Escape from Wonderland
NOS Event Center, San Bernardino
Oct. 29
3.5 paws
Attending an event like Escape from Wonderland is by and large a sensory experience. From the moment attendees enter the gates of this expansive electronic festival, they are immersed in sound, colors, textures, and images that provide a sense of excitement, and yes, wonder.
The electronic music may have been the reason many people decided to attend this event, but the 10-hour festival had much more to see and experience. With stages both inside and outside, everything was covered in festive Halloween décor with projections of ghosts and spiders surrounding the tents with stages inside.
Bright and colorful orbed ornaments hung from the trees with art installations surrounding a large water fountain, which by the evening was emitting fog and spitting fire into the air.
Dancers and aerialists were seen walking around on stilts dressed in extravagant and somewhat creepy costumes, and attendees were no different. The festival also offered a haunted maze, a pumpkin patch and carnival rides that attendees enjoyed in between sets, making the festival more than just an auditory experience.
Highlights from the festival included a range of artists from dubstep to drum and bass acts like Pendulum to popular house and trance acts like R3HAB. Overlapping scheduling of artists made it almost impossible to catch the whole performance of any single artist, especially with artists like Benny Benassi and Afrojack performing around the same time.
Nevertheless, both artists delivered exciting and dance-friendly sets, with Benassi playing hits such as “Satisfaction.” The most satisfying moment of his performance was when he played a more recent track, “Cinema” in which he dropped the Skrillex remix, causing the audience to sing along loudly and dance almost violently to the dubstep interlude.
Afrojack, in contrast, kept the energy alive by opening with his original mix, “Bangduck.” He continued to play a slew of his hits, from the popular radio single “Take Over Control” to remixes and mash-ups of Martin Solveg’s “Hello” and Major Lazer’s “Pon De Floor.”
The pinnacle of the evening was undoubtedly the festival’s closing act, Steve Angello. A member of the internationally known “Swedish House Mafia,” Angello played a range of hits from “One” to “Miami to Ibiza” as well as remixes of other popular dance songs, from Avicii’s “Levels” to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “By the Way.”
Angello also performed remixes of two Coldplay tracks, “Fix You” and the more recent “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall.” His set, enhanced by a gigantic tent set up that included massive televisions, expansive lasers and lights and constant streams of confetti, kept audiences enthralled and in amazement.
After playing Swedish House Mafia’s most recent hit, “Save the World,” which had audiences singing along, he closed the set with his favorite beat mixed with Florence and the Machine’s “You’ve Got the Love.” It was an appropriate and wondrous end to the festival.