At the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards, Kanye West made an unwelcome ascent to the stage for what may have been his most brash (of many) tirades to date. The cause: Kanye’s “Touch the Sky” video lost to French electro duo Justice’s “We Are Your Friends.”
Kanye argued he should have won for a number of reasons, including “My video cost a million dollars!” and “It’s got Pam Anderson!” As for the competition? “It’s nothing against you, I’ve never seen your video,” Kanye said to the winners.
Maybe he wasn’t a fan of electronic music then, but the rapper came around. By 2007, Kanye was topping charts with “Stronger,” and the song’s popularity was largely due to its sample of the 2001 hit “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” from another French dance duo, Daft Punk.
Perhaps Kanye’s change of heart represents a larger phenomenon in American music tastes. Justice and Daft Punk are just two of the numerous electronic artists who have gained mass audiences here in the past few years. So it’s no shock that we now find ourselves presented with UCLA’s first on-campus electronic music event, Electric Love Fest.
“I’ve never understood why electronica hasn’t been more mainstream,” said organizer and fifth-year international development studies student Lan Sha. “But I’m really glad that it’s catching on now.”
This event has been in the making for over a year, but its eventual success is a direct product of students’ enthusiasm.
“It’s different from other campus events because it started very grassroots ““ the students wanted it,” Sha said, referring to the massive response she’s gotten since she started a Facebook group last year to elicit interest.
ELF is planned to be a high-energy dance party featuring a lineup of local DJs and VJs, most of them UCLA students. Organizers hope it will offer an alternative to the image-oriented, hook-up-driven party routine.
“With Electric Love Fest, we want kids to wake up sore the next day,” said Marlon Fuentes, a fourth-year ethnomusicology student who will be spinning at ELF. “We want their legs to be sore and we want them to be dehydrated ““ from dancing really hard.”
ELF headliners Nick Dew and Kevin Stewart, who DJ under the name Religion, are no strangers to the electronica club circuit. The pair have played all over Los Angeles and recently have been garnering interest in the United Kingdom. They started out as hip-hop disc jockeys but were quickly sucked into the underground electronica community.
“It’s really a loving, embracing scene, everybody wants to be together, it’s like new-age hippies or something,” Dew said. Religion’s music still references their hip-hop roots, but reworks the songs to have a more upbeat vibe.
“Electronic music doesn’t have as much negativity as hip-hop may have. It’s really more positive, so it brings people together,” Stewart said.
Dougal Henken, a second-year
Design | Media Arts student, described it from the DJ’s perspective.
“It’s a very unique bond with a large group of people; everyone gets this sort of collective unspoken feeling and you can start communicating with the music you”˜re playing, you can tell them a story; it’s a very sharing experience.”
Henken is from New York and has been DJing since he was 14. More recently, he’s been DJing with Fuentes under the name Jakkmode. They do playful mash-ups that sample pop songs like Lady GaGa”˜s “Just Dance” and Estelle”˜s “American Boy.” They’ve played other Cultural Affairs Commission events such as Bruin Bash, and they’ll continue to bring the L.A. electronic music scene to UCLA students with this event.
ELF will also feature visual presentations by UCLA alumni group Collabo. Their spectacular and innovative displays have graced screens at events such as HARD Haunted Mansion in October.
Stephen Corwin, a second-year electrical engineering student who DJs with Jeff Ryemon under the name Color, is also eager to spread the electronic love. Color’s tracks layer percussion loops over samples of popular dance songs such as the Rapture’s “We Were Never Friends.” Corwin came up with the idea for an on-campus electronic music event after DJing his friends’ house parties. The parties were all high-energy, but he wanted to do something bigger.
But finding a space wasn’t easy. Sha said CAC’s help in finding a venue was what finally turned the dream into a reality. Tonight’s party will be in Kerckhoff Grand Salon. The event is free and only open to UCLA students.
Two more parties are in the works for February, and organizers hope to land the Ackerman Ballroom for a larger event next quarter.
If all goes according to plan, it looks like ELF could be the beginning of a new tradition at UCLA. Electronic music is coming out of the underground and onto campus.