If I had to guess the Big Idea communicated by the Atlantic Ideas Festival in New York City yesterday, it would be: wear a blazer, but not a tie. That seemed to be the key to getting on stage on the Atlantic Ideas Festival.
A Balinese girl tries to avoid a kiss during the Omed Omedan kissing festival in Bali, Indonesia, on Tuesday. During the festival, village priests dump buckets of water over couples to douse their passions. Image via Firdia Lisnawati/AP.
Halloween digs itself out of the chilly autumn ground for a few weeks each year, too weird and primal for governments or religions to claim. It is an ancient pagan harvest festival and a leering plastic skeleton in a front-yard cemetery of styrofoam tombstones. It is candy and liquor, sex and death, and the only "moral lesson" of Halloween is a sneering threat from a child in the night: Give me mine or you'll get yours, mister. It is the only honest American holiday.
Backstage at this year's Electric Zoo festival, which took place Labor Day weekend on New York's Randall's Island, I had one of the least pretentious discussions about music with a person who makes it for a living that I've ever experienced. The Berlin-based producer/DJ/label owner Alex Ridha (aka Boys Noize) had just played a 75-minute set to kids who wore day-glo T-shirts and Halloween costumes, kids who'd like flock to the main stage to hear Skrillex after Ridha's in-tent set. With Skrillex's selection reverberating off the wood-paneled walls of Ridha's trailer, the 30-year-old told me about "Reality," a track he'd worked on for a year, struggling "to make it sound not busy, even though it is busy."
This year's I'll Be Your Mirror festival (via All Tomorrow's Parties) is being curated by the Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli and will take place Sept. 21 to Sep. 23 in New York. We're premiering the festival's official mixtape here. Full track list is below. I'm predictably partial to the Blanck Mass track, but Tall Firs' "Crooked Smiles" is too fucking weird not to appreciate.
When people respond to modern dance music, chances are they are responding to drops. A drop happens when the beat comes back after temporarily exiting the sound design. In drop-fueled dance music, this happens every few minutes — the beat asserts itself, people freak out, their interest wanes, the song breaks down, the beat dissolves and then drops back in, asserting itself all over again, making people freak out all over again. And over and over and over again.
Meanwhile, in Australia, an ultralight plane has flown—quite literally—into a ferris wheel, requiring the rescue of four people—the plane's two passengers and two kids who were on the ride. No one was hurt, except for anyone who might have been wanting to go on the ferris wheel and now will not be able to do so.
Thousands of furries descend on Pittsburgh this weekend, for the sixth annual Anthrocon, America's foremost convention for "anthropomorphics," commonly known as "furries." Participants are already wandering the streets of Steel City, wearing costumes and carrying puppets, posing for pictures with locals, going to raves, and singing "furraoke" while boozing at local bars.
[A costumed reveller performs in the Notting Hill Carnival in London, the largest festival of its kind in Europe. Pic via AP.]
[60 kilometers of the Autobahn outside of Essen, Germany are shut down for the "Still-Life" cultural celebration. 20,000 tables have been lined up along the road to form the WORLD'S LARGEST TABLE. Germans!] (Pic by AP)
