Top Five Acts at Lightning in a Bottle 2024
This year’s Lightning in a Bottle had music blaring for five non-stop days. While trying to rank or compare all of the performances would be a task of Herculean proportions, we can at least highlight a few of the artists that stood out and the five that left the strongest impression on this year’s festival.
Honorable Mentions:
The Wandering Menstruals, an all-female folk band from L.A., graced the Grand Artique stage with harmonies warmer than the desert sun.
Honey Dijon, a house DJ who recently worked on Beyonce’s “Renaissance,” played a sanguine and celebratory set that felt like the festival’s commencement ceremony.
Floating Points, a British DJ who recently produced an album with the late-great Pharoah Sanders, employed repetition and movement into their set with a purpose and tact, unlike any other DJ at the festival.
PawPaw Rod, an electronic funk artist from L.A., brought a much-needed live element to the EDM stew.
BLAQ PAGES, a Ghanaian producer based in L.A., had the best afro-beats of the festival, combining unique and palette-cleansing rhythms with an incredible ear for taste that resulted in music with incredible mixing, sound quality, and bass control.
TOP 5 ACTS AT LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE 2024
5. FATBOY SLIM
Despite having an original catalog of EDM classics, Fatboy Slim celebrated the accolades of his idols, opening with a sample of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” and Talking Heads’, “Burning Down The House.” Four-on-the-floor beats were not in short supply across the weekend, but Slim’s employment of the rhythm stood out for its use as a tool for accentuation rather than just keeping time. While many DJs began to sound like Mr. Beat Metronomes after an hour, Slim’s percussion had a recognizably stronger resonance and timbre. Like banging your fist on the washer in grandma’s basement, the bass shook the meat clean off our bones.
4. Skrillex
Skrillex was the Ennio Morricone of the festival; opening with a combination of Spanish guitar and Italian opera, his stage was drenched in a blood-red light that welcomed the beloved DJ. Skrillex was the biggest crowd-pleaser of the weekend, first by performing a surprise set at The Stacks the previous night, and then playing crowd favorites and playfully trolling the audience during his mainstage set. He stayed on that theme with the use of Latin-inspired samples and rhythms before quickly breaking into his biggest hits like “Rumble” and “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” (which he kept jokingly slipping into the beat drops of other songs). Skrillex had some of the most satisfying beat drops of the weekend, and regardless of his pyrotechnics and stage semantics, had one of the strongest musical performances of the weekend.
3. M.I.A.
It’s difficult to decide which was better, MIA’s performance or her diva antics. Between her rants about 5G, protecting her kids from wi-fi, and leaving the stage several times, MIA’s stage presence, sound quality, and delivery were extraordinarily good. She interrupted her songs twice, first to demand that the audience stop using plastic water bottles, and again to declare that she had silver in her clothes to protect her from wi-fi rays, “on that note, we can party on.” The diva energy only enhanced her performance, adding a “gold chain” swagger to her performance on songs like “Bad Girls” and “Come Around.” The best part of the show was her introduction to “Paper Planes” where she literally played segments of “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons, “Royals” by Lorde, and “You Need To Calm Down” by Taylor Swift, each time pretending that it was “Paper Planes,” and accusing those artists of ripping off her song. She had a point because the audience fell for it every time, but she diffused her antagonism by saying, “I’m not agro anymore, I’m spiritual.” Of all the performances that weekend, this one felt once-in-a-lifetime.
2. ISOxo
ISOxo brought an ecstatic presence onto the stage, thrashing behind his mix table harder than the pit in front of him. Representing the best of San Diego, the local DJ performed a set that combined instrumental variety with tonal consistency, combining dubstep, hardstyle, and live instrumentation. Through the use of an electric guitar, he infused elements of rock and noise into his set that took advantage of the experimental potential still residing in the electric guitar. He also proved his metal as a performer, spending the majority of the two-hour set actively engaging with the audience, leaping off of his mixing table, and injecting the crowd with demonstrative adrenaline. Maybe the most shocking element was how he closed his set with a touching tribute to life, death, and anyone’s friends who had passed away that year. The sentimentality was unexpected but executed with a sincerity that had the audience in tears.
1. NIA Archives
NIa Archives had THE highlight set of the weekend, performing remixes and selections from her latest album, “Silence Is Loud.” The result was a well-paced, perfectly executed performance that combined bedroom pop with UK Jungle in an idiosyncratic, but undeniably likable fashion; it still felt like a jungle set, but NIA filled it with a personality that stood out from her peers. If you feel like seeing what I can’t put into words, or you just like crying in the club, Nia Archives is playing in San Diego on October 5th, at Wicked West, be there or be square.