ORLANDO, Fla. – Nightlife in Central Florida is as spectacular as you make it.
Around this time of year, now since 2011, something happens near downtown Orlando that you’ll no doubt hear some sleepless locals criticizing. As the evening begins, the sound of bumping in the distance gets ever stronger. Deep rhythms render absolute silence impossible in the many homes, apartments and hotel rooms near Camping World Stadium.
It’s from behind those thin walls, though, where you’ll find only a fraction of the waking, and while these few make their Facebook posts complaining about the noise, the rest of the insomniacs are likely right where it’s all coming from – Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando.
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EDC events are music festivals built on stated pillars of positivity, love, inclusivity and creativity, treating fans of electronic dance music (EDM) to multiple days of sets by their favorite DJs in an expansive safe space for recreation and self expression.
In 2025, EDC festivals are scheduled to take place in Thailand, Mexico, South Korea, Las Vegas and Orlando, along with the distinct “EDSea” on board the Norwegian Joy cruise ship, set to sail out of South Florida and bump over to Belize next November.
The organizer, Insomniac, Inc., said over 300,000 people attended the three-day festival in Orlando last year. For a picture of the local economic impact from an event attracting that kind of crowd, Insomniac the year prior reported attendees spent around $150 million at local businesses, and for a literal picture of that kind of crowd, see below.
Regardless of the crowd size, raves have always been and still are, to some degree, an underground activity. As such, there were many comments we came across that questioned what EDC was. Some folks here just don’t seem to know, and the more I thought about it, I wondered if I really did.
For answers, I made last-minute efforts to get a media credential on the final day of the festival. Even when they’re requested weeks ahead of time, not all will be approved, yet after some emails, phone calls, contact forms and a pleading DM to Insomniac’s public relations manager, I was granted entry on the merits of my pitch and it was time to finally cross out my main question: What is the Electric Daisy Carnival?
Our little world is flat here in Central Florida, both in the sense that we have no mountains or valleys and in how most of what’s here is all we’ve created. It’s just swamps, forests, pastures, lakes and little rivers otherwise.
Point is, any excitement to be found in our home towns is almost entirely a result of what the people are up to. You’ll see the occasional large crowd during weekends in the city, out at car meets, mulling around theme parks, but EDC, and events like it, stand out by attracting a downright horde. It’s not unlike water flowing to the lowest point on the map, a meteor crater if we’re still making metaphors of topography.
Truly, you wouldn’t be able to get closer to Camping World Stadium than Orange Blossom Trail without finding yourself in the growing groups of other people also flowing toward EDC, helping each other to cross roads and chatting in these tributaries with evermore vendors on the bank. The first hawker I saw was selling Gatorade outside of a tire shop, but within moments I heard others chirping, “Need a wristband? Need a wristband?”
Walking north on Norton Avenue got you pretty close to one of the stages – Neon Garden, built out of shipping containers gilded in red lights and lasers – so much so that it wouldn’t have been very difficult to catch shows there without spending hundreds on tickets.
For a word on money and without being specific, the armband I had been given would have been quite expensive at full price, and I’m talking new-Playstation expensive. My guess was these guys on the street were just trying to sell discarded bands they had found over the weekend, maybe even fake ones, but I never asked to make sure.
I turned west onto Church Street and saw a small RV that had been parked and deployed with signage offering free hugs from rave moms, a term I actually had some understanding of going into this.
To the best of my knowledge, anyone can be a rave mom, regardless of their age or anything else. The rave mom is sort of like the designated driver for their group’s mental and physical well-being; if you’re thirsty, the rave mom gets you water, and if you’re uncomfortable, the rave mom gets you someplace safe and looks after you, that sort of thing. As advertised, these rave moms were offering free hugs.
I met Ronnie Mytas here. Being one of the rave moms, she slipped a bracelet on my hand before going in for the free hug. The gift read, “WWW.PLURWAY.COM,” and we were already back to using terms and code that I didn’t fully know.
Prior to this, the only other place I recalled seeing “PLUR” was on the guest guidelines document I’d been sent earlier — “PLEASE KEEP IT PLUR,” it said — but Mytas agreed to give me some other basics of EDC before I jumped back into what was now a wide river of people flowing toward the gate.
The Plurway rave moms are part of a religious nonprofit organization that’s spent the better part of the last 16 years going to music festivals in five states. Neither Mytas nor Colleen, one of the founders, was able to recall an exact number of these missions. The meaning behind them, though, was fully explained.
“We think that a lot of times, people send out a message that these people don’t matter. We want them to know that they matter to God, actually, that they’re valuable, that they’re precious. Sometimes, they’ll do things out of desperation to have that feeling and so we think that sometimes if we just give them a hug and look them in the eyes and say, ‘We think you matter to God,’ that it makes a difference,” she said, going on to describe moments when roaming ravers have broken into tears during their free hug. “We have a lot of people who have lost a parent recently, people who are estranged, you know? (…) People who, maybe their parent is quite sick, or maybe is incarcerated.”
I got checked a bit when I asked if the largest of these festivals could be seen as a nation’s worth of folks who feel excluded gathering in the same place.
“I’m not sure if they feel excluded. Inclusion is a really important thing to them and so when you come here, it doesn’t really matter what your beliefs or how you live are, they tend to be very open. This is a big part of our culture and a growing part of our culture,” she said.
You wouldn’t be at a total loss if you looked for an official source with a lowdown on what rave culture is, how it began and where it might be going. I settled on a report published in 2001 by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center which — while critical at times, antiquated at others and tinged by amusing naivety in its struggle to explain youth culture and drug use to government officials — does still provide some non-editorial bullet points which have strangely remained true even after 20 years.
Rave culture began really taking off in the 1980s, the report covers, while other sources point to the late ‘50s for the origin of the term “rave” itself, meaning a wild party. American house music from out of Chicago and New York joined forces with the European techno, which first appeared around the same time if not a bit later in Germany, all to form two well-defined arms of the rave scene which would eventually shake hands over the Atlantic and embrace the world at large.
Starting as secretive parties in exclusive clubs, serving in tow as a space for LGBTQ+ solace and expression, the scene has evolved and expanded to where we are now, at these giant festivals with tickets on digital presale and local news stations writing articles about road closures and what to do if you end up losing your phone in the crowd. Granted, the small and secluded raves still go on, with the old report noting these dance parties can range from something like 30 ravers to tens of thousands, one of those strangely accurate bits.
EDC itself began in 1997 as a warehouse party in Los Angeles put together by present-day Insomniac CEO Pasquale Rotella. These days, it’s self-described as a globally-renowned and critically-acclaimed dance music festival attracting millions of fans, as well as being Insomniac’s largest brand. EDC Las Vegas is the largest dance music festival in North America, the website states, and EDC events have previously been held in Denver, Puerto Rico, Dallas, New York, Chicago, London, Brazil, India, Japan and China.
Rotella’s guiding philosophy? “All Are Welcome Here.”
That’s at least what his website says. I hear it’s difficult do get in touch with him, so a parasocial relationship is fine. How could you not want to be friends with someone named Pasquale?
“High energy, all-night dance parties and clubs known as ‘raves,’ which feature dance music with a fast, pounding beat and choreographed laser programs, have become increasingly popular over the last decade, particularly among teenagers and young adults. Beginning as an underground movement in Europe, raves have evolved into a highly organized, commercialized, worldwide party culture. Rave parties and clubs are now found throughout the United States and in countries around the world. Raves are held either in permanent dance clubs or at temporary venues set up for a single weekend event in abandoned warehouses, open fields, or empty buildings.”
National Drug Intelligence Center, 2001-L0424-004 Information Bulletin: Raves. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/index.htm. Published April 2001. Archived on Jan. 1, 2006.
Me, my bag and my boots were waved and scanned through EDC’s entrance, and now we were inside with the ravers.
I noticed that most of them were in groups and, specifically, that most of these groups were the minimum size, i.e. two, e.g. couples.
“Festival bae” (or “rave bae” if you’d like) was another term I had heard before, something affectionate to call your partner at one of these things. My festival bae was my handheld microphone, which miraculously managed to pick up speech under the heavy bass that the stages shot out for miles and miles.
My destination was Kinetic Field — the gargantuan cathedral-inspired main stage you may have already seen on our chopper footage — and facing it, the current was flowing left to right as people moved toward what I didn’t know then was the entire second half of the event, another hemisphere of this wacky world that had all been set up where people just last month were in line for sand bags ahead of Hurricane Milton.
It was my own fault that I never visited that second hemisphere. The event was already so large and packed with people that I was wholly unaware of and unaffected by what was happening on the other side, but then again, I never managed to find the press lounge either.
I popped a squat on the trodden, muddy grass next to Rainbow Road to get my bearings, dialing in my microphone and counting the roaches on the ground before making my way toward Kinetic Field. Not an insect in sight, I’ll add.
On the outskirts of Kinetic Field, I remarked I had never seen this many people in one place, never ever. It was as if the entire Eastern Seaboard EDM fanbase had collapsed and filled the space like floodwater, or if the rest of the country had cut to the chase and moved to Florida overnight.
Even from this far away, the stage filled my field of view, and I realized while looking at it that I was a witness to an entire industry, the end result from countless hours of work by thousands of people. It’s the same feeling as making it to the top of the Willis Tower and wondering how the hell people were able to build something like it. Further, I could appreciate that it was done and complete by the time I got there.
Note: The price for drinks from the bar at the top of the Willis Tower wasn’t far off of what was being charged here on the ground. I saw it was something like $35 or more for a double. Incredible.
It’s difficult to interview people moving around, even the ones standing still were basically vibrating. I felt like I had to wait until someone was doing the same assimilative dance that I was — the sway left-to-right, working out the calves — but I got a better idea before too long.
No matter what song was playing, you could hear someone singing the lyrics if it had any, and as a testament to the teamwork and grace of the average raver, it was possible for some of these groups to spread out a blanket and sit down without fear of being trampled here on the edge of Kinetic Field.
You’d find these little picnics everywhere, so I decided to get on the ground with one of them. This is where I met Nick, Dan and Nadia, all hailing from “nowhere really,” Nick said, which ended up just being Houston.
This was Nick’s first EDC, though he’s been to other EDM festivals before, and he was enjoying it.
They let me know that Houston was better than Dallas, but not as fun as Austin, where they claimed stuff similar to what was all around us could be found. Their group was only in Orlando for EDC, they said, and would be heading back to the Lone Star State without doing any more sightseeing here. Back in Texas, they at least have hills higher than 10 feet, Dan quipped.
The sets during the second day of EDC were the best, Dan said, adding he cried while listening to Eric Prydz. Perfectly understandable. “Call on Me” is a classic that really can’t be undersold.
I got to the point and asked Dan what he would want people to know if they had no prior knowledge of EDC.
“Good people, good vibes,” he replied.
“Rave parties and clubs were present in most metropolitan areas of the United States by the early 1990s. Teenagers overtook the traditional young adult ravers and a new rave culture emerged; events became highly promoted, heavily commercialized, and less secretive. (…) Capitalizing on the growing popularity of raves, specialized industries were developed to market clothes, toys, drugs, and music. Private clubs and secret locations were replaced by stadium venues with off-duty police security.”
National Drug Intelligence Center, 2001-L0424-004 Information Bulletin: Raves. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/index.htm. Published April 2001. Archived on Jan. 1, 2006.
There may be better questions to ask the festivalgoers, I thought, in light of potential fears that pickpockets could be prowling. Our prior reporting on other festivals, such as the most recent Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach, would suggest as much.
Making my way back toward Rainbow Road, which connected my half of the festival to the half I never found, I met Neil from New England, who shared with me his custom anti-theft system.
“It actually does happen. Her husband, last year, phone got stolen, so it happens,” he said, gesturing to someone else. “I’m wearing another pair of pants under here to keep my (expletive) safe, so it does happen.”
I pressed the question, given my hesitation to believe there would be as many pickpockets at an event like this due to the sheer price of entry. Much like what we heard out of Daytona Beach, Neil clarified it wasn’t EDC that’s to blame for stolen things, but the criminal mind itself.
“It’s not EDC, it’s criminals. You know what I’m saying? It’s not EDC, it’s the criminals that are doing it. It could be anything. This could be a (expletive) clown party, Disney (expletive) or whatever. It’s just criminals,” he said.
Before parting ways, I asked Neil for his message to the criminals, should any of them ever be reading this story.
“(Expletive) off man, seriously. (Expletive) off,” he replied.
Lights on vests, bucket hats — more than I’ve ever seen — cow-print jumpers, yoga pants, sleeveless T-shirts, unicorn outfits, keffiyehs, light-up capes, sunglasses at night, scarves in the heat, and a lot of normal clothes for that matter. These are the people keeping Spencer’s Gifts in business.
It was around this time that I starting having encounters with often long lines of people following tall flags. This, I learned, was about the easiest way to get around through the thick crowds. Among the ebb and flow, you can be packed shoulder-to-shoulder and still manage to make your way out or further in, just hop in a line trudging in your preferred direction.
It works much better than the method I learned a decade ago in Italy. That one’s no more complicated than just saying, “Mi scusi, mi scusi,” and hoping people get it.
I still didn’t understand the significance of the flags themselves, though. Flags that said, “GET A JOB,” “I LOST THE GAME” and “FULL SEND,” the Australian flag, the Guatemalan flag, the Jolly Roger from “One Piece,” a picture of Michael Rosen for some reason, flags for UF and UCF alike, one flag was just a pair of scissors and there were at least three instances of the American flag superimposed with an image of K-pop star Chaewon wearing a cowboy hat. That doesn’t even come close to scratching the surface.
While the government report cites comfort as a main theme for rave dress, I had not yet found what the flags had in common beyond seeming to say, “Follow me.”
“Ravers dress for comfort. They usually wear lightweight, loose-fitting clothes and dress in layers, allowing them to remove clothing as they become overheated from dancing for hours. Many wear loose shorts or very wide-legged or baggy pants. Ravers wear T-shirts, bikini tops, tank tops, tube tops, and open-back halter tops to help keep cool. After hours of dancing and often after using MDMA–which elevates body temperature–many ravers have removed most of their clothing. Some ravers, especially females, wear costumes to rave events, dressing as princesses, cartoon characters, or other fantasy figures that match the theme of the rave (e.g., futuristic, space, mystic).”
National Drug Intelligence Center, 2001-L0424-004 Information Bulletin: Raves. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/index.htm. Published April 2001. Archived on Jan. 1, 2006.
The armband I’d been given included access to VIP areas, so I made my way toward the spot next to Neon Garden. It was refreshing to be in an space with less density than the rest of it, no need for the flag lines here, just vibes and picnic tables. To my right were the air-conditioned bathrooms advertised to upsell VIP, some photo ops, lockers, food, bartenders, concierge, and a water station with pressurized faucets that could fill a 32oz bottle in a matter of seconds. Efficient, all of it.
I met Chris and Nicole here. I asked them if they thought VIP was worth it. This, of course, was not before finding out where Chris is from (Bogota, Colombia), asking him about nice places to visit there (Barranquilla, Santa Marta, Cartegana, Pereiea and Cali, he said) and prying why (the women, apparently).
“I feel that there’s a certain level of delineation whenever you come to festivals, so for me, I’d much rather save my money and experience VIP rather than GA,” he said. “Now, I’ll say this. It doesn’t make me a better person. Even though somebody looking at this might be like, ‘Oh, what a (expletive) snob,’ or something like that. I’m like, ‘Hey, if I’m going to a festival, I’m going to try to get the best experience!’”
Next up was Freddy, who I found leaving VIP with a drink in one hand and a flag in another.
The flag was just as much a double feature. Half of it was the Mexican flag and the other half was Guatemalan. It presented as good a chance as any to get my question about the lines answered.
“Our flag is Mexico and Guatemala, so everyone who’s Mexican or Guatemalan, they follow us,” he said.
Ah, I was almost right on the money. If you like a flag — which are actually called “totems” here — you follow it and make some new friends, simple as that.
I was beginning to think that all of my questions that night would end up having these simple eureka-moment answers, like learning what an acronym means, or how highway exits correspond to mile markers. Either way, the festival was beginning to feel more like a playground, a place you can meet and play along with all sorts of friendly strangers.
I wandered back across the festival’s entrance to one of the bazaars for a glint at the goods. The longest line was for Insomniac’s tables, where I hung around the exit to watch dozens of people get their hands on blankets, parasols, Dillon Francis T-shirts — the one I noticed depicted Mickey Mouse holding hands with Kermit the Frog, Donald Duck and one of the Grateful dead bears — a $75 “EDC” basketball jersey made to look like Orlando Magic gear, something for everyone.
Backing out and dodging an old man with bright green brat ponytails and an excellent eye tattoo on his leg, I got back on the ground again to interact with another picnic. Here, I met Zen from Toronto.
“Live your life, come to EDC,” the 27-year-old said, adding he likes being in the U.S. more than Canada because it’s warmer here. He was one of the many people wearing sunglasses at night, so I also asked what that was about.
“The sunglasses are just to help your eyes because there’s a lot of lasers, so they protect your eyes. Lots of lights,” he replied.
If you’re going to be at a music festival all day, it makes just as much sense to get an inventory together first as it would ahead of anything from a long hike to a Disney trip.
But like the rest of them so far, Zen had a point. Stylish sunglasses may not stand out as crucial PPE, not as much as earplugs at least, but there truly were lasers everywhere. Dress for the occasion.
It really can’t be understated how many people were wearing those bucket hats, though. As I picked myself up and started walking back toward the bazaar, I found Andrew, a bucket hat salesman, and jokingly asked if he felt bad about enabling all of these stereotypical wooks.
“No, because they’re all one of a kind and you have a smile hiding in it,” he said.
Let’s actually break away for a second to talk about wooks. I can’t expect to suddenly be the one trying to get away with unexplained slang.
Think of the wook as a modern-day subgenre of hippies. From there, it’s understandable why the jury is out on how exactly they’re perceived. They’re in the back seat on the way to the beach and they sleep on the couch, for starters. Some find them endearing, but lot of people don’t like wooks. They’ve garnered a reputation at festivals for kind of just showing up and relying on other people for what they need, a group of wooks is even colloquially referred to as a “mooch” in some circles. I’ve never had a problem with wooks, but whether that’s just because I haven’t spent enough time around them is undiscovered.
For a word on the kind wook, I first met them years ago. I’d been invited to a show at the Henao Contemporary Center along Edgewater Drive by two self-proclaimed wooks who I worked at a restaurant with, and when I asked one of them what a wook even was, he handed me his drinks and said, “Watch this.”
The man proceeded to fully shoulder check the very next person he saw, knocking them flat on their back. When this freshly-toppled fella got up on their feet, their first instinct was to approach my coworker and ask, “Are you OK, man?” before giving him a back-scratching hug.
That’s wooks for you. I see them like Gandalf saw Hobbits at first, just silly little guys who love smoking and don’t wear shoes.
I saw what I thought were plenty at the festival, though it’s almost impossible to really discern who’s who without asking first. The people you come across could be of any class or creed, so you’ll be there partying with churchgoers to strung-out wooks alike. I even met a G-man who told me he shouldn’t be seen there. The one thing they all had in common was that they were at EDC, which as we heard Pasquale say earlier is for everyone.
Back in the market, people were calmer here. These folks were politely perusing while the rest risked eardrum damage in the battlefields governed by the DJs they came to worship.
Bits and baubles, rings, sunglasses, gems, wandering shoppers with their shirts open or none on at all, needles and thread, lots of stuff with Usagi’s face on it — there was much for sale. The storefront “Serotonin and Totem Town” specialized in decorated hand fans — fans that said, “Melt my face,” “Keta-mine,” “Choke me” — which you’ll hear people flapping open and closed to the beat, another one of the ravers’ fun trends.
Abby from Winter Park was shopping for future festival outfits. She told me that she tries to curate her ensemble rather than just reuse her Halloween costumes like I thought people were doing. Abby described her current getup as going for a BDSM/bondage vibe.
Having gone to EDC for five years, though, she was able to sum up the event itself pretty well.
“I would say the main thing is it’s a space where literally everyone is welcome. It doesn’t matter what your body looks like or what your personal beliefs are or who you are, everyone can kind of come together and just zone out for a minute and kind of dance and just be, like, one community,” she said.
A lovely carpet had been laid out for a shop called Eli’s Dyes, a small veteran-owned tie-dye apparel company based in Anchorage, Alaska. I spoke with Eli himself after turning down the lightsaber duel I’d won by spinning his wheel of chance, always a genius marketing trick.
I asked Eli what it was like to follow these festivals around for a living.
“To be transparent, (expletive) soul-crushing, but also, at the same time, it’s soul-crushing because of the amount of work I put into it. I’m investing myself, I’m working 100-plus hours a week and I’m drained and dead inside, but I’m doing that for a bigger purpose and a bigger reason, and that to me is absolutely (expletive) worth it. I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else,” he said.
Part of that bigger reason was Eli’s passion for his brand’s motto, what he said was spreading happiness across the world across the world one tie-dye at a time, the subtext being “because the world’s kind of (expletive) up and it’s not (expletive) fair.”
“The second purpose is taking care of my family, providing for my family, making sure they are not hungry, they have a place to sleep, and then in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, when I’m getting old, we’re going to be OK,” he said, taking my next question about whether he feels like a carnie. “I like to say, ‘Glorified carnie.’ Music festivals are different. The energy is high, it’s a vibe, but unfortunately, some of our best events are state fairs, which are long hours, long days, two, three weeks at a time, and I feel like a (expletive) carnie there, but it’s some of the best revenue for the company.”
Eli had to take a new customer’s question about skirt prices, but he didn’t let me leave without kindly slapping a new sticker on my Nalgene.
“Although a casual listener may not be able to distinguish between techno and trance, ravers know the music well, and several DJs and bands–unfamiliar to most people–are internationally famous within the rave community. Today’s rave DJs are skilled stage performers and are considered artists much like musicians. They mix electronic sounds, beats, and rhythms, often synchronizing the music to a laser program. Popular DJs sell their music and perform live at the largest rave parties and clubs around the world. Rave organizers announce the appearance of famous DJs on their flyers and on the Internet to promote upcoming raves.”
National Drug Intelligence Center, 2001-L0424-004 Information Bulletin: Raves. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/index.htm. Published April 2001. Archived on Jan. 1, 2006.
At this point, walking had indeed begun to feel like a volcano hike, going on for hours only upward. It was time to find another picnic to join briefly, if only to take a respite.
I found myself back at Kinetic Field, where I met Andrew from Atlanta, Georgia, reclined with three friends on a blanket outlined with glow sticks. One of them had me take a flash photo before I asked Andrew if he was worried at all that a shooting could ever occur at a music festival like this.
“I don’t know. For the most part, I just try to do my part, be nice, don’t do anything wrong, you know? I just do my part, that’s all I can do,” he said.
I’d asked the question because we were only about a week out from a mass shooting in downtown Orlando. Two people were killed, seven others had been shot and a woman was trampled, all from the actions of one person in a crowd even smaller than this.
Andrew had spoken his mind, though, and I decided to move on. I asked him the same question I’d been asking everyone else: What would you tell someone who does not know what EDC is?
“PLUR! Peace, Love, Unity, Respect,” he said, having to repeat himself twice over the wub dubs in the foreground.
Now it all made sense. “Plurway,” “KEEP IT PLUR,” all that. It sounds like nonsense on the outside, but it’s a mantra. This idea of PLUR may have very well been what kept anything bad from happening among this crowd despite its size being magnitudes larger than the one that found itself running out of downtown last week. While these ravers may at a glace come off as wanton risk takers, they generally know how to have fun and how do it safely.
True to form, on my way back to Neon Garden, I unknowingly started a line that helped at least three other people escape Kinetic Field with me, but I’d be back.
It was getting late. Now that I had many of my questions answered, I wanted to try getting as far as I could into the crowds, total sensory overload.
I followed a pair of people deep into the sea of heads at Neon Garden, managing only one interview with Eve, from San Diego, who told me she would describe EDC as “electric.” Fog everywhere, lone drones flew overhead as others closer to Kinetic Field made 3D shapes in the sky and I “Mi scusi’d” my way toward another line heading out of the almost painful 156 BPM trance.
The only thing left to do was the same at the larger stage. I took my time to sneak past people taking pictures together along Rainbow Road, ones that were sure to end up on Instagrams, VCSOs and dating profiles. It smelled like fireworks and Sabretts.
Slowly I plunged toward the big stage, following line after line of people trying to do the same. My target was a totem not 20 feet away from the fence, which in the dark I mistook for the Czech Republic’s flag. Being part Czech myself, I thought it was an appropriate totem to seek out, yet its bearer kindly reminded me he carried the national flag of the Philippines. It was remarkable we were able to hash that out at all, the music coming from this stage is probably why my left ear was in pain for the next two days.
My final interview before riding one last line out of the festival itself was with a soldier named Carti, aka Nick, from Fort Lauderdale. Carti had seen me speaking with people and grabbed my shoulder looking for the same. It didn’t look like he was there with anyone either, he just felt a mighty need to espouse his love for EDC and the music playing here.
“I am in the military, brother. I am here because I want to (expletive) let loose, and I am letting the (expletive) loose right now, brother,” he said. “Listen to electronic music. This is the best (expletive) experience you can ever have anywhere. It’s (expletive) amazing. Go to any (expletive) electronic concert. Holy (expletive).”
EDC shuts it down at midnight, so I made my way out thirty minutes ‘til. The outflow passed the rave moms’ RV, which at this point was dealing with a line of people looking for the letters in PLUR they were missing.
I walked north along Orange Blossom Trail. Even though I had just come from a crowd of tens of thousands, I was alone again, and the only moving things I could see were trees and cars.
I paused to reflect on the sidewalk outside the old Parliament House, which had been razed some years ago. My friends and I would come here from time to time, back when I was a clubber of club age. Besides the great prices on drinks, I remember how my pal Daniel’s big sister would often remark how safe she and her friends felt there, compared to the average spot.
That’s what had made me stop, anyway. More memories. Even before any of us knew what PLUR was, we were still trying our best to make it happen, and though the Parliament House may be long gone, it always has been and will be up to us as individuals whether a night ends in bloodshed, or if it’s defined by peace, love, unity and respect.
Nightlife in Central Florida is as spectacular as you make it, after all.
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