But if you ask the people close to Rotella how they feel he’s changed, you’ll receive a much different answer. “He hasn’t,” Funke in particular asserts. “He’s grown, because there’s a demand to this, but he’s real to me. He’s about the DJs and the music and he would do this if nobody came.”
Indeed, Rotella’s decision to reintroduce the funk stage to Nocturnal Wonderland speaks to his continued integrity as a steward of electronic music culture. Out of a special kind of reverence for the role open-format DJing has played in the history of the scene, he’s has gone out of his way to reunite old friends for a pet project knowing full well that it could incur a loss. Funke explains, “He told me, ‘Look, if no one is in that area, I wanna keep doing it and they will come.’”
Blakemore also addresses returning to play an Insomniac party for the first time in five years. “Some of my friends say, you know, ‘He owes you,’ and I say, ‘he doesn’t owe me anything,’” he says. “I’m older now, I’m in graduate school, I have kids – he doesn’t owe me anything and I’m happy with what I had.”
And while Funke himself only curated the entertainment roster for the first two nights of the Upside Down Room stage, if you stuck around for Blakemore’s ‘96-’97-era acid house set under his timeless moniker, DJ Trance, on the third night, then you were in for a special treat. Among the costumed weirdos, dressed-down hipsters and curious newcomers, Pasquale Rotella’s face could be made out in a brief instance during which a spotlight shone over him in the audience.
In recent years, he looks markedly more weary than he does in his press photographs, but despite the fastidious security detail guarding him and his wife, model Holly Madison, as they stood in the crowd, he was still willing to engage any excited audience member that approached him in conversation. Only when you observe how he regards his fans firsthand do you understand why he calls them headliners – as far as he’s concerned, they’re the main attraction.
In what could only be a beautiful coincidence, right around this time those attendees who downloaded the Insomniac app would feel a vibration in their pocket – and when they checked their phone, they would find a push notification that read, “You are exactly where you need to be.” Subtle touches like these prove that even as Live Nation and who knows what other parties have their money on the line, the spirit of the parties has endured.
Pasquale Rotella is not among those to blame for what unsavory qualities have attached themselves to dance music since its recent explosion into mainstream culture. On the contrary, he’s a symbol of its integrity. He’s living proof that the assembly line of consumerism can’t put this musical movement in a box as easily as the those who serve on the boards of major corporations might wish. While he’s undoubtedly made his fair share of mistakes and deifying any celebrity is a slippery slope, it’s safe to assert that Rotella has become a symbol of sorts – and the favor he’s won among old and new generations of dance music fans alike qualifies him to represent it. After all, if his perseverance is any indicator, no matter what changes the scene goes through in the years to follow Insomniac will probably be around for another 20 years regardless.
The spotlight vanished, and all the faces in the crowd melted back into the shadowy, writhing mass that bobbed to the metronome-like drum pattern at the core of the track. A gentle breeze stirred the grass blades and members of the crowd closed their eyes. For a length, there was nothing but the music. A sustained moment of euphoria drowned out everything in the world, creating a vibration that would never disappear.
