Thousands of eager electronic dance fans piled into the Aragon Ballroom on Oct. 26 to hear Dada Life and participate in a world record-setting pillow fight. Garbed in eccentric and at times sensual Halloween costumes, these spectators coagulated into a shifting blob on the elliptic floor.
DJ Craze, a Nicaraguan American who plays dubstep, drum and bass, trap and hip-hop, entertained the crowd for roughly an hour. Top 20 hits blasted through the speakers, and although the music lacked an element of timeliness, the crowd jammed regardless. Trap hits like “Bugatti” and “M.A.A.D. City (Eprom Remix)” induced listeners into leaving the ground while punching the air.
Once Craze had left, Clockwork (alias RL Grime) stepped onto the stage. His set included many typical electronic songs, like “Clarity,” “Animals” and the quintessential “Reload” by Sebastian Ingrosso, Tommy Trash and John Martin. These masterpieces coincided with an array of purple light moving across the room, eventually colliding with a disco ball. Clockwork exposed a deft precision at layering songs, ostensibly playing one track then dropping another. The Los Angeles native employed an extensive knowledge of electronic music to the crowd’s enjoyment.
After an hour of twisting knobs and checking equalizers, Clockwork thanked the crowd and exited stage left. Olle Corneer and Stefan Engblom replaced him.
The two members of Dada Life joined the event with unbridled tenacity and enthusiasm.
“Are you ready to go bananas for two f—ing hours?” Engblom asked.
Fans responded in the affirmative by screaming and shaking fists. But the requirement for a Dada music set had not been met: a world record. The duo explained that everybody needed to fight for a complete minute. Piece of cake. Fans set the record and a layer of pillow innards remained on the floor. This layer grew to five inches by the end of the night, impeding movement but providing fodder to throw in the air during every drop.
Yet, the drops by Dada seemed lackluster — not evocative. The crowd pulsed to “Happy Violence” and “Kick Out the Epic MotherF—er,” but drops themselves were fast-paced explosions of noise. This is perhaps because those tracks did not rely on bass as much as festival songs do. It’s not so much what Dada Life had but more what it lacked.
The duo constructing masterpiece onstage, in front of a screen with images of burgers and bananas, concluded the night with another version of “Kick Out the Epic MotherFu–er,” while a gigantic banana bounced around the audience on the Aragon floor. This left the crowd ecstatic.
The next event at the Aragon will be My Bloody Valentine on Nov. 2, a concert for any shoe-gaze fan.
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Twitter: @afburnham
