One of the most highly anticipated sets of the entire ACL Fest 2011 weekend (judging from the size of the swelling mid-day crowd) was young up-and-comer Skrillex, who’s going to be gracing the cover of Spin’s next issue. The set was insane and the crowd got so bad even 20 minutes before his set that the security team had to shut down the pit access to photographers. I was bummed but ended up raging nicely with my team and my new friend Odie who was chilling back behind the soundboard areas.
The set opened with the Skrillex remix of the Nero track, “Promises,” and immediately the show just dropped into dubstep madness. The drops were nasty and we were getting some solid flowing between tracks. Loved the “Ruffneck (FULL Flex)” transition and I got to hear some of the “hits” that I expected like “My Name is Skrillex,” “Reptile,” and “First of the Year [Equinox]” – my contender for nastiest video of the year (in a good way).
The only gnarliness I noticed was an actual missed beat and slowdown on Skrillex’s hard-drive, which I’m all too familiar with now that I’m doing DJ and sequencing work for a band. He needs to open up his hard-drive cache or something.
For real, though, this set absolutely floored me. If you dig electronic music and you’ve already discovered dubstep, you probably loathe what this dude is all about right now. He’s bringing it to the mainstream big time and given the size of the crowd, if you don’t know and like Skrillex right now you seem to be in the minority. Don’t knock it until you try it; seeing an entire festival crowd rock a dubstep drop is an amazing sight to see.
My photos show what it was like to chill back in the crowd. Our very own LMB NOLA Editor, Wesley Hodges, was rocking backstage courtesy of some friends at Google that snuck him into the Google+ lounge (complete with photobooth, free Budweiser and an HD feed from the stage), so keep scrolling through the photos to get a look at what the set looked like from behind the stage as well as deep in the crowd. Check out the videos for the whomp and untz to get you through your workday…
Check out the little dude rocking during the Skrillex set:
