Last weekend brought with it another spectacular outing for Insomniac’s flagship festival, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) Las Vegas. Once again taking place at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, over 400,000 dance music fans headed out into the excruciatingly hot Nevada desert to take part in an unforgettable three day experience, full of a wide range of artists, top notch production and stage designs, exciting carnival rides and all around good vibes.
Getting to EDC isn’t easy. Let’s get that fact out of the way first. Located about a half hour outside of the Las Vegas strip, it’s a definite mission to make your way there. Whether you choose to drive or take the shuttles that Insomniac set up, it’s going to take you a while. The group that I went with chose the shuttle and although it wasn’t too painful, there was some definite disorganization and bottlenecks in the process, resulting in an average of two hours each night from the time we left our hotel to the time that we got to the festival.
To be fair, there’s really no easy way to transport hundreds of thousands of people to one particular area, but a journey that should be about 30-45 mins on average taking nearly 2 hours is a bit much. Is there a better way to go about doing this? Honestly, I don’t know, but what I do know is that a lot of people were very frustrated with the transportation system.
As bad as it was getting there, it was even worse getting back. Seriously, I pity the people who decided to stay right until the end of the very last set. 5:30 AM was when the final acts came to a close on each day, and if you chose to wait around until then, you were likely looking at a 8:30-9 AM arrival time back on the strip, if not later. Thankfully, I’ve been to enough festivals to know that you should never stay right until the end, but from people I spoke to that did make that unfortunate mistake, I know that it was not a pretty situation when the music came to an end each night.
But enough of the negatives, because aside from getting there and coming home, there was really nothing to complain about when it came to the 2015 edition of what many dance music fans call the world’s best festival.
Having never been to EDC Las Vegas before, I had always been told that nothing could prepare me for it. And honestly, that was absolutely true. Nothing could have prepared me for the moment that I stepped foot into Pasquale Rotella’s (founder of Insomniac) wild, imaginative, vibrant and breathtaking world.
I’m not exaggerating, either. The first time I laid eyes on what the Insomniac team had done to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, my breath was taken away. Laid out in front of me was a sight that I had never seen before. A sensory overload, if you will. Eight stages, twenty-four carnival rides, dazzling art installations, hundreds of thousands of people and beautiful, bright lights covering everything…..it was almost too much to take in and something that words can simply not do justice to.
As a newbie to the festival, overwhelmed would probably be an accurate description for what I was feeling as I set out to enjoy the night. There is so much to see and do that even with three days there, you likely can’t cover it all. Of course, the music is the main attraction, and we’ll get to that later, but there’s so much more to Rotella’s brainchild than just that.
