The first Worlds Away electronic dance music festival lands at the Monterey Fairgrounds with an epic day of dancing and DJs.

PHOTOS BY DANIEL DREIFUSS

Starting an electronic dance music festival is hard work. But if you’re going to do it, here are two tips: 1) hire Pendulum, and 2) do it in Monterey. The Worlds Away festival on Saturday, Oct. 12, drew about 7,000 people to the Monterey County Fair & Event Center, quenching a thirst for EDM and a radical audio visual experience. 

Worlds Away built the crowd up slowly as the day progressed. To set the stage, Pendulum producers Ro Sahebi and Nelson Diaz had to build it. Literally—the main stage at the fairgrounds was extended about 20 feet into the arena to accommodate a massive DJ table spanning two-thirds of the width, lined with mesh screens for visuals amid the audio systems. The first DJ set, featuring Los Angeles-based Sam Richie, aka informal., began at 10:30am with some early festival-goers already getting right up to the front. 

Sahebi credits the local community for showing up to create a successful event. “You guys helped us get here,” he says. “Monterey has come out to make this happen. It’s been tremendous.”

The producers add that they’re already looking forward to bringing the festival back next year.

By the afternoon, attendees began filing into the fairgrounds in droves. They were garbed in glitzy EDM outfits, fit for dancing. Like the producers, artists also remarked on what Monterey County offered.

“I feel like this place and Carmel-by-the-Sea are the most beautiful places truly ever,” says DJ ayokay, who boasts over 684,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, following his 1:15pm set. The artist behind the viral sensation track “Kings of Summer” that led to his mainstream success drove with his girlfriend to Big Sur that morning. He calls coming to perform in Monterey a “360-experience.”

“You can fly into a show, do the show and then leave and get no taste of the atmosphere,” ayokay says. “To come here to eat the food, to meet the people, is like, ‘I feel like I had a life experience and then played the show.’ That’s top-notch.”

Following informal., Piero Spada and ayokay, bigger names and bigger beat drops filed in to an ever-growing crowd. The lineup included EDM sensations Lost Kings, Sam Feldt and R3HAB. That caught the attention of EDM publications, also there to cover the artists at the festival. EDM Tunes and EDM Identity sent reporters to cover the festival as well, and remarked on the spectacle in Monterey.

“It was nice to see this here,” says Melissa Reyes, who does social media for EDM Identity. “Being the first major dance festival, [the producers] are setting a pretty high bar,” adds the publication’s hard dance editor Josue Paredes. Paredes adds that acceptance of dance music is growing: “It’s taken people time to realize that dance music is cool,” he says, “There needs to be more.”

And festival attendees, known as “travelers,” were left wanting more. The event showed the EDM community is multifaceted, accepting and whimsical. At the place recognized for catalyzing the modern music festival in the 1967 where Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire during the Monterey Pop Festival, RAVE achieved the same with the help of vertical smoke cannons, stunning visuals and confetti cannons lighting up the sky with laser lights and strobes at Worlds Away.

And then Tiësto played.

And immediately, the full scale of festival's potential was realized. With his hits like "Thank You (Not So Bad)," boasting over 324 million streams on Spotify, the entire stadium was electrified under the niveous effects, with confetti resembling snow.

Tiësto's set, followed by singer Lauv and producer duo The Chainsmokers, drop-capped the page in the next chapter for the modern music festival to take place in Monterey.