Over at GQ, here’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus behind-the-scenes at the Electric Daisy Carnival:

The only really crucial thing to note here about the music is that the whole thing is about the bass. People who know a lot about electronic music will disagree with me, but knowing a lot about electronic music is, these days, entirely beside the point. The progression of a house track, and one plausible reason for house’s ascendancy, goes like this: There’s some twinkly pirouetting melody in the higher registers, then some bass for a while, and then the introduction of a soaring, optimistic vocal track about saving the world or, for the slightly less ambitious, having a feeling re tonight’s bestness, then the simultaneous near-crescendo of the twinkles and the all-out vocal redemption, and then, right at the moment of presumed climax, the bass goes away for a few beats, everybody misses the bass so much and can’t wait for it to come back, maybe the snare reintroduces itself after a few seconds to remind you to get excited for the prodigal bass’s triumphal homecoming, a good DJ takes just longer than expected to bring the bass back, 20,000 or 50,000 hearts stop as one, lever arms hanging anxiously in midair, and then, when the bass kicks back in, the crowd goes out of their motherfucking minds, just like they did the time the bass disappeared and came back four minutes ago, pumping their right arms in genuinely exhilarated unison, survivors all of the briefly yet catastrophically lost bass.

[Photo Via: All You Can Love]