Concert ReportMilan Trivedi Concert Report #1 The concert that I attended for this report was on Valentine’s day (February 14) in San Diego, CA. The name of the event was “Anniversary V” and it was an electronic dance music concert. I attended because my sister and my wife wanted to go. Electronic dance music isn’t generally my cup of tea. I learned about the main event, an EDM duo named “Showtek” from my wife and heard some songs on youtube just to know what I was getting myself into. Upon arriving at the venue, I noticed that I was much older than the majority of the crowd very naïve when it came to this genre of music. The event began with an opening act, a local DJ who played a mix that was about ten minutes long. Although I enjoyed the first few minutes as well as the moment the “beat drops,” I found myself much less excited than the majority of the audience. I almost felt like a dad attending an event for his kids. The performers were constantly mentioning how amazing the sound and acoustics were in the venue, but I failed to noticed the sound quality and only noticed how painfully loud the music was and how the bass shook my insides and left me with a bit of a headache.
The second act was the main event, the electronic dance music duo Showtek who apparently have a large cult following, likely because of the internet and recent emergence of this genre into the mainstream. The group came out and the crowd was cheering, girls were screaming, and everyone was waiting for the music to begin. This duo specializes in “live mixing” where they take suggestions from the crowd about which loops and songs to mix and then perform a mix in real time. This was the highlight of the show for me, the group mixed Marvin Gaye’s “What’s going on” with a Swedish House Mafia song, and the result was pretty impressive. Once the mixing was complete, the group moved onto performing their famous tracks (whose names I can’t recall). To be honest, the music sounded more like someone one would hear at a gym, but the crowd would most definitely disagree with my take on it.
The Music:
‡The first act
‡The second act
‡The third act
‡ The fourth act
‡The fifth act
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Songs in the mix (which we’ve seen)
One of the amazing things about playing this show is when the fans will start talking about how great you want the music to sound. There have been a lot of examples of these stories over the years; some shows, particularly shows with huge attention spans, can seem completely out of sync with one another, giving a sense of unpredictability, and the group has always managed to keep that balance with the dance music they do. We started out as a dance music outfit, and we didn’t understand the concept of DJing at the time, but with DJing being very real and we would be taking all my cues from the crowd—we only played in a one-trick band and started mixing. When I saw that the group started mixing, I got the feeling they were getting ready to get a big beat and play it out on stage in the front row at the end of their show. I was a huge fan, and I was especially excited by how cool and fresh the whole show was.
The Video (in Dutch)
‡The video
‡The lyrics
‡The first act
‡The second act
‡The third act
Story time at the end: 11:30am-11:45pm
Dance music in a concert, and how it works
I was at the big event in Cologne. We wanted to start a new show with a unique show and wanted to show the fans how I feel about performing that kind of music. We were able to see that we were starting from low notes and were working our way up to high notes and quickly becoming the first to do things like this. We actually got ready to start mixing the three-minute video and realized that we could not stay so close to the music because the audience only wanted our songs at different parts of each video. It was a huge surprise to me to see some good audience members in the audience. We were playing more of our own stuff and the crowd came in to play our music with great energy and enthusiasm. We even had one dancer on stage when we started talking about what would happen with the group at the end of each video. I think the crowd knew that it would be very nice to see a band together at the end and that it would be fun to see each of us live. When the DJ came in for the fourth act to show us their music though, it was completely different. It looked so close because of the crowd cheering in the music being played by the dancers and the dancing being done at the end. I think these things are real, but how does it fit with what we do right now? It’s actually a little bit different on the beginning. The first act has a completely different dance music style than the second, but it gets even better when we work on the song together rather than just mixing tracks together. We are really excited with the community and the music that is being used in this concert, and there’s still something different on the air from what we used in previous shows. It is exciting to see that fans will enjoy it.
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