Electric Zoo Returns Under Watchful Eyes

How orderly can an electronic dance party be and still stay fun? That was the question facing the sixth annual Electric Zoo Festival, the three-day event on Randalls Island that started on Friday. In 2013, two festivalgoers died after using the drug known as Molly, containing MDMA, and the festival's third day was shut down at the request of New York City. This year, caution was omnipresent. Concertgoers were required to watch a two-minute antidrug video clip, drug-sniffing dogs met arrivals, bags were searched, uniformed security personnel were plentiful all over the site, and there were highly visible booths and roving 'ZooKeepers' to offer medical attention.

The festival's widely publicized strictures may have cut down on attendance. Official figures were not available, but on Friday and Saturday, when I was at the festival, the open fields and tent stages on Randalls Island were considerably less packed than at Electric Zoo 2013. Still, thousands of people showed up in their party outfits: women in face paint, rhinestones, beaded bracelets, butterfly wings, tutus and fluorescent bikinis; men in tough-talking T-shirts, wild wigs or superhero costumes. Under watchful eyes, they danced.

With six stages and a lineup of more than 140 acts, most of them wielding laptops, Electric Zoo offered a panorama of electronic dance music past and present, exposing the widening aesthetic divide between them. Dance-music expectations, skills and attention spans have changed over the decades: from rapturous immersion to walloping impact, from the slow dissolve to the jump-cut, from the contemplation of intricate musical layers to pop choruses and thrill-ride jolts.

Electric Zoo's main-stage headliners on Friday and Saturday nights were mainstays: the trance D.J.s David Guetta and Armin Van Buuren, who were at the first Electric Zoo in 2009 and have appeared at nearly every one since. The four-on-the-floor thump of their trance productions has migrated from dance clubs to radio airwaves, often in songs about seizing the moment or trading sadness for joy. Their sets shuffled amid their hit productions - sometimes with singalong lyrics on the video screen - and the staple sounds of trance: the 4/4 kick drum, the nasal-toned Morse-code synthesizer line, the ratcheting drumroll crescendo followed by plush chords.

Commercial success hasn't emboldened the headliners, or many of the other trance purveyors in the Electric Zoo lineup. When they weren't simply playing one another's tracks, they worked through a small bag of tricks, contented with the same timbres and formulas and calling out periodically for fans to put their hands in the air (which worked every time). The arrival in this decade of American-style dubstep, with its rawer synthesizer tones and sudden shifts to half-speed, has only slightly shaken up the complacency of trance; now, the D.J.s also dip briefly and gingerly into dubstep effects.

This year's other headliner, scheduled Sunday night, was Jack U, the partnership of festival regulars Skrillex and Diplo, who have been champions of dubstep and other bass-loving styles, but shortly after 4:30 p.m., thunderstorms forced the cancellation of the festival's final hours.

Outside the tyranny of trance, there were glimpses of dance music's many other possibilities, digital and analog. With fast fingers and huge hard-drive libraries, electronic acts can churn through giant stockpiles of sources, turning juxtapositions into comedy or illumination. Zeds Dead rampaged through bits of hip-hop, pop, house, reggae, dubstep and more, thoroughly unpredictable and thoroughly entertaining. Nervo, a two-woman team, strung together dozens of electro-flavored pop snippets, lingering over some while they showed off synchronized arm moves. A-Trak brought turntable virtuosity to the main stage in an afternoon set, applying it to more current styles, letting pop tunes emerge but also making them leap and stutter.

Two groups, Destroid and Keys N Krates, used live instruments to put human muscle behind the lurch and crunch of dubstep and the brittle, hip-hop-rooted sound of trap, with its pattering snare and cymbal sounds. Carnage, who performed on the main stage, made his reputation with a style he has called 'festival trap,' but his much-anticipated set was too fractured; it sputtered out repeatedly, like an old car in the cold, before righting itself for a careening, free-associative final stretch.

Yet there was also room for the hypnotic grooves associated with dance music's more underground days. Jamie xx, a member of the moody, Minimalistic band the xx who doubles as a disc jockey, segued his remixes of xx songs into layers of bass and percussion, as if revealing darker subconscious motivations. Bonobo overlaid the brisk beat of house music with plinking counterpoint hinting at Steve Reich. Chris Liebing let a house beat hover over subterranean bass motion; Gesaffelstein, who was a producer on Kanye West's 'Yeezus,' generated nervy, relentless techno momentum.

Electric Zoo has long featured a stage called Sunday School Grove where renowned D.J.-producers devoted to more abstract - but still fully danceable - styles like deep house and techno can let sets unfold at their own pace. There I heard some of the festival's most satisfying sets, devoted to the disappearing art of the segue, with tracks metamorphosing continuously and almost imperceptibly. Pete Tong gave his house set a perky, carnivalesque strut; Josh Wink toyed with epigrammatic synthesizer lines that dared to shift in and out of 4/4; Sasha's set was lush, rigorous and wistful, and Danny Tenaglia let a brawny beat lead toward ominous sustained depths.

This year's Electric Zoo also added a 'Vinyl Only' stage - low to the ground, with no video backdrop and a dance area the size of a modest suburban backyard - as a reminder of dance music's analog era, with long, leisurely sets for handfuls of dancers. It was placed en route to the exits, so that on their way home from the video, pyrotechnics, pop tunes and commercial clout of the trance D.J.s and their laptops, partygoers could glimpse their music's distant roots.

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