Electronic Dance Music Shows Its Many Faces At Pitchfork

The best dance-music performance I’ve ever seen at Pitchfork was in 2005, the festival’s inaugural year, back when it was the Intonation Music Festival. At the end of the last day I sauntered into a tent where I heard a DJ mixing Brazilian booty bass, southern rap, and indie rock (most memorably Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”). People were losing their shit. I looked down at my program and saw a name I recognized from an M.I.A. mixtape: Diplo.

The style championed by PC Music, a UK netlabel that’s home to A.G. Cook and certain Sophie side projects, could be called “accelerationist music”—that is, it begins with the aesthetic workings of capitalism and extrapolates to their logical endpoint. These acts aren’t the only ones at the festival to try out that sound: LA collective Future Brown also fixates on advertising as a vessel for music about progress and community. Their video for “Vernáculo” plays as a makeup ad, albeit one that subverts Western beauty standards by training the camera on women of color.

Future Brown Saturday, 2:30 PM, Green Stage

ShamirSaturday, 6:45 PM, Blue Stage

SophieSaturday, 7:45 PM, Blue Stage

Bitchin BajasSunday, 1 PM, Green Stage

Jamie XXSunday, 5:15 PM, Red Stage

ClarkSunday, 5:45 PM, Blue Stage

CaribouSunday, 6:15 PM, Green Stage

A.G. CookSunday, 6:45 PM, Blue Stage

Todd TerjeSunday, 7:45 PM, Blue Stage