Safe In Sound Music Festival Live Review Orlando 2014

Same In Sound at Safe In Sound | Live Review: Adventure Club, Flux Pavilion, Destroid, uZ, & Terravita | Firestone Live | October 3 2014

by Donnie George • October 8, 2014

Last Friday night, while some of my friends traveled down to Miami to see the lovely Australian house producer/DJ Anna Lunoe, and other friends went to Plaza Live to check out the chill-vibes brought to you by electronic British artist Bonobo, I decided to venture down to Firestone Live Music Park (aka their converted parking lot) to see what the all the hype was about with Safe In Sound Festival, the touring music festival brought to Orlando by Disco Donnie Presents, AEG Live, Firestone Live, and HTG in association with FSOB, Vizion 1 and Alliance Events.

The Orlando Safe In Sound date hosted headliners were Adventure Club, Flux Pavilion, Destroid, as well as support from ƱZ and Terravita. Other dates were lucky enough to get one of my favorites, bass gods and experimental dance music duo Zeds Dead (recently at the Fort Lauderdale Mad Decent Block Party) as well as recent Independence Music Festival headliner, Canada’s Excision.

While the title of the festival gives you the inclination that you would hear the overly remixed Capital Cities song, “Safe and Sound,” on repeat, I can confirm that all the artists featured were big in the heavy bass music variety of electronic dance music (EDM). Trap and dubstep were in full supply, though main headliners Flux Pavilion and Adventure Club are known to mix it up a little more than most artists in that category.

After show producers switched up the line up to my benefit (by putting the masked-mysterious trap artist ƱZ at a later time), I decided to head out with hopefully enough time to catch him. I have seen ƱZ once before at TomorrowWorld 2013 where he closed out the Trap stage with Flosstradamus.

ƱZ‘s show was so good there that it almost convinced me to go see him play the Evolve the Group New Years Eve at Roxy Nightclub at the end of last year. His sets are always a mixture of the hip-hop/rap-inspired EDM standards with some more off-the-cuff track selections that you do not hear from many others… however I did not end up making it in for his set. Instead I had to hear him kill his set from the insane line:

Little did I realize that this was an all ages show; the long line that I expected was just that much longer as literal kids swarmed the Firestone parking lot to rage to one of the few events they can actually go to. (Most EDM shows are late club nights that are 18/21+.) I ended up in the 21+ / No Bag Check-line. I watched as a Honey Boo Boo Face Melting totem zoomed passed us in one of the other lines. Thanks to Firestone management, I was able to swing through the line to grab my passes and get in right at the end of ƱZ’s set. A remix of DJ Kool’s 1996 classic “Let Me Clear My Throat,” made me realize that most of his set was more of a festival trap set and less of a club night set (a blander version of what I am normally more of a fan of).

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I was super excited for the next act after I had looked them up on Soundcloud a few weeks back. Destructoid (of which I’m more familiar with his other moniker Grimecraft) hails out of San Francisco with his chip-tune, video game inspired club beats. His Peachboiz mixes have been a favorite for a while. However, what came on next was not what I expected at all:

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Instead of Destructoid, we got Destroid: a Hot Topic clad goth-teen’s wet dream. The people on stage were dressed as some robotic mixture of Metroid’s Samus Aran and the science fiction horror movie creature the Predator. They allegedly played live guitars and drums in a metal/industrial fashion, and had a baseball capped lead MC, who came off like he was straight out of a nu-metal band from the 90’s. It seemed like their gimmick was more important to their live show than any sense of musical performance. CO2 cannons blasted off behind the light up stationary guitarist while the drummer seemed to mime a drum set that did not quite line up with whatever track was playing, at least from my perspective (a backing track with no onstage DJ?). Regardless of my criticisms, the crowd loved it; it sadly made all too much sense. I ended up, somehow, making it to the front right before Flux Pavilion went on. This English producer/DJ was and is one of the most respected dubstep artists around. Even though the bros took over with “bro”-step in the post-Skrillex era, the traditional dubstep originated and developed across the pond in the United Kingdom (see Plastician, Skream, Benga, James Blake, and an earlier Rusko). Hailing from similar Anglo-scenes, Flux Pavilion has always maintained a diverse perspective and a mixture of more mainstream EDM and dubstep tracks, while challenging production further. The crowd anxiously waited for his set to begin and there seemed to be a false start for a second. But once he started going, the crowd couldn’t stop. Even as the rain began to pick up and things got a little nastier, he and the audience kept going! Flux Pavilion started off with tracks “Bass Cannon,” and his newer remix of Skrillex and Kill the Noise’s “Recess.” He also dropped his older remixes like DJ Fresh’s “Gold Dust” and the Freestyler’s “Cracks,” but the crowd peaked out and lost it when he played his major hit “I Can’t Stop” (or as most people know it as Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Who Gon Stop Me” off of Watch The Throne).

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In the midst of Flux Pavilion’s set, I ended up breaking up a fight by the front of the stage. I do not know exactly why it started or what it was about, but when a 6-foot-3, 190 pound, bearded 29 year old, tells you to cut it out, you do. Well, at least when you are a little jit like a majority of the kids at this show. Throwing off vibes at a show is a sin.

Montreal-based Adventure Club closed out the night. Their sound, compared to any of the other acts of the night, was more varied and diverse. While they do have their own dubstep-inspired breakdowns, with the expected insane drops that have become cliché after the height of the late-2000’s craze, Adventure Club have the ability of transitioning into EDM with broader appeal. They dropped remixes of Disclosure, Flight Facilities, and Duke Dumont, putting their own electro/dubstep spin on these straight-forward house tracks. With their background as originally being a hardcore pop-punk band, it is no wonder that one of them took the chance to do a somewhat unsuccessful crowd surf and ended off their set during a track of hardcore band Underoath’s “It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door.”

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And there you have it, the more things change, the more they stay the same; this festival sadly reminded me that. Hip-hop and rap turned into trap, industrial/metal acts turned into mimicked robots, dubstep and downtempo electronica turned to brostep and still has people holding on for more, and an EDM set successfully ended with a stage dive and hardcore song. Yeah… the vibes were not necessarily my style in my older age, but, I still ended up having a lot of fun. From someone who went to the Korn created late-90’s Family Values tour (with Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Orgy, and other dated acts), and threw down in pits with System of a Down and Swedish metal band Meshuggah, I get it, and I’m cool with passing the torch to this younger generation.