Urban exploration—how the fuck does it work?  The arrangements of the acoustics, as the grounds below are toured, border on the freakishly genius.  There are points at which one hears gabber, hardstep, dubstep, techno and countless other genres of electronic music, and as one moves through the space, none of it bleeds into any of the others.  The couture and the dances, however, remain fluid and energetic as ever.  Helicopters of the square and the curious hover incessantly overhead, beating their own gabber rhythms, 500 feet up and rising.

Overheard in the backstage area apropos the DJ: “You never have to work. You get to party!”  Let it not be said that hanging out backstage is without its putrid rigors—because it is the most singular, astronomically difficult thing in the world to move even a fraction of the estimated 185,000 people here this weekend—to craft that perfect beat.  To string together some hitherto unheard series of notes that shoot straight from the sequencer and connect like so much electrical live wire to the nerves which make goosebumps a reality or a mortgage so magically paid off.  The middle deck pathways encircling the Coliseum remain phenomenally dark as fireworks erupt above. The park is the perfect place for ships passing in the night as hundreds of Craigslist “missed connections” are born.  The dark is the perfect place to have little breakdowns in loud corners, moments of diamond-tipped emotion shuddering through the haze and the bass.  And then the damnedest thing flies overhead: an airplane outfitted with LED panels mounted beneath its wings, methodically and brilliantly advertising the coming HARD Summer Music Festival.

Now for the highlights: Friday, the seamless booking of Dirty South, Swedish House Mafia, Kaskade and Deadmau5 on the kineticFIELD stage—and simultaneously at the circuitGROUNDS, the peerless revue of Z-Trip, Basement Jaxx, Infected Mushroom, Moby, and BT.  The highlights on Saturday weren’t quite so revoltingly revelatory—Will.i.am slightly before Benny Benassi and Armin van Buuren, who storm the stage about the same time that James Zabiela, Groove Armada and Boys Noize storm another.  But let’s face it: the Electric Daisy Carnival—and every festival like it—is by now virtually review-proof.  Tens of millions of fans will never be convinced of anything other than this music’s absolute infallibility.  Like Lawrence Welk or any given Superbowl of Motocross, the fans don’t read reviews for insight, if at all.  They don’t need to.  They desire authenticity—authenticity of feeling, of experience, and of community.  Conversely, no one’s writing any great history of this music because everyone’s simply too invested in it to step outside of it—and yet, conversely to that, outsiders simply “don’t understand,” much like—so the fable goes—one cannot truly experience this music without entering some kind of altered state of consciousness—or, at the very least, of conscience.  This, of course, is a falsity festering on the same level as “Put your hands up and dance!”, because some people just go to feel a quality of sound without acting demonstrably wacky.

—David Cotner

“Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings”: I hadn’t been back in L.A. more than a couple of days when the King of Pop exceeded all expectations of his upcoming tour by dying in advance of it. The Vine Street star of the Other Michael Jackson, legendary local DJ (now on KGIL), was the scene of a tastefully-done spillover memorial I viewed mid-afternoon Thursday, a few hours after the K of P keeled over. Leaflets reading “STOOPID! His star is in front of Graumann’s! Do you think the real Michael Jackson would have such a shitty location?” added just the right soupcon of ratwit Boulevard irony. A onetime rock hater, the (still-living) OMJ graciously gave the gaffe his blessing, adding “[I]f it would bring him back, he can have it. He was a real star. Sinatra, Presley, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.” The LAPD chopper buzzing overhead mooted any other directions and the propwash echoing off buildings gave a nice tension as I walked hillbilly-slow down the Avenue of the Stars toward Highland. It was like Day of the Locust as performed by C.W. McCall- a sullen mob scene presided over by more cops than Dog Day Afternoon. Swamped amid this flashmob of mourners was detritus from some upcoming TV-op for Bruno, a new comedy which may well go down in history as Sacha Baron Cohen’s karmic blowback. A disheveled, starveling street preacher climbed up on some rigging near me and set to bellowing about death, damnation and Jesus. It was a poorly-done crackhead busker’s version of a tune I know very well indeed, so, at his peroration, I loudly offered “O death, where is thy sting?” The fellow blinked in surprise, peering owlishly down at me as a distant voice intoned, “Grave, where is thy victory?” There was laughter and the brother went back into his spiel, plainly a broken man.

EDC = TKO: A miss-the-memo blunder of the kind fatigue inevitably brings got me no closer to the Saturday night closing of Electric Daisy Carnival than nearly the entire circumference of the Coliseum. Shunted in a left-landed circle around the place in search of a presslist event staff swore was at just the next gate got me a jogger’s-eye view of another overpoliced pop-clusterfuck. The atmosphere was much more alluring, as acres of friendly girls in boy-shorts and angel wings crammed every egress, even the mid-evening shuttle management graciously offered to take me to Staples Center (some miles away) to get accredited. A sightly mother-daughter kitty-kat team made the ride diverting and I was beginning to feel the event when I learned the presslist had already departed. Bloodied by fortune, I bowed to the ladies and padded downtown in my velvet clothes (past the spot on Sixth Street where, about twenty-four hours before, I nearly had to pepper-spray some strapping asshole trying to muscle a woman in a minidress) and caught the 18 Metro to the Warehouse District. Walking into the monthly Plump party on S. Santa Fe was like attaining the very bower of Underground Paradise. DJs Patrico, Jacques the Ripper, Todd Spero and FatFinger vied for beaty honors as a delightful lady of mystic bent drew the big-city pizen from me, one nuzzle at a time. Sweet home L.A., at last.

“Will The Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down?”: By three the next afternoon, I was slumped exhausted in the back row of the Silent Movie Theater, as the last night of L.A.’s first-ever Jerry Lewis retrospective flickered to giddy life. The three hours of clips shown before the main feature were like a curated tour through a vast and quirky comic universe roughly the scope of those of James Joyce or Flann O’Brien, and (in America at least), about as little understood. The last living heir to the great line of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, Lewis remains problematic to American critics and I think I know why. Those clips showed he has the founding shuck of American masculinity down cold, with his smooth ciggie-chuffing characters pointing up the fraud even as his geeky dolts tear it down one squeal and triple-take at a time. This is caricature the Roger Eberts and Rex Reeds of filmchat might find more than a little discomfiting. Even Cracking Up (Jerry’s 1983 directorial swansong, which had trouble getting released in the U.S.) shows lightning flashes of surreal brilliance, as Lewis does his own Brechtian variation on theAirplane! movies. The result is a W.C. Fields-peculiar opus at once too vulgar and too highbrow-brilliant for anyone outside his (gigantic) fanbase to get. The crowd was overwhelmingly young film buffs roaring in unironic glee at the temporary shrine of a neglected master. A few questions from the audience about Lewis’ unreleased The Day the Clown Cried made me keen to actually see it, instead of relying on the oft-cited displeasure of some few who actually have. These include the screenwriter –a breed of artist familiar with discontent- and Spinal Tap’s own Harry Shearer, whose last comedy album ought to disqualify him from criticism, even helpful hints.

Choke Point: The Women is housed at an elegant old house on Crenshaw and kicks up the occasional stylish indie-rock rumpus right under the snouts of the LAPD. The last Monday in June was yet another installment of Sean Carnage’s traveling rock medicine show and NYC punks the Choke were about to wreak fury in the front parlor when I walked in. Fronted by blonde whirlwind Cameron Eve, this quartet claims inspiration from the Kinks, the Buzzcocks and the Shangri-Las, but none of these worthies ever flung their pretty selves into a houseparty moshpit, at least not at me. The Choke’s set is tight and lithe, with most of the power held pragmatically in reserve, as a contrast to the sloe-eyed dreaminess of Dalmachio Von Diamond & the Enochian Keys, a six-man karass of Echo Park aesthetes with a moody streak. Von D.’s vocals come on like one of those mood-drenched charisma-rock acts Elektra signed in the wake of the Doors. Imagine a whimsical Scott Walker fronting the Electric Prunes and you get the general idea. I left as the house began to fill with seemingly every rocker south of Hancock Park and east of Koreatown, with most arriving on foot. While it lasts, this is a cozy and first-rate quasi-underground encampment without a MySpace page and without a lot of hassles either.

Stream: The Crystal Method “Drown In The Now” (Single Edit)

(from Divided By Night out now on INGROOVES)

Durable (and durably dynamic) mainstays of the L.A. party underground, the Crystal Method shot to international stardom in 1997 with Vegas. Dance music and electronica produce a great many ephemeral acts, but Crystal Method’s debut (now platinum and suitably special-editioned last year) placed Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland at a seemingly permanent place at the pinnacle of both genres. Divided by Night is the duo’s first studio album in five years, with scads of guest stars doing cameo appearances within CM’s characteristic dancefloor action adventure sound as it wanders down various dark sonic alleys. The Crystal Method is set to appear at the Electric Daisy Carnival the seriously-tweeky weekend of June 26th and 27th. Meanwhile, Ken Jordan here speaks to Ron Garmon about the real enemy of party people everywhere.

Crystal Method albums tend to have themes, so what’s the premise for Divided by Night?
Ken Jordan: This album is a lot more song oriented—also there’s a lot more singers on it. We’re not generally a lyric-driven band, so the themes are generally carried by the sound.
Which this time out is quite gritty, which is certainly the state of the L.A. underground. Is the dance-dance utopia over?
There’s like an ebb-and-flow going in America and L.A. I think even back in the late 1990s we always knew the scene would return underground after a while and so it has. All over the rest of the world, DJ culture is thriving and we’ve got the Electric Daisy Carnival coming up in L.A., which is gonna be huge. Last year we were there, it was like 70,000 people. There’s little or no crossover action with the mainstream, but DJ culture is still huge, so it’s kinda hard to figure. We don’t consciously try to take the temperature.
I get a lot of warehouse party vibe off this one, like a giant sound compressed into a small space until it detonates.
This one is a little more of a four-on-the-floor—much more than we usually do. It’s more varied and wide-ranging as well.
Any thoughts on the startling survival and mutative capacity of the L.A. underground?
There are a lot of good things still being staged at the Avalon and the Vanguard and elsewhere, but here and other big cities with the pop mash-up sound and the scene—that’s all bottle service and how much you pay. It grew up in nightclubs that had had cool DJs and cool music and the guy who could afford the bottle service couldn’t get in.
Tracks like ‘Dirty Thirty’ and ‘Smile’ are like long trawls through the L.A. nigh— big action-adventure soundtrack grooves with lots of dramatic proggy touches Peter Hook‘s bass gives those tracks a nice horror-movie feel that’s very much sums things up right now.
Oh, yes. His playing is so identifiable it really takes off. All of a sudden, you hear Joy Division and New Order. We didn’t actually work in our studio with all of our collaborators, but with Peter we did. He came by and spent all day working on those two tracks, with all his stories. He’s quite funny.
‘Drown in the Now’ does the big noise/small room trick I mentioned. How did Matisyahu get involved?
Last year we met him at the Pemberton Festival in Canada. We were closing out one of the dance tent on the last night. Earlier in the day, his road manager came around and asked if he could appear with us. He did this kind of singing-rapping thing over ‘High Roller’ off our first album and it was really really something, so we stayed in touch. We do always collaborate on our albums and sometimes the collaborations don’t always work out and never see the light of day, this time they all did.
Tell us about the Method’s new studio digs in NoHo. For years you recorded in the Bomb Shelter in Glendale.
For thirteen years. It was really getting nasty toward the end. We built it by ourselves in a two-car garage. It was just a disaster toward the end. I dreaded going to work every day. Maybe that’s why we have collaborators now!
I last saw you guys at the Obama Art of Change Inauguration party at the Mayan with the Mutaytor.
That came about at the last minute. We put up that free download of ‘Now’s the Time’ where we used Obama samples. It was kind of a nonpartisan incentive to get out the vote, even though we were very much pro-Obama. We got Shepard Fairey to make another version of his famous Obama image, only with the word ‘Now’ instead of ‘Hope.’ My girlfriend, who has this nonprofit, had some other friends who were throwing the event and asked us to play.
You guys sit at the pinnacle of the clubland scene here in Los Angeles. Is there any message you wanna drop from the balcony the dance-dance proletariat?
Yes. Music is not the enemy.
The L.A. County Fire Marshal might beg to differ on that. Who is the enemy?
Bottle service is the enemy.

THE CRYSTAL METHOD WITH PAUL VAN DYK, THIEVERY CORPORATION, PAUL OAKENFOLD, DAEDELUS, MARK FARINA AND MANY MORE ON FRI., JUNE 26, AND SAT., JUNE 27, AT THE ELECTRIC DAISY CARNIVAL AT THE L.A. MEMORIAL COLISEUM AND EXPOSITION PARK, 3939 S. FIGUEROA ST., LOS ANGELES. FRI. 4 PM – 2 AM / SAT. 4 PM – 4 AM / $55-$200 / ALL AGES. THE CRYSTAL METHOD PLAYS SAT., JUNE 27. MORE INFORMATION AND COMPLETE LINE-UP AT ELECTRICDAISYCARNIVAL.COM.