Day Trip, Insomniac Events’ two-day house music-filled festival, kicked off Saturday, June 24, with an eager crowd ready to dance the night away as they strutted through security lines when the festival gates opened for the sold-out event next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
Day Trip is the Burbank-based electronic music company’s first event since last weekend’s Beyond Wonderland Festival at Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state, where a gunman killed two former Southern California residents and injured several other attendees in a camping area near the festival grouinds.
Days after the incident, Pasquale Rotella, CEO of Insomniac Events, responded with a series of posts on Instagram to offer his condolences to everyone affected by the shooting. Fans responded to Rotella’s posts by expressing a variety of concerns, such as a lack of security at previous Insomniac events, the need for better bag checks and a desire to downsize crowds.
Yet, that didn’t stop fans from coming en masse for the third edition of Day Trip, with the intention to “keep the energy high with ‘plur’ vibes,” said Josh Simpson, a Long Beach resident who was attending his fifth Insomniac festival, using an acronym for “peace, love, unity and respect” that is popular among electronic music fans.
Simpson said he and his group of friends knew the risks since hearing the news of the shooting at Beyond Wonderland, but that didn’t stop them from wanting to enjoy the moment, as the electronic house community has always been about support and family anyway, he notes.
“Sure, it’s scary, and it’s something we never expected to happen at an Insomniac event, but we didn’t want that to (deter) us from just enjoying today because there is so much good happening with this…
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