For the people still clinging to the claim that electronic dance music (EDM) is barely music or a passing phase, now is the time to stop. The battle is over. EDM has won.
It was BC Place that hosted the Contact Festival, Western Canada’s biggest EDM event last night. DJs aren’t filling arenas these days. They’re filling stadiums. The fact that the Festival’s performers can walk down streets unrecognised does not detract from the adoration of the faithful. The medium is the message. And the message is, let’s dance.
IN PICTURES: Armin van Buuren, W&W rattle the roof for Contact Festival
For anyone hoping for a message with a little more resonance, they weren’t going to find it with Aussie twins Miriam and Olivia, DJing under their surname, Nervo. BC Place bounced along as they injected large doses of bass and beats into a selection of easy-on-the-ear hits, including Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” and Kiesza’s Canada-to-the-world smash “Hideaway.” The stadium’s scoreboard video continually showed the ladies’ at knob twisting work: far from hard labour but clearly plenty of fun.
A different remix of “Hideaway” made an appearance a short while later, amply demonstrating the limited palette of stadium rave, this time at the hands of Belgian DJ team W&W. Perhaps the most generically European-looking men currently in the entertainment business, the duo spoon fed the crowd an hour of easily digestible big room house while imploring everyone to “Throw your Ws in the air,” yet neglecting instructions to wave them like you just don’t care.
More challenging music was going on upstairs on the FVDED Stage. Sat unceremoniously on a mid-level stadium concourse, a medium-sized PA and some well-placed camouflage netting failed to disguise its concrete griminess. Which is actually as fine an ambience as any for EDM.
The star of the stage was GRiZ, known to his friends as Grant Kwiecinski, mixing up George Clinton funk and classic hip hop from Snoop Dogg and Lil’ Jon, while adding beats and blasting 80s-tinged saxophone solos of his own.
The rejection of EDM orthodoxy continued upstairs with the sparsely attended but still excellent duo Gramatik, whose crunchy beats over 70s soul loops delivered the funkiest set of the night. Joined on stage by GRiZ, their love of music over DJ ego produced a magic moment as two saxophonists blasted the riff over the original version of Stevie Wonder’s unbeatable “Superstition.”
Still, no one shelling out the astronomic ticket prices had come to be reminded of past musical glories. They came for Armin van Buuren, the Dutch king of the stadium rave. Welcoming the devout with some delightfully formal English, “If you will, raise your hands,” van Buuren delivered a muscular set mixing gems from dance music’s distant past (special mention for Faithless’ “Insomnia”) with his own production successes like “Sound of the Drums.” Eager to push the crowd, by now a unified sweating, heaving mass of humanity, harder than his predecessors, two hours of pulsating trance flew by. Still not immune for the lure of the pop-house crossover, he lost cool points for slipping Coldplay’s “Sky Full of Stars” into his mix. The night finished as he welcomed Vancouver’s own Trevor Guthrie on stage to provide live vocals for “This Is What It Feels Like.”
Not that individual tracks mattered on a night where size, atmosphere and Vancouver’s most tactile crowd (kudos to the young man who spent the entire evening requesting and receiving high fives) combined to create a genuine musical extravaganza. Watching a crowd filling a CFL field bounce in unison was an unforgettable sight.
The Contact Festival continues Saturday evening at BC Place.
