Joel “DJ Deadly Buda” Bevacqua

Qing Yang and Ben Fruehlich flew from Houston to Las Vegas last weekend to rave. But they weren’t going to Electric Daisy Carnival. They were going to American Gabberfest 2016, a two-day festival of hard electronic dance music held under the brutal Las Vegas daytime sun. (Full disclosure: My publication,......

Refracting the blacklights inside the Hollywood Palladium, a pair of phat pants covered in twisting flames tornadoes across the floor, moving at 150 beats-per-minute. Inside those billowing, fiery trousers is one Alex Bazaar, fittingly known by his peers as “Twisted.” Twisted is engaged in a particularly gob-smacking version of an......

My flashlight cuts through the incinerated debris, revealing that my collection of rare, hardcore rave records is a molten glob of vinyl on the ashes of its shelving. The burnt husks of my Technics 1200 turntables crown the top of the fiery ruins, victims of a SoCal Edison transformer explosion......

The sound is HUUUUUUGGGGGGEEE. Like, Jabba the Hutt huge. A massive, distorted, take-up-the-entire-sound-spectrum, megaton blast of gigantic kick drums ceaselessly ejaculating from towering stacks of loudspeakers at dystopian European summer music festivals with names like DefQon.1 and Dominator, transmitted with apocalyptic fervor by artists with names like Crypsis, Delete, B-Front......