At Quasar, Coachella's Soul for Sale
Coachella's first branded stage undermines an already problematic soundsystem. But at least the $375 per person sushi experience is likely to be a VIP pleaser.
[Note to subscribers: needed to get this one shipped before Coachella’s second weekend. My next post will be part five of the Berghain series.]
SUMMARY
On Saturday, April 12, 2manydjs, Barry Can't Swim, and Salute performed a so-called "b2b2b" on Coachella's Quasar stage for three and a half hours. Though the dancefloor started full of people excited to be there, excellent work by all four DJs could not overcome Quasar's misconfigured soundsystem. The event wrapped anticlimactically, with perhaps 10% of peak attendees remaining until the bitter end. The Quasar venue, in its second year at Coachella, remains deeply flawed -- broken even.
In the DPARTI acrostic that I use to rate and review dancefloors, I list seven factors that need to work together to create a magical dancefloor. The factors:
(D) DJs & Artistry: A great dancefloor requires DJs with great taste who select well, mix skillfully, sequence a journey, and who work with dancers to build the floor.
(P) People: A diverse crowd who respect, love, and energize each other make a dancefloor feel good.
(A) Acoustics: We want body-shaking surround sound with clearly separated highs, mids, and lows and large zones where the system sounds great.
(R) Rules & Governance: We're looking for evidence that the party is sustainable and well run and that the people putting it on have their heads on straight.
(T) Theatricals: Lighting sequences and effects add drama and amplify emotion, but they can also demand too much attention, turning dancers into passive zombies who shuffle open-mouthed at "visuals."
(I) Intentionality & Infrastructure: Does the design ultimately support the dancefloor? How does it all come together?
The Quasar stage, in short, fails miserably at (A), (R), and (I). No matter how good the DJs (D) Goldenvoice books for this stage, no matter how wow the visuals (T), nothing will make up for an acoustical nightmare made worse by commercial overreach.
RUFUS DU SOL AT QUASAR 2024: ACOUSTICALLY SUS
I'll skip straight to the heart of the issue by discussing Quasar's number one problem: its soundsystem. Last year, I attended Quasar for four hours for the Rufus Du Sol extended set and within a few moments, found myself deeply disappointed with the soundsystem, which, during specific songs, exhibited immersion-breaking sound glitches.
This is best illustrated through example. Rufus Du Sol performed their breakout hit, Innerbloom:
At 1:03, the first high percussion notes show up — a “tock” sound like a drumstick hitting a wood block. At 1:19, the sound returns, now part of the underlying drum track, on the 2s and 4s of each bar. It’s a clear note, singular and clear, but on the Quasar soundsystem we heard two or three of these notes — each delayed by a fraction of a second — every time the beat fired, due to misaligned and/or misconfigured speaker arrays.
This made dancing to this song especially difficult, because the 2s and 4s are -- in dance music -- the backbeat where a dancer's body usually lands with emphasis, creating an upbeat sense of propulsion. Hit play on the track above, and if you’re an experienced dancer, your body naturally accents its movements on the 2s and 4s.
So when this important beat has an echo happening a fraction of a second after the initial beat fires, you feel this uncanny sense of dancing out of time. That was my experience — I felt sluggish and out of step with the music on a song that I’ve danced to many times before. The soundsystem had made a beautiful song ugly.
This effect was especially noticeable when the percussive tock happened during moments when the rest of the song was quiet. For example, in the break (2:37 to 3:40), the tock is the most prominent percussive note. Each of these percussives had an unwelcome shadow following it. It reminded me of standing 50 feet from a brick wall and clapping -- one can hear the sound of your clap as it leaves your hands and enters your ears, then you can hear the echo of your clap that has traveled from your hands to the wall and back to your ears.
The problem reached a climax at 7:21, when the tock picks up a cowbell companion, and the song enters a gallop for the third and final drop of the song. This climactic moment, which should’ve made us feel like we could dance all night, fell short. This specific moment sounded cacaphonous — like someone had dropped a dozen chopsticks on a kitchen floor.
I stubbornly stayed in Quasar for the entire four-hour Rufus set because I wanted to be able to understand what I was hearing at a visceral level. I moved around the dancefloor and found a few spots where the sound problem was tolerable enough to put it out of mind, but I resolved to visit again in 2025 to see if it had been fixed.
QUASAR'S SOUND -- RED BULLSHIT EDITION
Unfortunately, Quasar's sound system still exhibited the same problems last weekend. Rather than getting better, the problems had gotten worse, thanks in part to Coachella's construction of a mega-temple (pictured above) for one of its biggest corporate sponsors, Red Bull.
This 20,000-square foot, pyramid-shaped building was built to house celebrities and influencers and to serve Omakase meals ($375 per head, before tips) from a pop-up by high-end sushi restaurant Nobu. The multi-level building features a ground level for proletariat attendees, plus two VIP levels for artists, influencers, corporate sponsors, and industry insiders.
This temple to excess wouldn't have been a huge problem if it hadn’t been plopped down directly opposite the Quasar stage, where its expansive glass frontage not only served to swaddle celebrities in air conditioning (protecting them from wilting in the 100-degree temps), but also served as a reflective surface for sound from the Quasar stage to bounce off of before returning to attendees ears, with delay added.
IF COACHELLA ACTUALLY CARED ABOUT SOUND
Coachella's reputation as a great festival was built by booking great music talent year after year, and by paying close attention to the production quality of the stages where artists performed. This is an important point — Coachella was a groundbreaking festival that influenced global musical tastes and artist fortunes for more than two decades.
But Coachella seems to be losing its way. Quasar appears to be the first stage Goldenvoice has built for the express purpose of pleasing a corporate sponsor rather than the ears of attendees or the bodies of dancers.
Quasar is the first branded stage at Coachella. There are other brand activations on the fields — from the Heineken tent to the Travis Scott merchandise experience, but the Red Bull building that violently encroaches on the Quasar dancefloor feels egregious for a festival that had been careful, until now, not to do such things.
Specifically:
(1) The Red Bull logo's prominence -- both in terms of size and placement -- puts it closer than any other corporate logo to any other Coachella stage. I'm reminded of the Bottlerock festival, which has just skipped any pretense whatsoever and labeled its stages after its corporate sponsors: Verizon, Prudential, etc.
2) The building's impact on the quality of the sound makes its presence impossible to ignore. Few spots on the beautiful, grassy lawn between the Quasar stage and the Red Bull building are free from echo as the sound bounces back and forth between the two buildings. I'm stunned that Goldenvoice would think it acceptable to foist upon attendees such a deeply flawed sound experience. The folks who used to run Coachella would never.
3) The physical footprint of the massive Red Bull building causes a chokepoint between the Quasar stage and the Red Bull building, making for an unpleasant and potentially even unsafe attendee experience. Squeezing through this bottleneck with thousands of other attendees made us feel like cattle, and made us feel that Goldenvoice had prioritized maximizing the footprint of the Red Bull McMansion over attendee safety.
HOW QUASAR'S SOUND SCREWED 2MANYDJS, BARRY CAN'T SWIM, & SALUTE
Time to put your ears to the test.
In the following embedded file, you can hear 30 seconds of the set, as broadcast on the official Coachella livestream:
And here's audio I captured with my phone, of the same exact moment, while standing on the grass in front of the Quasar stage:
Obviously, an iPhone isn't a great capture device, but the audio only needs to be clear enough to pick up on the problems at Quasar, which are fairly obvious to the naked ear. The extra beat echos can be heard most clearly in the first 15 seconds of the above clip, where afterimages of the staccato percussives can be heard ricocheting, undermining the drama of the pre-drop buildup, stealing energy from the dancefloor.
This isn't how the track sounds in the livestream nor is it what the DJs intended it to sound like. It's just sound splashing around, and it's typical of poorly designed systems. It's not a reverb -- which can make cavernous spaces sound cool. It's just a sloppy spillover; a drunk sloshing their drink on the dancefloor.
I'm not an audio engineer or some kind of golden-eared hi-fi geek. I've got normal ears, and my normal ears could hear these flaws clearly. Over the span of this 3.5-hour set, and for another hour during Tiesto's set the next day, I moved around the floor of Quasar looking for locations where the sound issue didn't happen, and I found very few "sweet spots” where the issue wasn’t immersion-breaking.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
If everyone on the floor is hearing a different track thanks to sound splash, echo, and other unwanted artifacts, we're no longer a connected dancefloor moving our bodies together on the same beat. Even people just 10 or 20 feet apart might hear a very different sound, and might step to very different rhythms.
What's more, in some parts of the Quasar field, the sound situation chases people away. These rotten zones caused people who wanted to dance to lose their groove and feel less energized by the music. Oftentimes, folks would just move out of these zones into another zone, but more often than not, the new zone would be just as rotten. After a few tries to find the groove, folks would leave the set entirely. By the end of the night, 90% of dancers had left this stage.
I've danced to 2manydjs in Miami (at Sound Nightclub), in Ibiza (at Pacha), in San Francisco (at Audio SF), in Los Angeles (at Los Lobos), and at various Despacio pop-ups. I've never heard them play in such a bad soundsystem. The Dewaele brothers’ magic can only do so much to hold a floor together. I imagine that the experience for them must have been frustrating -- they were selecting the tunes and mixing them together like they always do, and normally this would have been enough to hold a room of dancers in rapt, locked-in attention. But at Quasar, the room emptied out and I don't think the DJs really had a good feel for why that was happening.
NOT JUST THE AUDIO -- TOO MANY DJS
To be fair, it wasn't just the audio that was a problem. Having four DJs share the decks for a 3.5-hour set is just too many DJs for a cohesive story to be told through selection and mixing. Brothers Dave and Steph have worked together for some 30+ years and they blend their tracks together like chocolate and peanut butter, espresso and ice cream, twigs and berries. They’re a unit and they're always making choices that work and complement each other, whereas Barry Can't Swim and Salute were switching up the vibe somewhat haphazardly — needing to play the hits that their crowds had come to the show for. It felt like the Belgian national football (soccer) team playing against a couple of blokes recruited from regional English clubs to play together for the first time. The Belgian team ran circles around the team from England.
At times, it felt like the only thing holding the set together was 2manydjs. They were the adults in the room, or, to use a more Coachella analogy, they played the role of Four Tet to Fred Again and Skrillex. They didn't have to go in and correct the mix, per se, but their choices and mixing did help the set cohere.
SONG IDS (PARTIAL LIST)
Backlash by Wehbba
Mouth to Mouth (Boys Noize Remix) by Audion
Raindrops (Two Face Cervantes Remix) by Berval
Hyperconscious by Not a Scientist
Diligent by VAEN
Walk With Me by DJ Eclipse
Second Story by Mark Knight
No Mercy by Mark Boson
It Doesn't Matter by Gary Burrows
Breadholes (Stefano Kosa Remix) by Angel Stoxx
Got the Funk by Low Steppa & Capri
For a Feeling (feat. RHODES) [Layton Giordani Remix] by CamelPhat & ARTBAT
Needin U (feat. The Face) [Radio Edit] by David Morales
Raw (Tony Romera Remix) by Julio Navas, Gustavo Bravetti & David Amo
Throw (Slam's RTM Remix) by Paperclip People
Replay Silence by Elektrostyle
Anonymous by Redlight
Far l'amore by Bob Sinclar & Raffaella Carrà
A Madame Cottin by Volière
Saxobeat by Wanderson XVR
Dub City by Andrea Frisina & Irregular Synth
Believe (feat. Jocelyn Brown) [Mark Knight Remix] by Ministers De La Funk
Only Solution by Landmark
The DBG (Mark Broom Remix) by Shadow Child
Don't Start Now (Dom Dolla Remix) by Dua Lipa
Reach Me by Luca De-Santo
Odity (Enjoy Mix) by The Houzelab
RETRO ON THE STREET (Bonus Song) by DJ Electrix G
Despechá - Tech House by Gabi Mujica
Freshen Up by AVISION
Dusty Palace by Allen (Italy) & Filix
Materie Prima (Nanel002) by Unknown Artist
Motocross Madness by Soul Grabber & Paul Jacobs
House of God by DHS
Easy by Tiga
Machine lernt by Distant Sun
Listen by Max Chapman & Georgie Marshall
Born Free by Joe Mesmar
When I Push (Edit) by Eli Brown, Layton Giordani & OFFAIAH
Sunsleeper by Barry Can't Swim
Wolf by Juan Bernardo ruvalcaba torres
Dark Forces by Robert Babicz
It's a Fine Day (ATB Club Remix) by Miss Jane
Big Shot (Paco Osuna Remix) by AVISION
Woman by Kimani Wilson
Orange Juice (Extended Mix) by Danny Parton
Sugarphoria (Extended Mix) by Richard Durand
Electric Dreams by Joe Montana
Capricorn (Skream Remix) by Elderbrook
Oh Le Oh Le by Azzurri Balo Beat
Airwave (Radio Vocal Edit) by Rank 1
Alla Consolle (Mucha Cossa feat. La Madama Radio) by Mimmo Amerelli
Peach by salute & Sammy Virji
Underground by JMAC (AU)
EXTENDED SET FOR AN ADHD GENERATION
Quasar was designed to be a place where so-called “extended” sets could be played (vs. typical festival fare), but here, four DJs shared 206 minutes between them, averaging to less than an hour per DJ. That’s less playtime than each would have received had they been booked solo. When 2manydjs and James Murphy get together for Despacio, the three DJs play for six hours per day, three days in a row. Other DJs play extended sets of 6, 8, 10, or even 24 at other venues around the world. Quasar's "extended" sets feel lightweight and inconsequential in comparison to true extended sets. Perhaps these psuedo extended sets are a sop to Coachella's FOMO-afflicted attendees. This booking feels like the programming team arranged everyone’s favorite snacks on a wooden plate and called it charcuterie.
COACHELLA'S "SOUL FEELS INCREASINGLY ABSENT"
Reggie Watts weighed in on Coachella with a blistering rant. He wrote, "while the scale is impressive, the soul feels increasingly absent." Most people, he said, "move like walking credit cards, pinging from one branded experience to the next." The real moments of connection between people and music are "buried beneath the logistics, the brand activations, the overpriced everything."
I’d never felt this way until experiencing the shitty sound at Quasar for a second year in a row. As I stood on the Quasar lawn, dismayed to watch it empty out, I turned in circles, looking for the placement of speaker stacks, of reflective surfaces, and for anything that would offer any clue. My eyes lit on the Red Bull branding, prominently displayed.
Back in my tent later that night and early the next morning, I caught up on my messages from friends who had watched the Quasar stream the night before. One friend, watching the official live stream, wrote, "We are LOVING this Quasar set. Serious FOMO."
Suddenly, it made more sense. Coachella's livestreams are an important tool for Goldenvoice to increase the brand equity of the Coachella brand. Coachella is now an international destination, and how something looks on a livestream is perhaps more important than how it feels to those of us on the ground. The Quasar stage, with its beautiful set design and prominent sponsor branding carefully placed in the line of sight of cameras, was built for the streaming era. It’s a stage made for virtual consumption and for building the Coachella brand online.
Coachella seems to have made some effort to be subtle with the brand sponsorship, but the Red Bull marketing team know what they're doing.
Because I like to count, I re-watched the entire 206-minute set, and counted approximately 45 inclusions of the Red Bull logo in the video stream. That averages out to one brand placement every 4.6 minutes. Having worked on brand contracts for video streams, I'm willing to bet that these placements were part of the contractual obligation between Coachella and Red Bull.
What’s more, I’m willing to bet that the Red Bull logo was placed strategically so that camera shots of the talent could simultaneously include the logo, an implied endorsement of Red Bull by the DJs on the stage. (Note to DJs and the business people who represent them: I hope you're getting paid for that implied endorsement -- there should be extra compensation that comes with playing the Quasar stage, as the DJ's image is being mixed together with the Red Bull branding.)
THE SCORECARD
This is the lowest score I've ever given a dancefloor. I absolutely love 2manydjs, and Barry Can't Swim delivered perhaps my favorite set of Coachella '24, and I have no complaints about Salute's selections or mixing, but this stage's soundsystem and questionable design choices sunk the whole performance. Maybe Goldenvoice will get it right next year.
Bleak!