Identity Festival: A Retrospective

Well where do I begin....?
The beginning perhaps...

August 19, 2011 Identity Festival Camden, NJ

My DPC partner and I got chance to check out this stop of the tour. Unfortunately, a few delays prevented us from catching a few of the acts we very much wanted see. Not to mention, set times and act locations were shuffled throughout the day. But I’m going to do my best to stray away from some of the less positive aspects of the fest. I think Becca pretty much nailed it in her post. No worries though; there was still plenty of day and music left for us to get down to.

We weren’t exactly sure what to expect from the festival overall. We quickly got the gist of it though:

Oh yes, people came here to RAGE! And with the hormone-powered, angst-driven energy of thousands of glow stick toting teenagers...RAGE was had in this place.

What about the music you say? There was some of that too...
My first stop was to check out:

Still early in the day, the crowd was a bit thin but the energy was definitely rising. Admittedly, I am not too familiar with their material. But it was just what I needed to distract me from picture taking long enough to get my first dance on of the day. That’s what we came here for, right? Yeah, that....and the people watching!

Next...Booka Shade!...who, for whatever reason, got moved from the mainstage to a smaller one. No comment on that. What I will comment on is how they absolutely tore it down with a crowd of just a few hundred of us who could: 1. Find it. 2. Tear ourselves away from whatever generic electro that was happening at the other stages. (Sorry, that wasn’t too positive was it?).

These guys bring so much energy and creativity. No pressing “Play” then screaming and running around on stage while the track rides. They touched on a large portion of their catalogue and not only played their songs well, but played them differently from their studio counterparts. The live improvisation was an exciting relief from the non-stop untz happening at the other stages

There was downtime after Booka, and some rain-time for a while. This quickly became "exorbitantly overpriced beer" time. Then I heard it:

“WAKE THE FUCK UP!”

Hey, don’t tell me what to do Rusko.

I enjoyed a good portion of his set. He screamed; a lot. But brought a metric shit-ton of energy (see what I did there?..”metric”...he’s British...ok sorry). He womped it out, threw it back to some early stuff, some housey stuff, and even dropped an "unreleased" Rhianna track he produced (which he told us not to tell anyone about...sorry Rusko!).

Next up..: Avicci

This was probably one of the more exciting acts of day as far as production value.

I’m into House music as a whole, and he hit the spectrum of it. There were some cheesy moments, but there was enough quality stuff that even a snob like myself could find enjoyment in a good amount of the set. The crowd as a whole absolutely loved it!

There's a lot more that could be said (and shown) about my experience at Identity Festival, but for sake of highlighting what I actually enjoyed and keeping with focus of this blog, I’ll wrap it up. In all honesty it was a great time overall. The range of music was enough grab the attention of anyone who likes current electronic dance music. It just didn't quite hit the nail on the head as far as my taste go...

We like dirty disco dance parties....

:)