Photos: Despite Eclectic Bill, EDM Reigns At North Coast Music Festival
By Austin Brown in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 5, 2016 3:45PM
Photos by Tyler LaRiviere
Ostensibly, North Coast Music Festival finds an unlikely middle ground between hip-hop, rave and jam music, drawing each diverse audience in one place and creating a potpourri of fans and musicians alike. It’s supposed to be a dizzying buffet of musical odds and ends, finding the rabid fanbases that exist outside of the oft-plumbed indie rock and alternative pop scenes found at fests like Lollapalooza and Pitchfork. It’s an admirable and utopian desire, but in practice, North Coast is something of a hot mess: ravers and PLUR-proselytizing EDM lovers careen into sets filled with prog rock and bluegrass solos; the Chainsmokers’ “Closer” is played at least once an hour; and Matt and Kim’s otherwise bonkers stage antics concerning an inflatable penis and the exhortation to the crowd to “use the air from your vaginas to fill up these balloons” somehow seem par for the course.
In a place like this, it’s the idiosyncratic artists that stand out, drawing together the curious and inquisitive toward something more oddball. Matt and Kim’s aforementioned banter framed a set that revamped their plain keyboard + drums setup into a set of rave-ups and spurts of adolescent ecstasy in songs like “Daylight” and “Cameras”, albeit ones that felt more asexual than the performers themselves. Meanwhile, Vulfpeck’s Saturday set was dotted with fodder for those with a trained ear—for wound-up funk banger “Back Pocket,” the crowd was divided up to sing the chorus on different octaves. The collegiate vibe was refreshing, if a little stilted, but it came with a welcome dose of soul upon the entrance of frequent collaborator Antwaun Stanley for their most recognizable slices of slinky soul, “Wait for the Moment” and “Funky Duck.” And of course, returning headliners Umphrey’s McGee continued to lay down their mix of Phish-style jam band aesthetics and proggy, melodic excursions.
It’s no surprise that this eclecticism doesn’t mesh well with some of the more grassroots artists found in Chicago; and local stars Jamila Woods and Ric Wilson, while performing stupendous sets that only justify their growing fame, suffered from early time slots and an audience seemingly unconverted to their charms. And while Lil Durk and Vic Mensa made appearances during Ty Dolla $ign’s hit-justifying (and, unfortunately, entirely lip-synced) set to represent the city, that whole show lay in the shadow of Juicy J’s Friday performance, which eclipsed all the rest of the hip-hop at the festival with a decades-spanning run of banger after banger, going all the way back to his Three 6 Mafia days. Faring best might have been Sunday’s Chicago house mini-fest in the secluded Heineken house, which benefited from a limited capacity to create a more intimate atmosphere than almost anywhere else in Union Park that weekend. Jesse Saunders, the creator of the first original Chicago house record with “On and On,” stood out with his interpolations of Fingers, Inc.’s “Can You Feel It,” a pulsing disco edit of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and a stack of old-school house records that managed to keep the walls shaking while paying close attention to history.
Of course, all of this was on the margins of the fest: Anyone with eyes could tell you that the bulk of the audience and the marketing for the fest was geared towards its biggest moneymaking venture: EDM, dubstep and whichever of its practitioners have survived past the genre’s faddish adolescence and subsequent deflation over the last year. Talk to any trendsetter (if you must) and you’ll hear that EDM qua EDM is in decline—people are moving towards the Balearic lilt of tropical house or the grinding crunch of Berlin techno, they’ll probably say—but you wouldn’t be able to tell it from being at North Coast, where the crowd greeted each drop and Chainsmoker chorus with shock and awe. Some of the appeal remains befuddling, even to my ears—my notes on Baauer’s Friday performance consist entirely of the word “skronk,” and Zedd’s festival-closing performance seemed like something Ayn Rand would have enjoyed—music as a form of power that demands enjoyment and dance, a subjugating force rather than anything transformative. But gems emerged nonetheless: Dutch DJ Sam Feldt in particular offered a surprisingly riveting set, cavalierly throwing together some of the biggest and best bangers of the last six years into a nonstop churn that still managed to let through light (and melody, thank God). His approach—at one point sandwiching '90s hip-house classic “I’ll House You” by the Jungle Brothers in between Calvin Harris and LMFAO—felt closer to the hyperactive glee of mash-up culture than any of the self-seriousness of modern EDM.
Finally, Odesza’s headlining set on Friday might have been the highlight of the weekend, proving their light touch and commitment to their own material a preferable alternative to the mix-and-match strategy of someone like Matoma (who eschewed his entire discography to mix “I Like To Move It,” now best known for its presence in the soundtrack to Madagascar). The best Odesza songs work not for attempts at subversion or independence, but rather their competence at craft and songwriting—“Say My Name” and “All We Need” in particular are deceptively effective at casting the shadow of alternate worlds and possibilities, reaffirming dance music’s potential to convey a spiritual experience just as well as a sexual one.