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No One Else Can Feel It For You; Only You Can Let It In & 10 Other Takeaways From Portola 2024
The third edition of the electronic festival happened at San Francisco's Pier 80 on Sept. 28-29.
Primarily presenting the styles of electronic music commonly grouped together as indie or alt or just non-EDM, the lineup gathered some of the scene’s biggest, buzziest and most respected artists for a show that also, like in years past, featured a powdered sugar sprinkling of pop (in the form of Rebecca Black, Natasaha Bedingfield, etc.) While often overlooked on the global circuit, San Francisco has a rich and mighty electronic history, and certainly the many locals in attendance demonstrated that the Bay Area parties hard, and also well: the crowd was loose but from our vantage point never out of control, stylish in mostly non-cliché ways and generally friendly, with none of the too cool (or too self aware) atmosphere that elsewhere can, and does, stifle the dancing. Outside of Gesaffelstein’s 2013 classic “Hellifornia” and his 2024 “Hard Dreams” (from his March album, Gamma), the show was marked by not only the heaviness and The Dark Crystal meets Fraggle Rock look of the stage set up, but also an almost total absence of melody, with the artist instead delivering relentless, often jerking and increasingly loud drums and synths in deliciously pummeling fashion.
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