Electric Zoo

This past Labor Day weekend of 2015 saw a gathering of people from near and far on the grass of Randal's Island, New York City, for the annual electronic dance music festival known as Electric Zoo.

Electric Zoo is a three day long festival that hosts a large lineup of electronic music artists of all genres.  From trance to trap, and hardstyle to house, electric zoo brings an experience that everyone can enjoy.

I went to this festival for the fist time on Labor Day weekend (Saturday) in 2014.  I only bought a ticket for one day and didn't really know what I was getting myself into.  I only got the ticket because I liked one song of an artist that I knew was going... in hindsight that was not much of a reason to spend over one hundred dollars on a ticket for an all day festival.  Nonetheless, I pressed on, and even managed to convince a friend of mine to get tickets as well.  Now a year later I am back for all three days, a budding veteran with a year under my belt.

The festival is divided into five different stages, each hosting a different artist at the same time.  Each stage generally maintains some consistency with genres and artists.  Meaning you can find similar music at each stage no matter who is playing (there are exceptions to this rule of thumb).  The main stage will provide the most mainstream music, while other stages lean towards less popular genres (another rule of thumb is that the more popular a genre is, the bigger the stage it will get, but again there are exceptions).  This year, the festival was also streamed on twitch (twitch.tv)! so you can check out for yourself what the stages looked like.

So what exactly makes these things so interesting? and why would anyone spend so much money just to hear songs they could listen to in their room?  To me the answer is quite simple; It's all about the people.  The music is the reason why I got into festivals, and I still love being able to hear my favorite artists play their music in all different ways; it is truly unique.  But it is the people that keep me coming back.  Almost everyone going to these festivals dresses up in some sort of costume, or brings some sort of prop, or talent, or any number of things.  There are all different kinds of dancers, people doing back flips, others are doing light shows and dancing with LED hula hoops, and on top of that, most people are more than friendly towards one another.  There is always someone doing something amazing and it is an unrivaled feeling knowing that you could go up to almost anyone at the festival and talk to them about what they're doing.  Traveling to the festival, you see more and more people with the Electric Zoo wristband on, and everyone treats each other like one big family.  Veterans give advice to the newcomers, and more often than not friendships are made that last for years.

Electronic music festivals might not be for everyone, but I can safely say that there is no other experience out there that can compare to a weekend running away for one, two or three days in bliss, to have fun with complete strangers.