Good news! We are giving away two pairs of free tickets to see The Do Lab presenting Kraddy & R/D tomorrow at the El Rey Theater!  Hell yes.

One of LA’s great venues, the El Rey Theater has been the residence of recent for downtown LA legends The Do Lab.  Previous shows here have included Freq Nasty & Marty Party, Mimosa, The Glitch Mob not to mention their massive Lightning in a Bottle festival.

Experience a superb night of music to expand your horizons in one of Los Angeles’s most historic venues.

$20 presale HERE or $25 at the door.  Don’t buy into the hype and let carmaggedon scare you off!

To enter to win a pair of Tickets just follow these quick and easy steps!

Step 1: Retweet this EXACT message on twitter. Just copy and paste.
“@DANCEISM is giving away a pair of tickets to see @kraddyodaddy and @_rd tomorrow in LA! Get info here: http://bit.ly/recXJ5″

Step 2: Make sure you’re following @DANCEISM on Twitter or else we wont be able to direct message you! You can follow us by clicking our twitter names and pressing the “follow” button directly below our picture!

That’s it! As soon as you complete these steps, we will enter you to win Tickets!

Please check your “direct messages” inbox tomorrow at 4pm to find out if you’re the winner!

What up interweb? Dru J and Sean Weezy here from the Team called EZY. We’re excited to be writing our first blog post for DANCEiSM.

We wanted to start by giving you a little background on our musical influences and some ideas that inspire us. Early on in our production days we hustled the streets and bought our first piece of equipment, a MPC2000XL drum machine. We were listening to a lot of DJ Premier, J Dilla, Pete Rock, and RJD2 at the time and we instantly became obsessed with chopping up old records.

As we grew older and went away to college, our new environments played a big role in sculpting our sonic personalities.  We went to different schools but every summer would come back to LA with all the new bangers we had discovered – Bonobo, STS9, Emancipator and Glitch Mob.

On the other end of the spectrum we were bumping Dipset, Three 6 Mafia, and UGK.  This combination of chiller/tripper tunes and aggressive/hip-hop beats gave birth to our new-found love, DUBSTEP.

Rusko’s Jahova was the first time we had experienced such powerful low frequencies resonating within our souls. BOOM… the earth-shattering WOBBLE, we were hooked.

We tried to find a local music scene/community and we went to DIM MAK Hollywood. Soon after, FlyLo started the Brainfeeder camp and we hit up Low End Theory, where some of our favorite acts were performing original beats.

This changed our perception of what a DJ/Producer really was.  For the first time we felt surrounded by like-minded individuals who were all connected by their passion for music. The Do Lab expanded on this sense of family when we started seeing close friends playing at their events and CRUSHING it.

We have been a part of all these crews and drawn a lot from them musically and spiritually. This concept of community takes us back to our tribal days where clans would gather, meditate, and experience collective consciousness. Today music is the universal language that connects our realities and weaves us together.

“My family and I made an impact on our town. Their impact changed the nation and I indeed have changed the world.” Unknown Monk

With the help of our family here at DANCEiSM, 2011 has been off to a big start.  We opened for NERO at Control and have an upcoming show with Light Year at Panda Mondays (Event Info). Our second EP, Silhouettes, is now available for free download (CLICK HERE), and we have an exclusive track being featured on Aisuru, a Japan Relief Album due for release later this month (Aisuru Japan).

We are thankful to be doing what we love and are hustling harder than ever.

Stay EZY

First Impressions (Exclusive DANCEiSM Blog Mixtape) by Team EZY

Over the past few years, the greater Los Angeles area, as well as most of the United States have experienced a proliferation of huge electronic music events. Old fixtures such as Electric Daisy Carnival have grown exponentially in size. Fairly new events like Hard Fest are expanding rapidly due to an overwhelmingly growing EDM fan-base in America. Even traditional music festivals like Coachella putting a huge emphasis into booking EDM acts, with the Sahara tent being universally recognized as the place to be at this years festival.

All of these massive events have in turn bred a new generation of grass-roots party promoters, all of whom want to take part in the glory of throwing huge events. In reality however, getting to that point takes years of hard work and dedication. Communities and a following don’t just appear by booking one big headliner and promoting it to all your friends. They come through consistently putting together events for music lovers, fans, and people who just want to party.

These massive festivals have also led many folks to discover something they really like. Check out something new this weekend and you may find that some of the best parties are sitting right in your own backyard, with an open invitation for any and all to come and join.

Here are some weekly or monthly events we recommend checking out (besides our own events of course ):

Dance Right

Low End Theory

School Night!

BrainFeeder Sessions

Droid Behavior’s PRIME

Check Yo Ponytail

The Do Lab

Create Fixate

This is the first post of what will be a new bi-weekly production & technology post for DANCEiSM. Have a few excellent contributors to shed some metaphorical light into the wonderful world of event, sound, and lighting design.  Keep checking back, the content is going to start flowing from here…

No, I didn’t make it to Coachella this weekend. I did *almost* drive to the desert for a psytrance festival though Saturday night.  I did not realize a deprivation of bass would put my head into such a weird place. But alas, I digress. I did closely monitor the progress of the festival via LA Weekly’s WEST COAST SOUNDS, the most-excellent Youtube stream, and in HD meta-perspective through the veins of Facebook.

So it appears that VICE MAGAZINE and THE CREATORS PROJECT had a tremendous amount to do with the lighting design of the main stage and Sahara tent. They approached each stage in a more scultural, interactive, and artful approach than in years past. MUTI RANDOLPH designed the Sahara Tent and there’s an excellent interview with him and fusing the experience of light and sound on the BBC here. British design team UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS did the main stage in collaboration with Arcade Fire, Interpol, and Animal Collective. Interview with the creative director here again via BBC.

Of course, hometown heroes THE DO LAB stepped it up again with four (!!) full-blown installations. Full construction pictures on the FB page at the following links: The Fish Fry, The Pagoda, The Treehouse, and the Info Booths. If you haven’t been paying attention, their festival LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE next month in Irvine will be a showcase of all this with so much art and music in it will make your head melt.

Overall, what I think is really of note here is that sound, lighting, design, and architecture are truly beginning to fuse in the festival realm.  The vast resources that it takes to evolve production are beginning to flow. The larger stateside music and events community has come to expect and demand innovation and the more ambitious, artful approach that has been commonplace in Europe for the better part of 20 years.

Over here at small-and-mighty DANCEiSM HQ we haven’t gotten the call for a full stage design just yet, but Griffin and my design from the 3-YEAR ANNIVERSARY did make its way to the main stage of the COACHELLA BEACH CLUB by Hollywood heavyweights NIGHTVISION ENTERTAINMENT.

Alexandria in action:

Coachella Beach Club:

So I suppose that is all for now. We’ll see what this all turns into as we get it moving, but don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop a line to info@danceism.com with ideas, comments, suggestions, or if you want to get involved.

<3