Festival: DRILL LA – Day 02 @ The Echo and Echoplex (Los Angeles)

The musical explosion continues!

If the opening night of DRILL was a taste of things to come, Day 2 was a build up to the inevitable explosion that appears to be in store for Saturday’s closing night. With use of the entire building, fans and festival goers had a plethora of choices on either stage. The stairs leading between the venues provided a nice amount of passive exercise as we would either hike up to The Echo or bolt down to Echoplex to catch whichever bands met our fancy. For my part, I ended up spending most of my night downstairs at Echoplex, but I did catch the first two acts at The Echo.

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Festival Preview: DRILL Los Angeles

WIRE brings DRILL back to the West Coast for the first time in 4 years!

When I was seventeen I went to “The Warped Tour” in San Francisco. I had never been to a festival and it was definitely a bit mind blowing. The concept of walking from stage to stage strategically placed in a given area, with an enormous lineup of bands, having to pick and choose which bands to see and which bands to miss, was thrilling to say the least. I continued going to bigger and bigger festivals after that (Coachella, Sasquatch, Treasure Island) until about 2010 when I ultimately began to feel jaded by them and I haven’t been to a single festival since. So here we are in 2017, I am now in my 30s and I’m going to another festival. This one, however, promises to be a whole different experience entirely. Since around 2013, English post-rockers WIRE have been curating a festival called DRILL. The catch with DRILL is that it doesn’t rely on gigantic locations and 100s of bands but, instead, focuses on smaller venues and puts more energy into bringing diverse musical styles and bands, both new and old, together. While, thematically, many of the bands are linked by the post-punk, darkwave, dream pop genre, it is safe to say from past DRILL lineups that it promises to be an exciting and unique experience.

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