TuneLab
EDC Live - EDC Las Vegas 2016: Markus Schulz
circuitGROUNDS hosted by Dreamstate
Markus Schulz at EDC Las Vegas 2016, on the Dreamstate-hosted circuitGROUNDS stage—this is the sound of a man who believes the rapture is a festival and he's the chosen pilot. We're here for the full sermon: the sweeping arms, the dramatic pauses, the feeling that every breakdown is a personal test of our emotional fortitude. The vibe is vast, laser-cut, and unapologetically euphoric, designed for 50,000 people to feel a singular, chest-tightening wave of feeling. This is pure, stadium-sized trance and progressive house, operating at a brisk average of 130.3 BPM and largely in the epic, open-sounding key of 12A.
The energy balance skews heavily mid-range (0.58), which is where all those enormous, cascading synth melodies live, supported by a solid low-end thump (0.28) and strategic high-end lifts (0.13) for the climactic moments. Schulz's mixing is seamless and narrative-driven, building peaks with precision. The tracklist is a journey through his Coldharbour wheelhouse. He opens with his own radio edit of Solarstone's classic 'Solarcoaster', setting the tone for melodic grandeur.
The set pivots on his own anthems like 'Destiny' and the peak-time weapon 'Remember This' in its Mark Sherry remix guise. A highlight is the driving, muscular tech-trance of Fisherman & Hawkins's 'Oblivion', before things get wonderfully silly with the NJ JACKALS track 'Intense Sex With Hearts Racing'—a title only trance could get away with. The journey is quintessential: from the opening ascent of 'Solarcoaster', through the emotional core of 'Destiny', and ending in the chaotic, over-the-top bliss of that closing NJ JACKALS bomb.