It’s misleading to judge a festival by its first day, but the opening evening of Electric Zoo, the big annual dance festival on Randalls Island, was noticeably lacking in spark. Granted, today and tomorrow promise more sparks with heavier-hitting lineups. Still, yesterday felt less than exciting.
That was partly due to the new setup. There are five stages this year instead of four, and the longer set times that resulted made things feel a lot less snappy. That was as evident with the moodier stuff in the Sunday School tent as on the bigger stages that catered to the hands-in-air anthems. Four Tet, an Englishman who lives in Brooklyn, offered jazzy, psychedelic bells and askew rhythms that sound swell on headphones and fell flat for the big crowd: he cleared out the tent. At least you could listen to him: Dixon, following him, was the definition of tepid, offering tracks that went nowhere validly, refusing to build.
Bigger stages fared similarly. On the Main Stage West, English trance duo Above & Beyond got lots of hands in the air with their cascading piano lines, surging string overlays, and an aspirational we’re-gonna-make-it feel. but the energy was low: It felt more like a straight line than a cresting wave. In the Owsla tent, Dog Blood — the duo of dance stars Skrillex and Boys Noize — elicited a similarly listless half-excitement with their blurting low-end explosions.
Little wonder so many DJs have turned to “trap” — the slow-rolling Southern-rap machine beats behind this spring’s surprise No. 1 hit “Harlem Shake,” by Brooklynite Baauer. Headlining the Hilltop Arena tent, the scruffy young producer-DJ packed it in five minutes, moving rapid-fire between tracks without coming off like an ADD case.
Favoring clipped vocal samples over groaning low end, Baauer dropped remixes of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” and Kanye West’s “New Slaves” that were both obvious crowd pleasers and, amongst the largely tepid energy of the rest of Friday evening’s acts, satisfyingly rude. Arms were pumping, not just raised. As Lindsay Lohan’s mutating visage was projected over the DJ’s head, Baauer segued OutKast’s “B.O.B.” into his own remix of Disclosure’s “You & Me.” “I want to see everybody jump in the air,” he commanded, and they did, happily.
He finished, naturally, with “Harlem Shake,” playing it for less than a minute. It was enough. A good DJ, after all, knows when to quit.