After a couple weeks of Twitter teasing from Pasquale Rotella, it has finally officially been announced that Chicago will be one stop on the road to Electric Daisy Carnival in 2013. The date and venue will be revealed on January 16. While the chosen venue is anyone’s guess, the date is pretty much confirmed as Memorial Day Weekend.
The festival announcement is a signficant one, which arrives at the end of a ridiculous saga that many Chicago EDM fans have been following. It began when a new music production company called Aura Presents arrived on the scene in early fall, making a splash with publicity for their new Future Sound Music Festival for Memorial Day Weekend 2013 at Toyota Park (out in the suburbs). Promoters started selling tickets before any lineup announcements, and a fair number of (crazy) fans bought in. Aura’s inadequacies started to show through as various elements of the plan fell apart: meetings for volunteers were moved and cancelled, promises for Groupon deals never actualized, and so on. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, rumor surfaced that Insomniac claimed Memorial Day Weekend as their own, squashing any hopes for Future Sound to compete. The defeated owner of Aura Presents wrote a blog with his entire EDM sob story, which provides a good read with some strong statements, if you have 45 minutes to devote to reading a poorly written but emotionally wrenching memoir. The bottom line is Aura is bankrupt and Insomniac is now the king of the Chitown playground – at least for that one weekend in May.
The scaled-down version of the Las Vegas festival will also return to New York City in 2013. Look out for further announcements in January.
EDC Las Vegas tickets go back on sale on January 9.