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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Day 1\n\n 11:15 p.m.\n\n I'm standing in the barricaded walkway cutting through the center of the crowd. One fan calls me over to the wall and says he has a favor to ask: go backstage and ask Tiesto to change the light show so that this festival-goer can put a message up proposing to some girl. I begin to try to explain to him the various practical matters prohibiting me from doing this\u2014not least of which is the fact that Tiesto goes nowhere without five bodyguards, but also the fact that, believe it or not, he is not controlling the light show from his DJ booth on the stage\u2014but he launches into a story about how he is setting himself straight and needs this girl. Then he boasts that he's sold 7,000 tablets of MDMA so far at Ultra. I say I'll go ask Tiesto, and he tells me his brother is friend's with Timbaland's son, and they'll just get Timbaland to have David Guetta do it on Sunday.\n\n Day 2 \n\n 3:30 p.m.\n\n The dance duo CO/OP, comprised of Ronnie Rose and Jon Janerich, are relaxing at the Epic hotel's pool after a killer afternoon set, sharing mimosas with their friends and manager. As part of the seemingly ubiquitous Ultra takeover, there's even a DJ blasting electro poolside at an upscale hotel. People are contorting themselves as wildly here as if they were down the street at the Main Stage. I'm about to wonder aloud why people are missing the festival they came here for to dance to a DJ at the hotel, but there's a collective distraction as we try to discern if a 40-year old woman's thong is encrusted with real or fake diamonds.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 4:00 p.m.\n\n After the poolside break, I return to the festival grounds and take a moment to note some of Ultra's fashion trends. The most common look is a T-shirt proclaiming \"I'm in Miami, Bitch.\" It's challenged only by \"Sex, Drugs, and Dubstep\" or the \"I love you but I've chosen...\" (fill in the blank: \"techno,\" \"house,\" \"dubstep\") series. There are many American Indian headdresses, and one bro wearing a blonde, braided wig underneath a plastic Viking helmet. A couple walks past me, both topless, covered in body paint mimicking the Na'vi from Avatar.\n\n 4:45 p.m.\n\n Skrillex and his entourage, including girlfriend Ellie Goulding, pull up in a long speedboat, docking next to the press tent. I've been trying to figure out how Skrillex can go out in the sun considering his pale complexion. He's, like, Cullen family white.\n\n 9:00 p.m.\n\n On my way back to the Main Stage, the crowd is far more intense than before. It's nearly impossible to get anywhere in less than 15 minutes. Two girls make out in the middle of the walkway, obstructing my pathway. Both are in bikinis and covered in the projections of dozens of rapidly moving green and red lasers, seemingly coming from some source below them. The girls seem like they are on a lot of drugs, and are undulating as a crowd forms around them taking photographs. This lasts 30 minutes.\n\n 11:00 p.m.\n\n For most of Ultra, backstage access is easy for those of us with production passes. And then Madonna shows up. She comes onstage to introduce Avicii, then dances beside him as he opens his set with her new single \"Girl Gone Wild.\" Then she leaves. The whole thing is anti-climactic and seems like a shallow plug for her new album, MDNA. The only other sighting of celebrities outside the EDM scene: Paris and Nicky Hilton. Nobody seems to care.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 2:45 a.m. \n\n A-Trak gives me and a friend VIP passes to his Fool's Gold label's after-party. Sitting in a curtained-off area side-stage and watching Just Blaze's hip-hop dominated set, I talk with A-Trak's manager, Renee. She tells me about her conversion to the EDM scene: when DJ AM, whom she dated, dragged her to a Daft Punk show. At the same time, I'm having a mini-conversion of my own. A-Trak brings a grittiness to his set, returning the sound to its original home, the clubs. Afterwards he claps me on the shoulder, his other hand gripping a perspiring bottle of Corona. \"This is the shit you don't hear at Ultra,\" he says.\n\n Day 3\n\n 6:00 p.m.\n\n I'm sitting in the trailer of Steven Ellison, the man behind Flying Lotus, with a few of his friends. He and I talk about the influences on his music, ranging from dreams and metaphysics to his aunt Alice Coltrane's album Lord of Lords. \"I want my music to be like that. I want it to be forever, man,\" he says. In the background, his manager is meticulously rolling a joint. Their friend is drinking Jameson straight from the bottle.\n\n 9:00 p.m.\n\n On the VIP deck looking out over the trance music tent I can see nearly two dozen massive hexagonal screens hanging throughout the tent, transferring the experience from a stage-based light show to a total, encompassing atmosphere. There's a thirty-something rave girl next to me in pink, furry leggings that run from her shoe to her knee. She also has pink hair. To her right is a man in his late fifties. He's spinning around and around. He's one of the oldest people I've seen here and perhaps the most out of his mind. He speaks in complete gibberish. He's wearing a giant green Dr. Seuss-esque hat and a shirt that says \"Spanish Triathalon: Eating, Drinking, Fucking,\" complete with diagrams.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 9:30 p.m.\n\n During David Guetta's set, I'm standing in the barricaded walkway again. This time, I'm back at the sound stage, a particularly massive structure roughly halfway back through the crowd. Next to me is Auggie, an employee of Mountain Productions, the staging company behind Ultra. Auggie is bald with a mustache gelled into two eccentric curls. He's wearing a Carhartt work kilt. (These exist). We watch the intricate system of lights and lasers, projected from nearly 20 massive screens flanking the stage. The crowd is a sea of multi-colored, glowing tubes, dispersed amongst festival-goers by the Ultra Event Staff. I don't know if it's Auggie's mustache, kilt, or the way he authoritatively grips the bar of the sound stage and gazes out, but it's as if he's presiding over some LED-drenched communion. For a moment, I have a glimpse at the possibilities of transcendence at Ultra. Then I remember I'm watching David \"Fuck Me I'm Famous\" Guetta."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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