Neon District was a party thrown by Attack The Music who had been running music shows at anime conventions in LA and Chicago for nearly a decade at this point. These shows were the best opportunity I had to see my favorite artists from the rave scene in Japan play live before I could go to Japan myself. The conventions paid to fly over the DJs while Attack The Music curated a shuffling list of talent each year. This year featured the likes of Taku Takahashi, Banvox, TeddyLoid, Pa’s Lam System, Yuc’e, Ram Rider and Massive New Krew with additional support from American DJs to open and close the all-night show.

For a show run inside of a convention hall, the audio sounded really good. There were no live microphones to cause much feedback or present those kinds of issues, so they had that going for them too.

Every artist really came out swinging. Pa’s Lam System is one of my personal favorite acts, and was actually featured on some of the flyers for previous events I mentioned, but I somehow always missed them due to time constraints. Pa’s Lam System is a trio act, where all 3 people take turns DJing while wearing monkey masks on stage. They had a huge surge in popularity in the mid 2010’s with the rise of Futurebass in the electronic scene, finding a lot of success with their single “I’m Coming” which can be heard playing in the first twitter embed featured in this section.

If I went over each act individually, this section would end up having a long, nuanced paragraph for each act, so I’ll resist the temptation and just tell you that everyone killed it at this show. This was one of the best events that Attack The Music put on stateside.