Electric Zoo 2012 Day 3 Review

As we woke up in the morning our legs were tired, minds blown, and ears sore from wearing plugs for two day straight, yet the sounds of NYC street traffic weren’t going to let us go back to sleep, nor would our excitement.  We were blessed with a 3rd Day of Electric Zoo Review, the last and final to party with our new NYC friends we met at the festival.  Not only was the festival fleeting, but so was summer.  After all Labor Day weekend marks the culmination of summer.

Days 1 and 2 the Zoo spoiled us with deep emotional sets of Above & Beyond, grungy dark energetic sets of Nadastrom, and everything in between.  The range of music on display at the festival was dynamic, impressive, and satisfied a vast group of electronic dance music fans.  However, Day 3 wasn’t going to be overshadowed by any means.  Electric Zoo built their day 3 lineup to go out with a bang.

On the bill for EDMBoston was Eliot Lipp, Paper Diamond, W&W, Dash Berlin, Porter Robinson, Knife Party, Dev, Tiesto, Diplo, and Skrillex.
 

Eliot Lipp

Eliot Lipp opened up the day at the Riverside tent with his chill experimental sounds.  He balanced his set in between his unique jazz house influenced sounds and hip-hop induced beats before giving way to Dubstep to finish out his set.  It was a challenging atmosphere for the artist because he was the first set of the day.  When an artist is charged with opening up a festival he has to deal with people peaking in and out of tents and often only has seconds to pull someone in.  Lipp successfully transitioned in and out of varied sounds to successfully build an intimate crowd and keep them engrossed.

Eliot Lipp passed the keys to the Riverside Tent to fellow up-and-comer Paper Diamond.  Paper Diamond continued the flow of dubby hip-hop inspired beats that Eliott Lipp left off with.  However, technical problems troubled the artist early in his set. As the music completely cut out on him at one point, he took to the mic and said, “Bear with us two minutes while we figure this out.”  Fortunately, everything was back up and running immediately and he hit the crowd with some fresh dub.  He worked the crowd well striking up hands in the air clapping.  When Paper Diamond hit the crowd with Delta Heavy’s Remix of “Must be the Feeling” it took control of the tent and Paper Diamond carried the energy with more Dubstep inspired tunes.
 

Paper Diamond

Mid-afternoon we transitioned out of the Riverside Tent and made our way to the goliath Main Stage, but not before snacking on some tasty grass feed beef meatballs.  Yes, you read that right: gourmet meatballs at a festival.  In fact they were some of the best meatballs we’ve had and there are yelpers on our team.  They hit the spot and satiated us for the remaining part of the afternoon, which is always clutch at a festival because all too often we forget to eat and wane at the end of the day.

W&W was the first set we captured at the Main Stage.  They gave the Main Stage its first signs of life with their unique blend of Trance and house, which people are calling ‘Trouse.’  One of our favorite parts of the set came when they played a triple stack of their own tracks: “Shotgun”, “Moscow” and “Invasion(ASOT 550 Anthem).”  We weren’t the only ones to take notice, as the dense sea of hands in the air paid respect to W&W’s anthems.

W&W

Dash Berlin was next up on the Main Stage and this was the first time we were seeing him live.  However, his set time before sundown took away from the energy of his trance music.  As a result, he had trouble keeping the crowd’s attention.  He feverishly ran back and forth on stage trying to pump up the crowd.  He threw free waters out and even held an IPad above his head that read “Make Some Noise”.  I don’t think we’ve ever seen someone try to pump the crowd up more, other than Steve Aoki.  His music was excellent but EDMBoston felt an evening slot would have really pumped up the Dash Berlin show.
 

Dash Berlin

Fortunately as the young phenom Porter Robinson took the stage the sun peaked out for the first time of the day.  While it was hard to decipher if the sun or Porter Robinson shifted the crowds energy, there was clearly a shift.  Everyone came alive because Porter’s high energy set wasn’t going to let anyone sit back.  His sweet mixings of complextro drops with progressive lullaby buildups were dynamic and artistic.  His set was unique and varied from the other artists of the festival, and as such it felt fresh.
 

Porter Robinson

“He’s amazing, HE’S AMAZING!” Screamed out Sarah Mcnutt at which time Porter proceeded to play the hook line “My name is Porter Robinson and I’m never ever going to release this track” to his track “Peace.”  Other highlights from his set were his mashup of Robyn S “Show Me Love” with Zedd’s Shotgun and Darth & Vader’s “Return of the Jedi”.  Porter also freshened up Nari & Milani’s “Atom” and replaced the drop with Gesaffelstein’s “Variation.”  One of our favorite parts of Porter’s set was he kept us guessing and wasn’t afraid to swap tracks in and out with little notice.  One second he’s playing Deadmau5’ “Strobe” and then transitiosn into “Some Chords” mixed with “Moar Ghsts N Staff (hard intro version mix).”

Porter earned the hype that surrounds his name in his Electric Zoo Main Stage set and renewed our excitement to follow this extremely talented young artist.

As the day wore on at the Main Stage the energy continued to surge.  Knife Party harnessed the crowd’s energy from Porter’s set like the alien warship in Independence Day, and then released the subatomic energy onto the crowd causing devastation.  Moments prior a fan said to us, “Wait till Knife Party gets on stage, this place is going to be mayhem”.  Indeed it was.  The hard drops and their aggressive Dubstep/Electro sound warped the most innocent PLUR baby into a raging maniac, bouncing and contorting their body into deep emotional poses not seen since the days of hard grunge.
 

Knife Party

When Knife Party stopped the madness with their final track, the sun had begun setting and we were getting squeamish.  There only about 3 hours left of 2012 Electric Zoo and we were experiencing one of our best highlights of the summer.
 

Tiesto

Tiesto would be our last Main Stage act before transitioning to our headliner of choice for Day 3.  Tiesto’s set was very vanilla.  He played a safe set composed of clublife material filled it out with a lot of mashups from other artists.  He was technically sound as always but where he stands today, leaves you scratching your head and questioning why he gets paid this much for playing a set that almost any other artist at the festival could replicate with ease?  It was disappointing to say the least.  We will say, his opening with “Chasing Summers” with smoke pumping in and the sun down was euphoric.

The winner from Day 3 was non other then Diplo.  He packed in the largest crowd we’d seen all weekend at the Riverside Tent.  When we walked around the back to take a photo, people were lined up 10 rows deep outside the tent on all sides.  Diplo kept the crowd engrossed for the full hour and twenty minute set.  The set was complete with visual, auditory, and emotional depth.  He had special 3D visuals going on all the LCD screens, and he interacted with the crowd frequently throughout his set.  In addition Diplo played a set packed with Trap, Moombahton, Hip-hop, Dubstep, and Progressive House.  Diplo kept us guessing during his set and remained unpredictable throughout the set.

Diplo

One of the wildest points in Diplo’s set was when he played House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”  It came in the last quarter of the set and morphed the energy in the tent  over the edge.  It had people going out of their minds.  At one point during the track someone even jumped the barricade and got on stage and did a backflip!

And just like the backflip Electric Zoo was over before we even could wrap our arms around it!  We had a fantastic 3 days in the Zoo and were very impressed with the festival.  The focus of this festival was most certainly on user experience and enjoying quality music, and for that we can definitely say we will be back next year!

We’d like to personally THANK the Made team and Plexi PR for putting on such a fantastic festival!