Kevin Bronson on April 15th, 2013

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Who: Robert DeLong in the Mojave Tent
In 3 or Fewer Words: Lunch-hour whiplash.
Memorable Because: No sooner had Deap Vally finished their excursion into the gritty blues of rock’s past than Robert DeLong gave the growing crowd in the Mojave Tent a glimpse of the future. The cherubic DeLong is proof that all electronic music is not created equally; he doesn’t just play it, he performs it – part multi-instrumentalist, part producer, part gamer. He started his set by looping his tweaked voice, percussion and synth. Then, furiously, he roared through 30 minutes of poppy, dubsteppy, rocky electro, at times banging away on a good old-fashioned drum kit (!), at others playing and manipulating keyboards and at still others singing and joy-sticking those vocals with a Wii controller. Some of DeLong’s songs from “Just Movement” were dance tent-worthy, but others were merely catchy collages, folk music as imagined in a space station. He also has something to say, as the single “Global Concepts” suggests. His logo is an orange, chopped X, probably because he chops a lot of X’s, but except for a few minutes when the video monitors flanking the stage projected the wrong signal (a button-pusher in the sparsely populated dance tent), DeLong’s set earned nothing but amazed “ohs.” Your move, Weekend 2 attendees.
What I’d Tell My Friends Who Were Day-Partying: You missed something truly new.
– K.B.