Electronic Dance Music Explodes in Gainesville Nightlife

Heads bob. Hips swing. Fists pump. The bass drops.

A light show shines lasers on hundreds of dancers. Most are local college students, swaying their body to every beat spun by DJ Adrian Villaverde. No lyrics, just music — electronic dance music.

Outside, dozens of people are lined up, cash and ID in hand, waiting to be let in to the place to be on a Saturday Night, Forum Nightclub at 233 W University Ave.

Forum is not about being seen with the right crowd, though. It’s about the music and the atmosphere.

“It’s the perfect place to rage,” said Oriana Paolillo, a 20-year-old UF junior and a regular patron of the new nightclub. “The music is ridiculously good, and the feeling you get when you’re dancing to house and dub is incomparable.”

Antonio Mercado, owner of The Dynasty Group, the marketing company behind the opening of Forum, Gainesville’s newest, EDM-exclusive nightclub, agrees. “This club is not for the Miami, bottle crowd. It’s for college kids going bananas.”

And it is within the past year that the Gainesville nightlife crowd, along with all of the U.S., has gone embraced dubstep and house.

EDM went from being only heard in underground music scenes, to a full-fledged phenomenon that has been embraced by top 40 recording artists such as Britney Spears and Rihanna in their most recent albums, the more than 100,000 people who, according to the Miami Herald, attended the EDM festival, Ultra, in Miami, and the hundreds of club-goers who helped Forum reach capacity on its Jan. 14 opening night.

MTV has also acknowledged the new craze. In late December, it declared 2011 “The Year Dubstep Broke,” describing the music genre’s rise into the mainstream music scene.

But according to Jake “Va-Ye” Del Valle, a local DJ who has opened for sold-out acts such as Alesso, EDM wasn’t always this popular.

In Summer 2011, when Va-Ye first started DJing for Kava, a local bar and hookah lounge, he was limited to playing rap music only. Now, thanks to patron requests, Va-Ye plays a mix of house music and rap.

Va-Ye also plays an all-house set Mondays at Fubar, a downtown bar, and mixes in EDM, top-40 and hip-hop on the “Get Tanked Thursdays” at 101 Cantina in Midtown.

“I play house songs, and you see the crowd— they’re getting into it now,” Va-Ye said. “This energy that this music carries, it’s catching on like wildfire.”

DJ Vijay Seixas was the first to bring an EDM-exclusive night to Gainesville when he opened the Saturday night Neon Liger Dance Party at Spannk nightclub in 2008.

Then, Neon Liger was frequented by “more of the underground, alternative crowd. The punk rock kids and hipsters” said Seixas. “Now it’s anyone, more college kids. It’s not limited to the alternative kids”

EDM began to spread in Gainesville in late summer 2010 when Gainesville became a popular stop for big-name DJs in the EDM world, such as Grammy-award winning DJ Skrillex, said Mercado, owner of The Dynasty Group.

“After shows started selling out, [booking more EDM performers] started to make sense,” he said. “After all, Gainesville is only a reflection of the national market.”

Mercado’s company, the Dynasty Group, has marketed some of Gainesville’s most frequented bar and nightclub events since 2003. It has also booked most of the recent, local EDM performances, including Steve Aoki in January and Alesso in February.

Both Aoki, a DJ and producer who has worked alongside artists such as Kid Cudi and Blink-182’s Travis Barker, and Alesso, one-third of the DJ super-group Swedish House Mafia, drew sold out crowds.

Within the past year, The Dynasty Group has also brought performances by Grammy-nominated DJs Tiesto and Avicci, and award-winning DJs Diplo, Porter Robinson and Laidback Luke.

Performers such as Steve Aoki keep coming back to Gainesville because they love the energy of the college crowd, Mercado said.

“It’s not about the location, we don’t have venues of the caliber of those in places like Las Vegas,” he said. “It’s purely about the music, and college kids, they have more energy.”

This same energy led the owners of The Dynasty Group to open Forum, one of the only EDM-exclusive nightclub the town has ever seen, capitalizing on the local demand for house and dubstep.

“People said we were crazy,” Mercado said. “They told us to keep it more mainstream, but we thought we could get away with it because people are really that hungry for this kind of music,” Mercado said.

“So did we get away with it? The answer has been a huge, two-thumbs-up, kind of yes. The force is there.”