EDC Creator Could Face Up to 13 Years in Prison.
EDC Creator Could Face Up to 13 Years in Prison.
Pasquale, Holly, Josh Strickland & Kaskade.
Pasquale Rotella revealed Sunday night that he’s going to wed Hugh Hefner’s former “Girl Next Door” Holly Madison, the mother of his daughter, Rainbow, on August 15 but just hours after the happy announcement he was in court on Monday morning facing more than 13 years in prison for bribery, embezzlement, conspiracy and conflict of interest..
Rotella appeared in a Los Angeles court in a pretrial conference for a case by the Los Angeles County District Attorney, which alleges that the event planner used more than $2.5 million in funds from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where he hosted raves, to pay off city officials. Rotella was indicted alongside five other men involved with his company, Insomniac events. Currently out on a $1.8 million bail, he could serve up to 13 years and 8 months in prison if convicted.
The case will reconvene on July 29, just over two weeks before the couple plan to wed. But Rotella remains confident that he’ll be vindicated.
Last year his attorney, Gary Jay Kaufman, said that his client, “has always acted lawfully and appropriately with respect to all of his dealings with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Any allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Rotella by the District Attorney’s office are completely baseless and flat-out wrong, both on the law and on the facts. “All transactions between Insomniac and the Coliseum were transparent and approved by the Coliseum General Manager, his staff, and the attorneys representing the Coliseum. Any charges against Mr. Rotella are clearly politically motivated and publicity driven.”
However, innocent is the last way the city of Los Angeles is feeling like describing Rotella. While he may have been only arrested this past March, the drug-related 2010 death of one 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez at an Insomniac show led the company through 13 months of investigation and endless shots of foul play, which in the end has led to where the CEO and his five team members are today. For everyone’s sake, we hope such violent accusations are much less scary than they seem.
How will this affect Live Nation buying stake In Insomniac Events? What this will mean for Insomniac, whether it will sway buyouts from Live Nation and how it will impact the future of EDC events are still to be seen. Stay tuned for details as they present themselves. Neither Insomniac Events or Pasquale Rotella have release statements official or unofficial.
Posted by David Miller
Vegas Notes: Light Group’s new day club “Daylight” at Mandalay Bay is ready for Memorial Day Weekend & EDC LV is SOLD OUT.
Vegas Notes: Light Group’s new day club “Daylight” at Mandalay Bay is ready for Memorial Day Weekend & EDC LV is SOLD OUT.
Photo credit: Al Powers
Light’s sunnier counterpart, Daylight at Mandalay Bay, has released the lineup for its Memorial Day Weekend opening: Axwell and Zedd christen the dayclub’s decks on May 25, followed by a J-Cole performance on May 26. Daylight—dubbed Eclipse after dark—will also host a nighttime DJ series on Wednesdays and some Sundays, kicking off with Axwell on May 22, followed by Skrillex on May 26.
Waiting to order your Electric Daisy Carnival tix? Oops. Insomniac Events announced Monday that the June 21-23 fest has sold out in record time. Insomniac CEO Pasquale Rotella urged fans to take part in the soon-to-be-finalized EDC Week, which brings pool parties, nightclub events and the Bassrush Massive concert to the Orleans Arena during the festival week.
Just a few days after his rousing opening night set at Hakkasan, Steve Aoki debuted his Aokify Splash Vegas party at Wet Republic Sunday afternoon, with a special appearance from friend and EDM icon Tiësto in the DJ booth. Aoki doused fans with champagne while crowdsurfing on an inflatable raft, pulled off his trademark throw-a-sheet-cake-at-a-fan gag and played remixes into the early evening. All in a day’s work for the bearded turntablist.
Posted by Jorge Labrador (via Las Vegas Weekly)
BT rants on Porter Robinson saying he is “Talented but selfish”
BT rants on Porter Robinson saying he is “Talented but selfish”
BT treated his Twitter audience to a rare, lengthy diatribe on another artist, Porter Robinson. After preparing his readers for a “long story,” BT began to explain how he first found out about Robinson via MySpace three years ago. He says he struck up a friendship with the young producer (after talking with his parents – Robinson was but a high schooler then), and the two even worked on some tracks together.
As Robinson’s star began to rise through big room gigs, festival dates, and an official Lady Gaga remix, BT found him harder to contact – shrouded often by a team of agents, managers, and other “advisors.” While BT was understanding of this development, he describes Robinson himself as being “too cool to interact,” placing the blame squarely on the artist, not just his entourage. The tipping point came when Robinson told BT he could no longer finish the tracks they had begun working on together.
BT admits to having his feelings hurt by Robinson after being rebuffed by an artist who he felt personally responsible for bringing to a broader audience. But rather than make this a personal attack on Robinson (he calls the young DJ a “real talent”), BT goes on to use his experiences with him as an example of how the younger generation of DJs are similarly “self focused & selfish.” When he was an up-and-comer, BT says DJs like Sasha helped him, and he “vowed to pay it forward” when he could.
BT ended his “rant” with some advice: “So I hope you (and other young producers reading this) take this as a cautionary tale. Remember to act with respect and pay it forward.”
Tiesto, who BT shared Robinson’s tracks with and became an early supporter, weighed in as well, citing the lack of loyalty in younger producers (though Tiësto’s original tweet has since been deleted).
BT has around 622,000 Twitter followers; Robinson has about 216,000. Thus far, Robinson has not responded.
Posted by David Miller (via In The Mix)
Insomniac and SBE announce new Hollywood EDM club “Create”
Insomniac and SBE announce new Hollywood EDM club “Create”
Last week, Live Nation drew close to finalizing the acquistion of about half of the L.A. EDM promotion firm Insomniac. But that isn’t Insomniac’s only new partnership of note. The firm has just announced a new collaboration with the hospitality firm SBE on a new venue, Create, located in the former Vanguard space in Hollywood.
“Insomniac had done work in that space in the distant past, and they know and love the space,” said Costas Charalambous, the senior vice president of night life for SBE. “Now we can play with music, fashion, art and presentation for our clienteles. It’s a clean slate, and we can be spontaneous in taking all that to the next level.”
The partnership and name change comes after SBE purchased the Vanguard room and threw its first party, with the Swedish DJ Avicii, in February. SBE promised a full slate of dance bookings to accompany the interior revamp, but the schedule since then had been fairly quiet until now.
The new venue kicks off on May 11 with a set by the Dutch trance act Dash Berlin. Neither Insomniac nor SBE has publicly announced any further sets, but Charalambous said a full lineup of headliners and recurring weekly genre nights is impending.
With the collaboration, SBE gets a marquee talent buyer with Live Nation muscle for its third EDM-focused venue (alongside Greystone Manor and Agency), one far larger than either of those with three distinct rooms and an outdoor patio. Insomniac gets a second club-level room in L.A. (to accompany its own popular Exchange L.A., in downtown) to try out younger acts and give superstar DJs a flexible space for underplays in the heart of Hollywood.
The partnership is also apropos given each firm’s major recent plays in Las Vegas. Insomniac’s Electric Daisy Carnival is set to grow even bigger with an infusion of Live Nation money and logistical support (the fest moved there from L.A. in 2011), and SBE’s own SLS Hotel and Casino is slated for a 2014 opening, and will include many established L.A. dining and nightlife concepts. With Insomniac’s talent-buying acumen and SBE’s venue stable, “the partnership could be endless,” Charalambous said. “We definitely want to see where else it can lead.”
In the more immediate future, however, L.A. gets a new, flexible dance-music space that can veer between tableside bottle-service blowouts and GA floor space for underground nights. The upside of such a big and converted industrial room, Charalambous said, is the ability to transform the room to meet any artist’s specific vibe. Insomniac’s broad reach means they’ll have plenty of opportunity to experiment. “A drink tastes the same anywhere, but this combination of great music and ambience can make that drink taste a lot sweeter,” he said.
Posted by August Brown (via Los Angeles Times)
‘Clarity’ reaches pinnacle of mainstream status with cover on Glee season finale.
Free Download: Go Deep (JD Live 2013 Bootleg)
Daft Punk Give Their Reasons For Not Touring.
Daft Punk Give Their Reasons For Not Touring.
With the first single here, the album just over a week out from arriving and information about their big return (for once) not completely non-existent, the burning question for Daft Punk now is what their tour plans are. “We want to focus everything on the act and excitement of listening to the album,” Thomas Bangalter told Rolling Stone when they asked the Frenchmen amid the Coachella madness. “We don’t see a tour as an accessory to an album.” Another couple of interviews down the track, the robots have elaborated on why there aren’t any immediate plans to hit the road.
“We don’t want to tour this record right away because it seems the magic of music today and the life of music today is on stage,” Bangalter told the Daily Telegraph’s Kathy McCabe. “We put all our focus on the idea of trying to put a lot of life on a record, the same life you would have in a live performance and we don’t want to simultaneously do something that would remove the focus from this thing we spent so much time doing.” Making it crystal clear, earlier this week a representative for the Frenchies told the Huffington Post that “no tour is planned”. All’s not lost, though – when they do eventually tour, the pair told Rolling Stone it will be with a “career-encompassing setlist.”
The duo’s last world tour began at Coachella on Saturday 29 April 2006, an experience limited to a few thousand witnesses in the desert. In the strobing light of the Sahara tent, two robots appeared inside a 20-foot-tall, three-ton pyramid, flanked on either side by a lattice of bulbs. (“We got a sense that it went well,” Bangalter later dead-panned to Mixmag.) Two months later, the duo was headlining the Eurockéennes festival in Belfort, France atop the pyramid, and the tour momentum built from there: Barcelona,Madrid, the Godskitchen tent at Global Gathering in the English countryside, over to Japan, back through Europe, then South America en route to Miami for the Bang Music Festival. The ‘Alive’ tour ended in Australia with four cities over eight days in December 2007.
Posted by Katie Cunningham (via In The Mix)
Diplo: “Labels just want to jump on EDM dick”
Diplo: “Labels just want to jump on EDM dick”
If there’s one man you can count on to consistently deliver memorable one-liners, it’s Diplo. Sure enough, when the ever-acerbic Mad Decent boss sat down with The Huffington Post last week, his opinion on all things label-related didn’t come sugarcoated. A few days before he opened up about how Baauer’s chart-topping, viral hit Harlem Shake “saved” Mad Decent from going under (“a year ago we were going to fold because we couldn’t figure out how to make money,” he told the same outlet at Coachella over the weekend), Wesley Pentz talked through the label’s game plan.
“We are a label that exists on the internet, so when something like that happens, we know how to incubate it and make it go crazy,” Diplo told Huff Post about that YouTube-dominating meme. “There are no rules to running a label anymore. We have, like, seven people working for us, but Interscope probably didn’t even have a record as big as Harlem Shake last year and they have thousands working for them.”
“Interscope dropped Major Lazer when we asked for money for a video for Get Free, and we sold 150,000 copies of that song,” he continued. “So that just proves that labels have no idea what’s going on anymore. They just want to jump on EDM dick – shit that sucks because they don’t feel the music but think it’s happening. We are in these streets.” As he puts it: “When it comes to dance music on the fringe, there’s no A&R that can teach you or guide you.”
But dance music’s renaissance man wasn’t done dropping quotable gems yet. “Dance music is so interchangeable,” Pentz added. “There’s not a lot of face to it. It’s a bunch of Dutch DJs with the same haircut. You go see a dance stage at a fucking dance festival and I’m bored out of my fucking mind. That’s not going to last very much longer, because kids see that it’s the same shit every single time.”
Posted by Katie Cunningham (via In The Mix)
Deadmau5 Goes Downtempo For Fiancée’s New Album.
Deadmau5 Goes Downtempo For Fiancée’s New Album.
Deadmau5 and Kat @ XS in Las Vegas. (Photo credit: Danny Mahoney)
Since his appearances at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival and Lollapalooza Brazil, Deadmau5 has returned to his state-of-the-art studio to mess with his machines. (He did, however, recently emerge for a trip to Las Vegas, where he’s been poached by the MGM Grand’s lavish new $100 million superclub Hakkasan and its poolside party spot Wet Republic in the ‘Unhooked’ guise.) So, what’s he working on? Is it the long-promised artist album “that tells a story and is a big package”? An LP may be bubbling in the background, but right now the man behind the ‘mau5 Joel Zimmerman is concentrating on making an album with his fiancée Kat Von D.
Now Zimmerman has shared “the first rough draft” of Satellite, his favourite track on the upcoming album. In typical Deadmau5 style, its genre is labelled ‘KvDStep’. He’s taken a cinematic, downtempo route on the production with a plaintive piano lead-in to the vocals. “Still lots of work to do, but here’s the intro and first verse,” he writes. The comments on his Soundcloud range from the confounding (“First Knife Party and then you Deadmau5, trap drops every-fucking-where!”) to the excitable (“WTF! Loving the new sound, man”).
“I fucking hate dance music,” Zimmerman told Vibe back in February, happily writing his own attention-grabbing headlines. “I make music that you can dance to, but when someone says the word dance music I think of Aqua. Barbie Girl.
“What’s happening in dance music now is what’s happened to hip-hop,” he went on. “Grandmaster Flash and fucking all that and spoken word, shooting this dude you hate and fucking this hoe. There are these other guys that are like, ‘Let’s take this 808 and fucking 606 and then fucking red-line it and just make it an engineering embarrassment…’ and that’s what happened with dance music.”
Listen to track demo featuring Kat Von D on vocals below. Actually sounds pretty good.
Posted by Jack Tegoning (via In The Mix)
EDC Promoter Sells Out To Live Nation?
EDC Promoter Sells Out To Live Nation?
Live Nation Entertainment is close to finalizing a deal to acquire about a 50% stake in Insomniac Events for $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
Insomniac Events, which produces electronic-dance-music festivals and is known for its Electric Daisy Carnival, which drew more than 300,000 fans to Las Vegas last year, would be a coup for Live Nation, the nation’s biggest concert promoter.
Live Nation had been competing over the past year with bidders including SFX Entertainment’s Robert Sillerman, who has helped consolidate both the radio and live-entertainment industries and has been snapping up a variety companies that specialize in DJ-driven music called EDM. SFX had offered at least $100 million for Insomniac, according to people familiar with the matter. Behind the fight over Insomniac is a scramble to capitalize on the growing popularity of EDM as technology drives interest in music created on computers rather than traditional instruments.
A growing number of DJs now garner rock-star salaries and headline festivals where just 10 years ago they were eclipsed by singing, guitar-playing bands. Insomniac keeps its books private, and founder Pasquale Rotella was quoted in Billboard Magazine last year as saying that his company comes “very close to losing money” despite selling out most of its events. Mr. Rotella has faced controversy stemming from drug-related deaths of concert-goers that attended the events. The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year that at least 14 people who had attended Insomniac events died in drug-related incidents since 2006.
Mr. Rotella has supported new safety measures at venues such as increasing law enforcement at festivals, warning fans about drug dangers on event websites and displaying emergency services text numbers at events.
He is under indictment on bribery and other charges in connection with raves at the Los Angeles Coliseum and adjoining Sports Arena, where county prosecutors allege he conspired with a partner to keep security costs down by making illicit payments to a stadium manager. They have pleaded not guilty. Despite its troubled history, Insomniac has a strong brand, and the ability to attract hundreds of thousands of young fans to its rave-like events. The Electric Daisy Carnival has been held in California, Colorado, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Texas and Puerto Rico, and tickets quickly sell out.
Insomniac also bolsters Live Nation’s growing EDM portfolio: The concert-promotion giant last year acquired Los Angeles-based dance-music-event promoter HARD Events, as well as Cream, a British company that hosts club nights in Ibiza and Creamfields festivals around the world.
Joining with a corporate giant doesn’t appear to jibe with the image Mr. Rotella has cultivated. At a conference he organized last summer, Mr. Rotella said he didn’t want to be a promoter. “My passion is not selling tickets and making money. I want to create an experience,” he said.
Supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, who recently entered a partnership with Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte to operate music festivals and nightclubs around the country, had considered buying Insomniac Events three years ago for a lower valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter, but decided to pass.
Live Nation and Insomniac each declined to comment.
Posted by Hannah Karp (via Wall Street Journal)
Free Download: I Need Your Love (Angle Mash)
A word with Wolfgang Gartner.
A word with Wolfgang Gartner.
In a recent interview with White Raver Rafting, Wolfgang Gartner, also known as Joey Youngman, turned what could have been one of those generic Q&A sessions into one of the most honest and interesting interviews that an artist has gave in a while. With the interview touching on subjects from the beginning of Wolfgang’s career to the future of EDM, the real Wolfgang Gartner personality came out during this interview.
Q. A lot of new electronic dance music fans don’t know that you use to produce Deep House under the name Mario Fabriani. I’m curious as to why you decided to step away from that aspect of dance music. Why don’t you produce different styles under monikers like Eric Prydz does with Pryda and Cirez D?
A. Well there’s a few things that are sorta inaccurate about that question. I used to produce underground house, but most of it wasn’t deep house. It was mostly disco house and chicago house, and I released a majority of it under my real name, Joey Youngman, along with 7 other aliases, one of them being Mario Fabriani. What Eric Prydz does with Pryda and Cirez D is nothing like going from electro house to underground house. He’s still making music in a vein that he can play in his DJ sets, that still meshes with his output under his own name, and isn’t a major departure from it. There are a ton of reasons I don’t make underground house anymore. First and foremost, it’s underground. I got tired of living beneath the surface. I wanted my music to get more exposure and reach more people, I felt it deserved it, and there was no way to do that without changing the music. I still love all that stuff. I did a “90′s house mix” recently and gave it out to the blogs for people to download and I’ll probably do another one again soon. I would probably enjoy making it still, but the bottom line is I just don’t have time. Underground house is still underground, it doesn’t generate the type of exposure or music sales these days to base a career on. So what that equates to is that it would be a hobby – something I would be doing strictly for fun. And at the moment I’m so overwhelmed with everything in the world of Wolfgang Gartner – touring, keeping up with my release schedule, myriad daily issues and tasks of coordinating with my team to make sure things run smoothly and we make the right decisions, everything that my career has become over the past 5 years, that I don’t have time for a hobby. I guess that’s what it really comes down to. I still love it, but underground house is a hobby, and I’m too busy for a hobby right now. Maybe one day I’ll take a step back and start playing around with it again.