Massive Three-Day Electronic Rave Event Is Right at Home in Sin City
What Los Angeles didn’t want, Las Vegas gladly accepted.
What Los Angeles (and other cities, including Dallas this year) can’t handle, Las Vegas treats as just another weekend.
It may be Sin City, but there were few sins committed at the Electric Daisy Carnival, held the last weekend in June at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. And officials – even the cops – are happy with the results and are eager to have the event return in the future.
This is the rave that drew negative publicity at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 2010, largely due to the death of a teenager after a drug overdose. No such incident happened in Vegas because the city had a good security plan in place an executed it so well there were only a handful of arrests in a crowd of about 80,000 each of the event’s three days. Er, nights. Er, mornings.
Instead, Electric Daisy Carnival was a county fair with an edge. It had a Ferris wheel, funhouse and fair food, but mixed that in with top DJs – many of whom spin at the Vegas clubs on the Strip – that pumped fans full of music and entertainment well into the morning hours.
Kinetic Field, the largest stage in North America, was the haven for headline performers Swedish House Mafia. The trio played to a massive sea of more than 40,000 festival goers at just one of the festival’s six stages, with major pyrotechnics and special surprises throughout the set.
Once they transitioned into their latest single “Save the World” the crowd went crazy as the lights came up revealing the vocalist John Martin center stage offering a live performance as Axwell, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso stood on top of the booth to hype the crowd. A 10-minute fireworks show and Red Bull skydivers shooting off flames lit up the sky during the two hour show.
Electric Daisy Carnival, Vegas style, featured more than 200 performers – including fire dancers, fire twirlers, aerialists and stilt walkers – on the 1,000-acre Speedway, which hosts a NASCAR event each March. There were six stages and 13 large-scale art installations that were very popular among the teenagers and early 20-somethings that made up the crowd.
It’s a safe bet – pun intended – that this event will be back in Vegas for many years in the future.
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