry." Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim whose Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat is an EDM anthem, told the Wall Street Journal in an article titled "The Dumbing Down of Electronic Dance Music," that "David Guetta and others took [electronic dance music] out of the underground. Everybody is trying to ride that wave. They're just trotting it out." EDM festivals also still labor under a cloud, going back to the rave days, as an excuse for drug taking and dangerous behavior. Back then, the stereotype of the raver was the drug MDMA or Ecstasy. Now, the cliche is to be "rollin' on Molly," the powdered form of Ecstasy. In terms of this side of public perception, this hasn't been a good summer for EDM. There have been several deaths among Electric Daisy Carnival attendees through its history; there were two at the most recent edition last month. This follows on the heels of the death of a 15-year-old girl at EDC in Los Angeles in 2010, a 19-year-old Argyle man at the Dallas edition of EDC in 2011, and two people at EDC in Las Vegas in 2012. (Last year, the final day of New York's Electric Zoo festival was canceled after two deaths and four injuries.) In late June, an Avicii show in Boston made headlines after 36 people were sent to the hospital and another 50 were treated on-site for drug/alcohol-related issues. Back in 2011, one North Texas club, Afterlife, was shut down after Dallas police charged that illegal drug dealing was taking place on the premises. "Everyone is not there for the music," says Chris Hale, aka Chale, a Fort Worth DJ and promoter. "It used to be PLUR -- peace, love, unity and respect -- and that used to be real. Now, people make fun of it. Now, it's 'please let us roll.' " But Elle Palmer, who runs the EDM-news/reviews site EDM Sauce, says it's too easy to sensationalize these cases. "I think it's a miracle there aren't more [problems]. If you had a bar with 140,000 people in it, what are the odds that only 38 people would have to go to the hospital?" Hale thinks what EDM is going through now is no different from what other forms of music have gone through. "In the '80s, you couldn't go to a bar without there being rows of cocaine somewhere," he says. "People who come into the EDM scene, they grow out of that," Palmer adds. "The people who've been into it a year or two, you see them say that that's not necessary. 'Let's just enjoy [the group] Above & Beyond and lay on a blanket.' " Then there's the simple fact that EDM can't sustain its current level of saturation. Now that even Disney is marketing Dconstructed, an album of Disney classics such as Circle of Life and Main Street Electrical Parade re-imagined by the likes of Avicii and Kaskade, the bandwagon may well be creaking. Still, don't expect it to disappear entirely. "This stuff has been around a long time," says Fort Worth's Jeff Langhammer who DJs under the name of St1gma. "People are always going to want to dance. We had disco in the'70s, New Wave in the '80s, Trance in the '90s. Now, it's electro-house and all that stuff ... It's not going anywhere." Sums up long-time Dallas DJ Wade Hampton? who goes by the name of Wish FM?, "This is quite a moment we're having this year." ___ Two Dallas friends are taking their popular EDM events from Big D to the world The clock is ticking close to midnight in the space formerly known as Ghostbar, 32 floors above the city of Dallas in the W Hotel. It's the inaugural night for Lights Up High, the scaled-down sibling to Lights All Night, Dallas' biggest annual EDM party, and DJ Twelfth Planet is digging deep into the dubstep as the fans gather closer to the booth. And there in the crowd is some guy dressed as a panda -- and no one finds it odd. In fact, everyone wants to have a selfie taken with him. A few days later, in a Deep Ellum building that once housed a Fritos factory, there are no pandas in sight. The guys who run Highland Concerts -- the company that operates the Lights franchise of events -- are dressed more like the casual young businessmen that they are. In fact, CEO/talent booker Scott Osburn and president/talent buyer Hank Keller make no secret of the fact that they not only want to take Lights All Night -- which takes place at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center every December -- beyond the Metroplex but also move into events that fall outside of EDM's boundaries. "A big goal of Hank's and mine is throw a multi-genre, mainstream rock festival," says Osburn, 28. "This [EDM] was an opportunity for us to prove ourselves and cut our teeth." In fact, Lights All Night has its roots in very un-EDM events. The childhood buddies, both of whom grew up in Dallas, went to different colleges -- Texas Tech and University of Montana for Osburn, LSU for Keller -- but both had an interest in concert promotion. They collaborated on a Missoula, Mont., show for the folk duo the Indigo Girls. It sold out. Back in Dallas, they took a New Year's Eve party at aimed at a college crowd at Dallas' Magnolia Hotel -- which drew 500 in 2008 and 1,200 in 2009 -- and expanded it into what is now Lights All Night. "Scott said we needed to brand it," Keller, 27, recalls. "And so we called one of our girlfriends from high school and said 'we've got this New Year's Eve party and we need to give it a brand. We're going to have some electronic music and we need a name.' She calls back five minutes later and says, 'I got it. Lights All Night.' We looked at each other and said, 'That's perfect!' " With Ghostland Observatory headlining, that 2010 edition of Lights All Night -- held at the Plaza of the Americas -- drew 6,000. The next year would prove even more crucial. The mammoth Electric Daisy Carnival was coming into the market with a huge event at Fair Park and Osburn and Keller needed outside investors. "Back then, it was just Scott and myself in his parents' back house," laughs Keller. "We put an investment model together that we could show to a group of investors," says Osburn. "We had this momentum -- 2008, 600 kids; 2009, 1,200; 2010, 6,000 -- and then we said there's no better time to go for it and create a bigger show, create a bigger budget and bring in these large acts." But tragedy struck at Electric Daisy Carnival in the summer of 2011 where one man died and many others were hospitalized. This could have been bad news for Lights All Night in the wake of the negative publicity. So Keller and Osburn brought in a team of outside experts -- including Jim Tobin Productions who handle logistics for such large-scale events as Bonnaroo and many others and Southlake-based Alpha & Omega Mounted Security Patrol, who work at Coachella and other festivals -- to help reassure city officials that Lights All Night could go off smoothly. "We were able to to hire the best of the summer-festivals business and bring them to Dallas in December because there's not much going on," Keller says. "We had 220 security, 150 police that year. It was Super Bowl staffing levels just to put the event on, and it was expensive," says Osburn. "But it worked and we had a great year." They attracted 26,000. Fast forward to 2013, and 43,000 showed up for a bill that included Deadmau5, Kaskade and Fedde Le Grand. On top of that, Keller and Osburn expanded internationally with a Mexico City event on New Year's Eve. "Right now we're working on trying to do a Lights All Night in Panama City," says Osburn who adds there could be Lights All Nights in Asia and Australia as well. On top of that, there will be the occasional Lights Up High events in Dallas. Their success has caught the attention of the likes of the big promoters -- Live Nation, AEG and SFX among them -- but Keller and Osburn say they like having their independence. Though they have partnered and consulted with MCP Presents out of Denver -- who stage Atlanta's Tomorrow World and Mad Decent Block Party in Dallas and New Orleans among others -- they've decided to stay in the driver's seat. "We sought to learn from [the big promoters] ... and we have been in conversations with them and we decided that it's not the right time to take that step and that we need to stay independent," says Osburn. "We're excited about that." TARRANT GOES TECHNO Fort Worth trails Dallas in terms of EDM activity but some local DJs are trying to change that Jeff Langhammer may not be what you'd expect from a dance-music DJ. By day, the 34-year-old is an ad exec, the founder/CEO of Ilfusion Creative, as well as a first vice president of the Fort Worth Botanical Society in charge of community relations and a co-chair for Concerts in the Garden. By night, he pulls on a wrestler's mask, takes the name of St1gma, and spins EDM. "I've really been into electronic music since the mid-'90s," he says. "I wanted to learn how to DJ. I got a cheap DJ controller and really liked it. I upgraded my equipment, got better, and started getting gigs ... It's fun creating an atmosphere. You're kind of a performer." Which is where the mask comes in. "It's pretty memorable and people like it," he says. Langhammer is part of a Fort Worth EDM community that is trying to establish its own scene in Dallas' shadow. In fact, when four EDM DJs with a national profile -- Butch Clancy, Kennedy Jones, Emalkay and Liquid Stranger -- wing into Fort Worth for an Aug. 2 date at The Pulse Club on Belknap, it could be a game-changer for the western side of the Metroplex. It signifies that EDM fans in the 817 area code won't always have to travel to Dallas for a big show. "I'm from Fort Worth and I want to do this for Fort Worth," says Chris Hale, aka Chale, a DJ and promoter who is staging the event that is which is being billed as Great Awakening. "Dallas has everything. They have the better venues. They have more money. They have more people. They have everything. I'm trying to build something that competes." "Fort Worth is kind of minimal on the electronic music scene," agrees Langhammer. "Dallas is a little more friendly with that stuff, for sure." Two years ago, he launched a monthly EDM Meetup in his workspace/studio near Fort Worth's West 7th district. But noise complaints put the gatherings on hold until he found a club where he could stage the events. Since January, he has been hosting EDM nights, dubbed Foch Lounge House Party, on the last Saturday of the month at Foch Street Lounge. "[The Foch Lounge owner] has been really cool with doing more electronic music, which you don't really find around here, and growing that spot into what EDM Meetup used to be," Langhammer says. He says that Fort Worth crowds tend to be more conservative in their music preferences. "What works around here is a lot of Top 40 remixes," he explains. Max Reeves, 26, a TCU environmental science student who DJs under the name of Maxy and often plays at Foch Street, agrees, especially in reference to West 7th. "You have more of the cowboy and jock-y kind of thing but, surprisingly, a lot of them like this kind of music," he says. "They just don't have any place to go." Hale, 26, says that Dallas has an EDM edge, partly because it gets most of the big, touring DJs and because of clubs like the long-running Lizard Lounge. "The Lizard Lounge has been around forever. They've locked it down," he explains. "They did a great job in doing that. But it makes it difficult because if you want to create a name outside of that, you've really got to work for it because they've set the bar really high. That's what makes it difficult over here is that we don't have one set venue that has been known for EDM for 25 years. Lizard Lounge gets to bring that aura of itself into everything it does." Reeves and Hale are thinking ahead to spreading their wings beyond Fort Worth. Hale is planning to promote events throughout Texas and Colorado in the near future. Reeves, who graduates in December, would like to start playing outside the immediate area. "I'm not at all opposed to moving ... I want to start going to places other than Texas," says Reeves. "But my main plan right now is to finish school and get more local things going on in Fort Worth ... I think Fort Worth is moving in a decent direction. If we can get more big names to come to Fort Worth, if we can get that to happen, then we know we're doing something right." STILL RAVING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS The Lizard Lounge maintains its status as the HQ for EDM in North Texas There may be areas of the country with more electronic-dance music nightspots and bigger festivals than North Texas, but few can boast a space like Dallas' Lizard Lounge. Not only is it a contender for the title as the longest-running EDM club in the country -- it opened in 1991 -- but it has hosted some of the biggest names in the genre, from Moby to Deadmau5. Though the club went through some lean years in the early 2000s, the surge in popularity for EDM and an uptick in activity in the surrounding near-Deep Ellum neighborhood has benefited the 1,000-capacity Lizard Lounge. Owner Don Nedler is even launching a second club, the more intimate 29 Eleven in Deep Ellum, which should be fully open by fall. But what has sustained him, says Nedler, 56, is the region's taste for electronic dance music. After moving here from Houston in the early '90s, where he started the original and now defunct Lizard Lounge in a city that he says leaned more toward hip-hop and industrial, he discovered that Dallas preferred techno and house music. He thanks the presence of The Starck Club, the legendary '80s-era dance mecca that's the subject of a new documentary, for that. (Nedler actually co-owned the Starck Club in the mid-'90s with NBA star Dennis Rodman.) "That really dictated the course of the music in Dallas," he recalls. "Greg Watton was over at 2826 playing house music and the whole rave culture was just beginning to emerge." Nedler brought lots of attention to the Lizard Lounge by getting KDGE/1021. FM DJ Jeff K to do an after-hours broadcast from there and booking such of-the-moment acts as Moby and the Prodigy. "The one thing I try to hone in on is the culture surrounding the music," he says. "I knew that rave culture was significant." Much has changed since those heady days, not always for the better. Things bottomed out in the early 2000s, as they did for many venues post 9-11. Deep Ellum's decline and the construction of the DART light-rail line nearby didn't help. "Ultimately, it became clear to us that we had to create a destination location," he says. "Deep Ellum was dead. We weren't getting any business from Deep Ellum and our survival was based on our ability to get people to come to this location...We had to give people a pretty good reason to come here." Nedler also knew he needed to continue booking That meant booking top-flight national and international DJs and, these days, that means aligning with a major promoter to make sure Lizard Lounge has access to those names. Lizard Lounge now has an arrangement with SFX, the concert promoter that runs such major music big festivals like Belgium's Tomorrowland, Australia's Stereosonic and New Orleans' Voodoo Experience. "If we didn't have this partnership with SFX, I don't know where we would be," he says. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Of course, EDM's success means that the Lizard Lounge has much more local competition. It ranges from larger rooms like Zouk (in the old Starck space) and It'll Do (a '40s-era space brought into the modern age thanks in part to Brooke Humphries of Barcadia and Beauty Bar fame) to smaller, bottle-service lounges, and even afternoon Sunday Funday parties at Sisu Uptown Resort. "You used to have to go to a dance club to see a DJ," says Leo de Hierra, Nedler's business partner. "Now, there's a DJ on every street corner." And getting those DJs is increasingly expensive. "Our average DJ used to cost us $2,500 and we would book a headliner for under five grand," says Nedler. "Now, the established DJs want $10,000, $15,000 and $20,000." But none of this is stopping him from going ahead with the 29 Eleven, which will have a different feel from Lizard Lounge with less frenetic, more chill-out house music aimed at a slightly older crowd. "It will be more of a boutique dance club," Nedler explains. "We have customers who've graduated from the Lizard Lounge but we want to give them an option for another place go. You do get to a point where you think, 'Lizard Lounge, the crowd is a bit young for me.' " DANCING IN YOUR SEAT The documentary 'Under the Electric Sky,' opening in North Texas on July 25, brings EDM to the movie screen There's a scene in Under the Electric Sky, Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz's colorful 3-D documentary about the 2013 edition of the massive, annual three-day Electric Daisy Carnival festival in Las Vegas, that shimmers with the PLUR -- peace, love unity, respect -- spirit that so many EDM adherents say they believe in. Festivalgoer Jose, who has scoliosis and is confined to a wheelchair, has to enjoy EDC surrounded by a sea of standing bodies, rarely able to see the stage. So some of his fellow EDM fans lift him, chair and all, over their heads and pass him along, outstretched hand to outstretched hand. It's crowd surfing as therapy and Jose is moved to tears. "The thing is it's different things to different people," says Lipsitz in a phone interview about the passion with which some EDC fans treat the festival. "There's certainly the community element and being one with the music and all these people who are so different from you ... [The fans] definitely tried to create a positive, warm, fun, inspirational environment." This is one of the elements that drew Lipsitz and Cutforth -- whose background as either directors or producers includes the Katy Perry: Part of Me and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never docs as well as such reality-TV shows as Project Runway and Top Chef -- to want to make a movie about the world of EDM. Once they gave it some thought, they decided to focus on the Electric Daisy Carnival. "We had done music documentaries and felt there was something happening in the world of dance music," says Cutforth by phone. "The experience of going to a dance-music festival is very singular. And Electric Daisy Carnival is really a connection to the story of dance music." Simultaneously, Pasquale Rotella, CEO of Insomniac, the company that stages EDC, approached them about a partnering on a movie. He became an executive producer. "It all came about serendipitously," Cutforth explains. The directors view EDC, which this year attracted upwards of 400,000 people, through the lens of several festivalgoers with a unique back story, including the aforementioned Jose; a group of guys called the Wolfpack who are getting over the death of a friend who overdosed; a 40-something couple getting finally tying the knot at EDC; and Sadie, a girl from Forney, Texas, for whom dance music is her only outlet. In addition to their stories, Under the Electric Sky, which opens in North Texas on July 25 at Cinemark West Plano, features performances from some of the biggest names in the genre: Hardwell, Above & Beyond, Fatboy Slim, Afrojack, Avicii, Calvin Harris, Tiesto and Armin van Buuren among them. What Under the Electric Sky doesn't do is offer much context, history or any negative aspects -- such as drug use -- some associated with dance-music culture. For example, there's no mention of the death during an EDC event in Dallas in 2011, the last time the festival was in North Texas. Some of the reviews have even labeled it an extended commercial. The site Sound on Sight called it "essentially an advert for the Electric Daisy Festival." Big Picture Big Sound called it "a pure love letter to the festival, its music, and the people who travel from all over the world to attend. Presenting it this way makes it feel like an infomercial." Cutforth and Lipsitz shrug off such criticism. "We definitely didn't set out to make a hard-hitting documentary," says Cutforth. "We wanted to make something mainstream and entertaining first and foremost ... The focus is on the fans and what it means." "If someone had died this year [2013], that's something we would have put in the movie," says Lipsitz. "We were prepared for much more of a medical story. We thought that might be something that would turn into some dramatic stories. But it was relatively quiet and EDC is a very well-run operation, they're very smart, and they've been at this a long time." Besides, says Cutforth, EDC justifies the narrow approach as, in some ways, it's bigger than EDM. "They will sell out even before anyone knows which DJs will be there," he says. "It's not about the lineup. It's about the experience." It's like Burning Man. It's its own thing." ___ Cary Darling, 817 390-7571 Twitter: @carydar ___ (c)2014 Fort Worth Star-Telegram Visit the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at www.star-telegram.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]