Excavating the essence of the Electric Daisy Carnival

If you live in Las Vegas, you’re at least somewhat familiar with EDC.

Even if you don’t know what the acronym represents, you recognize the brand. Electric Daisy Carnival is ubiquitous here this time of year.

If you’re not immersed in dance music’s subculture, the buzz that EDC generates probably resonates at about the same frequency as white noise. From the surface-level sensationalism — the drug-related deaths, some eye-popping optics and loathsome traffic woes — the festival may seem like little more than a debaucherous dance party in the desert, populated by people in wild getups, interspersed with some wearing next to nothing at all. That’s how many people see it.

If you want to begin excavating the true essence of EDC, though, start by screening “Under the Electric Sky” on Netflix. You’ll see that it’s a stunning production with the impressive infrastructure of a small city. It’s also a cultural touchstone. Though some have dismissed the film, produced in association with the festival’s promoter, as being more of a promotional vehicle, it offers a vivid snapshot of EDC and captures the romanticism that draws throngs of people to the Vegas event.

They come here for the music, obviously. Not to mention, it’s a hell of a party. At the core, though, there’s a lot more to it.

The three-day gathering offers a communal sense of belonging to many who otherwise feel like outsiders. They’re personally invested in the culture — and so is the festival’s 40-year-old founder, who was shaped by Southern California’s underground rave scene during the ’90s.

“This is my life. I grew up in this culture. It’s everything to me,” says Pasquale Rotella of Insomniac Events, the promoter behind EDC. “It’s what I love to do. It’s my passion.”

That passion powers this grandiose production. The Insomniac chief says he has a hard time living in the moment, and that has him tenaciously tweaking the template, envisioning what’s next.

“The site map is a working document constantly,” says the promoter, who roams the festival grounds each year noting possible improvements. “For all my festivals, I always wanted them to be better than they were the last year. I always wanted them to be the best experience that someone had ever had. I wanted people to walk in and I wanted their jaw to drop.”

And so they have. Year after year, fans (or Headliners, to Insomniac) routinely buy tickets before acts are even announced.

“The Headliners come first,” Rotella says. “It’s about giving them the best we can. It’s not a concert. We want to be a music festival, we want to be a pop-up theme park, we want to be an art show, we want to be hard to label, actually. We want to be a full immersive audiovisual experience. And we want every aspect of it to be good.”

Because of the premium on pleasing the fans, the fans have put their faith in Insomniac — and it’s paid off with an event that’s entirely well conceived and presented, beginning with buying tickets, which are delivered in a box containing all sorts of memorabilia.

“The experience starts when you buy the ticket,” Rotella says. “We want people to have a unique experience, and we want to wow people from the second they buy the ticket.”

This sort of careful consideration goes into every aspect of producing EDC, and it comes from everybody involved in the process, from contractors to the 90 or so members of Insomniac’s staff — which includes veteran underground promoters experienced in putting on their own parties — who toil together over matters of staging, production, traffic flow, security, providing medical provisions, right down to the company responsible for creating all the artwork.

“They’re just good people,” Rotella says of The Firm, the EDM-seasoned graphics company based out of Denver. “They love the culture, they get the culture, they’ve lived the culture.”

So has Rotella. Although dance music fits nicely in the mainstream these days, this was definitely not the case when he launched Insomniac in 1993. In fact, even when EDC moved to Las Vegas in 2011, the landscape looked different.

“Dance music culture and Vegas weren’t, by any means, connected,” Rotella recalls. “The culture was not here. XS was not playing dance music. Hakkasan didn’t exist. Light club didn’t exist. There was no dance music here. It was a big risk. I didn’t how it was going to turn out. I didn’t know if our core fans would follow us here, but I had to give it a try.”

They did, obviously, but it has taken tenacity to get here. When Insomniac left Los Angeles to come to Vegas, it did so in the shadow of controversy, trailed by adversity.

Besides dealing with lawsuits, Rotella was indicted on criminal charges, including embezzlement, conspiracy and bribery, associated with EDC LA. While several counts have been dropped, Rotella faces two remaining charges.

Although Insomniac lost $3 million the first year, the move here ended up being successful. But it hasn’t been without it’s challenges, from uninvited scrutiny brought on by five fatalities related to the first several installments of EDC in Las Vegas to a looming threat of a proposed 8 percent entertainment-tax increase on tickets.

Though EDC generates a substantial amount of revenue, the margins aren’t nearly as big as people think, Rotella says, and this is a pressing concern.

“We have to get on it right away,” he says. “We can’t afford, as a company, to do an event of this size at a loss. So we will get on it right away and see what’s possible. We have faith that we’ll figure it out. We’ve had a lot of challenges in the 20 years that we’ve been doing shows.”

Enduring those hurdles and setbacks is exactly what it took to get to this point, and that applies not just to EDC but EDM in general.

“I mean, there’s tons of things I would do differently if I had the knowledge I have now, but I couldn’t have because that’s the only way I learned,” he says. “There was no road map to build what has been built here. It was do-it-yourself, just like punk rock. The underground rave culture was a do-it-yourself thing. That was the only way you could learn.

“I’m doing this for the same reason why I did it when I started,” Rotella says. “I love it. I get a lot out of it. It’s gratifying, it feels good to me, and it makes me excited to wake up in the morning, and it makes me happy.

“If this all of a sudden — I’ve seen it happen before with this music and this culture, where it’s not the cool thing — peaked, I’d still be doing it, whether it’s 400 people or 400,000 people. This is what I like to wake up to in the morning.”

That requires sleep. Pulling together EDC Las Vegas and the other events across the country, Rotella chose a moniker that seems fitting, and so does EDC’s ever-present owl motif.

“The owl represents Insomniac,” Rotella points out. “It represents me, as a night owl. It represents all the people at the company that are working 24/7, and the scene, and night culture — we’re all a bunch of night owls.

“There’s so many different kind of owls, but they’re all the same species, right, just like all the attendees at the festival. We’re all the same, but we’re also different, and we all come together.”

Read more of Dave Herrera at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com.