April 30, 2007 - Ex_Plex, Los Angeles CA

The Ex_Plex, nestled underneath the Echo, Echo Park’s venerable, seedy concert venue, has always been good to me. More spacious that its upstairs neighbor, the Ex_Plex was the right choice for what went down on Monday, April 30th. For weeks I had been receiving e-mails from Steve Aoki and his record label, Dim Mak, telling me to buy tickets for the Dim Mak/Ed Banger show. I should have recognized the show’s major flaw right from the get-go: disorganization.The flyer was overflowing with DJs—eventually, they just stopped adding names and created text addendums in the e-mail bodies and subjects.  Ed Banger is a French electro record label; the manager, producer, etc. of it is the DJ Busy P, manager of electronica duos Daft Punk and  Justice. His name caught my eye when the show was first announced, but what officially sold me was the e-mail I got several weeks after the first, announcing a “special guest” had been added. I immediately decoded the message: JUSTICE WOULD BE PLAYING IN L.A.!  (To those not in the know: Justice is on Ed Banger Records, and the cross if their symbol).

The show started at 9 as Guns n’ Bombs, DJ Them Jeans, and Blake Miller (the gaunt lead singer of Moving Units) got the crowd moving. I was at the front of the stage, and we were all going nuts; there was room to dance as hard as we wanted, and trust me, we did. The changes were quick, of course, since the only equipment was laptops; the crowd, however, still found time to shout “Justice!!!” every time. Steve Aoki was supposed to DJ for half an hour, but due to some   unclear technical difficulties, he was replaced by Jesse (one half of MSTRKRFT and a member of (R.I.P.) Death From Above 1979) after about ten minutes. Jesse spun quickly, and the show began to take a turn owards hip-hop, especially with the groups 8 Track and Pase Rock that followed.          

At 11 PM, the Ed Banger crew stormed the stage; subsequently, the crowd surged forward—and stayed there. I was still at the foot of the stage, but I could not see what was happening onstage for the life of me (I was too busy trying to remain standing). So Me, Mehdi, Busy P, and Justice were all there, but I do not know if there were more. They all stayed onstage together and switched off DJing—this is where we come back to the evening’s fatal flaw, disorganization. Many people later said that they didn’t even realize Justice was playing, because the format was so confusing. Once crowd surfing started, I knew I couldn’t stay with the big boys in the thick of things, and I actually fell asleep on some vinyl couches in the back. My friends awoke me an hour later, looking very haggard and sopping wet.  We all agreed that the evening was a success, but it went on a little too long, and the French DJ free-for-all at the end could have been structured better.

-Rachel Alonso