The lights were extraordinary, and they deserve to be the first thing mentioned. Four Tet's Sunday closing set at Portola turned the Warehouse into a space that seemed to change shape around the music. A long installation overhead cast sheets and shifting curtains of light through the building, giving the room a depth that a conventional stage display rarely reaches. The effect was wonderfully psychedelic. You could know exactly where you were and still feel a little lost inside it.
Read More“A lot of feelings, no solutions” is an unusually honest way to begin a festival set. It also happens to be the title of the song Tove Lo used to open her Saturday appearance at Portola. Her music has long understood the attraction of a night out when your personal life is in disarray. The songs offer somewhere to put that mess for a few minutes, and her Pier Stage set gave both the newly released material and the older hits room to do it.
Read MoreOvermono's music can make a vocal fragment feel like a memory you had forgotten was yours. A few words repeat, the beat keeps moving beneath them, and an emotion gradually becomes more distinct even as the language stays incomplete. Their Sunday show in Portola's Warehouse was a particularly moving expression of that talent. After the exhilaration of Ben UFO and Daphni, it gave the evening a deeper ache without diminishing the urge to dance.
Read MoreFatboy Slim has a remarkably good ear for the point at which familiarity turns into excitement. A recognizable vocal arrives, another rhythm pushes beneath it, and a song you have heard hundreds of times suddenly gives you a fresh reason to move. His Saturday set at Portola's Crane Stage drew on that instinct with an easy sense of mischief. Norman Cook knows these records work. Much of the fun comes from hearing what he decides to do with them.
Read MoreFollowing Ben UFO was a difficult assignment. Daphni made it seem like the most natural thing in the world. His Sunday set in the Ship Tent picked up the momentum already in the room and kept it moving, with a selection that was exuberant, playful, and occasionally startling. This was one of the weekend's most enjoyable stretches of dancing, and the transition between the two DJs was a large part of why.
Read MoreThere was a good reason to be curious about Mike D's name on the Portola bill beyond the obvious Beastie Boys connection. His new project, Mike D 5D, brings that familiar voice into a band making restless, distorted music of its own. In the Ship Tent on Saturday, the appeal was hearing how readily the old material could sit inside that new setting. The recognizable songs gave the set a history; the new ones gave it somewhere to go.
Read MoreFcukers make dance music with a pleasantly grubby streak. The basslines are thick, the hooks are economical, and Shanny Wise sings as though she has better things to do than convince you to have a good time. At Portola, that attitude suited the surroundings. On an industrial pier where the attractions were mostly other stages, their Saturday set offered an appealingly direct proposition: get into the groove and stay there.
Read MoreBen UFO's Sunday set was the kind that makes it difficult to give a tidy answer when someone asks what he played. You remember how quickly your expectations changed, how completely the next rhythm took over, and how little you wanted to leave. In the Ship Tent, he delivered one of the weekend's most absorbing DJ performances. There was a wildness to the experience, but also the feeling that the person choosing the records knew exactly how far he could push it.
Read MoreThere was room for a smaller, stranger kind of electronic pop at Portola, and ear occupied it well. The duo's Sunday appearance in the Ship Tent offered songs that seem to form out of fragments: a soft vocal, a digital flicker, a rhythmic pattern that briefly becomes the most important thing in the mix. The appeal is in the way those pieces hold together without losing their oddness. On a bill with so many artists built for immediate impact, ear rewarded a closer listen.
Read MoreHead Trip already promised one of the most ambitious stage builds the desert has seen in years, and now the festival is revealing the other half of that ambition. Head Trip and Floating Points have announced the full lineup for Sunflower Sound System's US debut, running all weekend long during the one-time-only event at Empire Polo Club in Indio on October 10-11, bringing some of dance music's most celebrated selectors into a listening environment built entirely around the physicality of great sound.
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