Armin Van Buuren, Kaskade And More: The Acts To Catch At This Year's Electric Zoo Festival

Whether you’re planning on attending the Electric Zoo Festival or not, there’s plenty to talk about when it comes to the artists and music that will be featured there. EDM, or electronic dance music, has become a hugely popular and commercially successful genre in the past few years -- so popular, in fact, that it's even been parodied on Saturday Night Live. 

We talk with Michelle Lhooq, editor at Thump, Vice’s dance music channel, about the acts to catch at this year's Electric Zoo Festival -- plus, she explains what terms like "house," "trance," "dub step" and "techno" mean, and how you can tell one EDM sub-genre from another. 

Who's Who At This Year's Electric Zoo Festival:

Armin Van Buuren

"He's known as being a trance DJ. He has a very famous radio show that he's had since 2001 called 'A State of Trance.' Trance is probably the most euphoric and uplifting form of EDM. It's characterized by a lot of vocal buildups, euphoric and melodic -- almost classical melodies. Everyone knows the song 'Sandstorm' -- that's a classic trance song. Armin van Buuren has been one of the originators of [this style], and he's also been responsible for spreading it all over the world." 

Kaskade 

"He is a mix between trance and house and pop. I would describe him as America's sweetheart. He gets the title of being the only superstar Mormon DJ that I know of. He started DJing in his dorm room at Brigham Young. He was part of the underground party scene in Salt Lake City."

Gesaffelstein 

"He's the classic French DJ who's brooding, he's mysterious, he has an amazing stage presence. He's also got a very distinctive, dark sound. He was a producer on Kanye West's Yeezusalbum. So all those grinding sounds that people loved on that album, that was coming partly from Gesaffelstein. I think that he's bringing dance music to a very interesting place -- a darker place, a more abrasive place that people who listen to Kaskade or Armin van Buuren at first might be like, 'what is this?'"

 

Jamie XX

"He's an example of a crossover act who comes from the indie world [he's in the band The XX] but who does his own DJ sets. He's done a lot of remixes of Florence and the Machine, and he recently did an excellent album where he remixed Gil Scott-Heron's music. He took Gil Scott-Heron's vocals and put his own sparse and minimal beats behind them and it was just a masterpiece."