- I decided to attend my first HARD event to gauge whether or not I am, in fact, old.
The two-day festival was well-managed, with four stages, several carnival rides and a shit-ton of people between 18 and 25. But instead of catering only to what that demographic knows, it seems like HARD has embraced the DreamWorks approach: give the kids what they want, but throw in some stuff for the parents, too. For every Nero on the main stage, there'd be someone on the Underground Stage or at the Red Bull Music Academy Discothèque who might offer something a little more mature. I tried to get equal helpings of both.
On day one, I was struck with a few things that I didn't expect. The crowd wasn't as aggressive or rambunctious as you might assume, and there was always plenty of room to dance. The costumes were split between rave outfits, typical Halloween/Day Of The Dead fare and a hybrid of the two. There were breakdancing Heisenbergs and a confusing abundance of Power Rangers.
On the main stages, I caught parts of Oliver, Zeds Dead, Nero and Bloody Beetroots. Their sets all felt interchangeable, but their crowds didn't seem to mind. The main HARD stage took on the facade of Freddy Krueger's old house on Elm Street. Skrillex made it feel like a gateway between adolescence and adulthood—frightening, awkward and grotesquely humorous. DJing from atop a sinister jack-o-lantern, he was the crown prince of angsty robot-rock and emo war cries. His set was the most ambitious, from the sheer amount of tunes he crammed into 90 minutes to his ridiculous stage show, which featured what might be described as pyro-projection-live dancer theatrics. Meanwhile, in the RBMA Discothèque, you could find Kavinsky (dressed as Teenwolf) blazing through his catalog, a surprisingly crowd-moving performance by Benoit & Sergio, and an excellent closing set by consummate professionals Masters At Work.
By day two I was already at quarter-strength, confirming that, yes, this still is a young man's game. I caught some pretty solid sets by Tensnake and Jamie Jones, but Eric Prydz's anthems were especially impressive on the main stage. Foregoing DeadMau5, I opted to watch Giorgio Moroder close out the Red Bull stage, and I had a moment to speak with him before he went on. During our chat, I learned that 1) Midnight Express is his favorite of his own soundtracks 2) he's back in the film-scoring market as we speak 3) he recently turned down scoring a film because a rough cut was embarrassingly bad.
Moroder's DJ partner, Chris Cox, couldn't make it to HARD as billed, so Moroder had to teach himself Ableton in order to pull off his medley that evening. When he took the stage, he addressed the crowd (through a vocoder, of course): "They called me the granddaddy of EDM. They called me a 73-year-old EDM badass." After a few technical hiccups early on, granddaddy conducted his way through one of the most ridiculous back catalogs in pop music history. These records came out before most people in this crowd were born, but their anthemic, big-room quality made them an obvious antecedent to the arena-techno playing elsewhere at the festival. Asked if he had a favorite EDM grand baby, Moroder confirmed: "It's Skrillex, of course!"