This summer was supposed to be the Summer of Rave in L.A. But the death of a young dance music fan after attending the Electric Daisy Carnival in June threw a bevy of high-profile events into a tailspin, leading to cancellations and logistical scrambling to meet new city-authority attention.

This Saturday's Monster Massive at the L.A. Sports Arena is one of the few major electronica events to come in the aftermath of EDC. The success or failure of the concert, which features a top-shelf lineup including Carl Cox, Moby and U.K. house vet Steve Lawler, could indicate whether the bustling L.A. rave scene is in recovery mode, especially considering that the sounds of four-on-the-floor beats and scintillating synths are now the default mode of most of rap and pop radio today.

We talked with Lawler about rave culture's second wind, and how it's still misunderstood in the mainstream.

So much of American pop and rap music is informed by the sounds and structures of techno and electronica today. How has that mainstreaming influenced or changed the ambitions that longtime dance music artists want from the genre and culture now?

I’ve never been drawn to the more commercial side of music. What excites me about music are things that are new and creative; the birth of something is always where it is most exciting, in my opinion. What tends to happen is artists ... start music trends and fashions and they go on to become commercial. By the time it has become commercial, we usually have been a part of developing and creating something new. Pushing a new direction.

And that’s the pattern that I’ve always found myself falling in. The whole idea of the R&B and hip-hop scene using elements of house, techno, and electro, I don’t really know how to view it. In one breath, it’s a good thing because it’s introducing new people to electronic music, but on the other part I feel like something has been stolen, because something that we have nurtured and created in the basements of the world is now being capitalized, marketed to death and commercialized and used solely to make money.

What this crossover has done [is] opened up electronic music to people who might have never listened to it before. What that means is, big events like Monster Massive and Electric Daisy Carnival will become busier and attract a much broader audience. You will find, in some cases, people may go to these events in search for their commercial fix and stumble across an arena with someone like myself or Carl Cox, Digweed, etc. playing and think, “I really like this, actually I prefer this than what I heard on the radio.”

I remember when I stumbled upon house music for the first time it was by accident back in 1989. Just by pure accident I heard this music and I then spent the rest of my life following it. So if this does open that door and bring more people in, then it’s a positive thing, in my humble opinion.

The best song on Conor O’Brien’s debut album as Villagers, “Becoming a Jackal,” is about a bus breaking down. Not in any dramatic fashion, just a typical sputtering out that leaves the Dubliner among a few dozen passengers stranded on an Irish roadside. That crew makes up the cast of "Twenty-Seven Strangers," a quiet acoustic rumination on loneliness, death and the gnawing need for love.

“I don’t drive at home, so I’m always taking buses, and I really wanted to write a song about this mundane thing and see where it went,” O’Brien said. “I want my songs to discuss things that aren’t really said between people, and when you put that in an everyday setting, it shows that everyone has a universe inside their head.”

The rest of the world of Villagers, which play the Music Box tonight, is a bit more intense. The album’s rooted in simple tools -– O’Brien’s vibrato-stricken vocals and sprawling, lyric-centric songwriting; loosely wound guitar strums and homespun orchestral complements. But it adds up to one of the most interesting and singular visions for the genre since, well, the last inky-haired Conor O. of Irish lineage to self-lacerate over dark-eyed indie folk.

New York-based director Sam O'Hare offers maybe the most unusual vision of California's preeminent music festival yet -- one from a three-quarters angle above everything. "Coachelletta" makes judicious use of the tilt-shift technique (you saw the popular Web video visual conceit used in "The Social Network") to render the breadth of the festival and its crowds as an oddly touching miniature. The installation art in particular looks impressively pagan from up there.

-- August Brown

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

Close to an hour into Miike Snow's headlining set at a sold-out Wiltern on Friday night, something went wrong. It might have been a blown fuse, a busted MIDI apparatus or something even more esoteric. But for about 20 minutes, the glitch sent the experimental electropop trio offstage while a team frantically poked at their synthesizer rig.

A fog machine idly sputtered in the blue-lit background until they finally solved the problem. “This is like when you bring somebody home to finally make love, and you realize at the last minute that you don't have a condom,” singer Andrew Wyatt joked to an audibly frustrated crowd.

Mechanical failure silences artists all the time, and Miike Snow's previous 45 minutes of witchy Nordic disco were entrancing. But it underscored how completely alien the idea of accidents is to today's pop audience. Pitch-correcting software, beat quantizing and pop radio's abdication of organic instruments have altered modern ears to make mistakes sound ever more mistaken.

T.I. may have talked a suicidal man off a ledge this week, but the rapper wasn't able to talk a federal judge in Atlanta into letting him off the hook from prison.

After breaking his probation (following a 10-month prison term for weapons charges) with an arrest for drug possession in Los Angeles early last month, the Grammy-winning rapper, born Clifford Harris Jr., will return to prison for 11 months, according to the Associated Press.

Harris is quoted as pleading for leniency and admitting he "screwed up" and needed drug counseling, but failed to sway the court's opinion. It's another blow for the rapper at a pivotal point in his career, after the success of his crime-caper film "Takers" and the forthcoming release of his new album, the now-unfortunately titled "King Uncaged."

-- August Brown

Photo: Clifford "T.I." Harris. Credit: Michael Loccisano / Getty Images

With the Jack Daniels barely yet rinsed from her toothbrush, Ke$ha is following her fellow purveyor of ravey synthpop in releasing a quick-followup EP to her January debut album, "Animal."

"Cannibal," available as a standalone record and as part of a deluxe reissue of "Animal" on Nov. 22, clocks in at eight new songs with production work by longtime mentor Dr. Luke, Benny Blanco, Max Martin and, intriguingly, "A Milli" producer Bangladesh. "Cannibal's" first single, the typographically challenging "We R Who We R," will make the rounds to radio Thursday, just in time for any weekend plans to get raked and wake up on an elephant in the desert.

-- August Brown

Photo: Brendan McDermid / Reuters

A list of upcoming concerts across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses.

Staples Center
Sade, Aug. 19 (Mon.)

Honda Center
Sade, Aug. 30 (Mon.)

Gibson Amphitheatre
Ozzy Osbourne, Feb. 1; Daniel Tosh, Dec. 4 (Fri.)

Hollywood Palladium
Above and Beyond, Dec. 10 (Thurs.)

Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre
Go Fest 2010 with Rascal Flatts, Oct. 17 (now)

Wiltern
Halford, Dec. 17 (Fri.)

Nokia Theatre
Stevie Wonder's House Full of Toys, Dec. 18 (Fri.)

There isn't a working band that has more fun playing live. The energy created is healing.

 
In the middle of Arcade Fire's set at the Shrine Auditorium on Thursday night, during its disco-dripping song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), the group's lead singer Win Butler ran offstage and into the crowd. This isn't unusual for the band — onstage the eight-member (and counting) ensemble batters the fourth wall as hard as it thwacks its dozens of drums, keyboards, violins and other sundry noisemakers.

What was strange was what Butler did when he made it to the back aisles. He gathered some new friends among the legion of iPhone picture-snappers, brushed his sweaty southern-goth haircut to the side and stopped to watch his band play.

Even if his jaunt was a bit of lead-singer peacocking, Butler still must have felt what the many hundreds of thousands of Arcade Fire fans have suspected since the arrival of its 2004 debut album “Funeral” — that we're watching a rambling cast of accordion-playing Canadians grow into the defining rock band of the 21st century.

The group has played some of the biggest stages the world can offer, licensed a song to the Super Bowl and topped album charts while releasing its music through the scruffy indie label Merge. Arcade Fire's best songs, like the gang-chorus rapture of “Wake Up” and call-and-response burner “Rebellion (Lies),” will be on our oldies stations in 40 years.

And after three albums, including the latest “The Suburbs,” the band members have finally written enough of them that their Shrine show could even make their singer take a step back and revel in the grandeur.

In 2010, three of the top MCs in mainstream rap have had major career turning points thwarted by legal drama. T.I., Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane have dealt with it in very different ways.

After a jail term resulting from 2007 gun charges, T.I. slipped up again last month when he was arrested on drug possession charges, just as his feature film “Takers” was topping the box office. (He will learn Oct. 15 whether his probation will be revoked and whether he has to return to prison.) After releasing the world-beating “Tha Carter III” and his poorly received rock album “Rebirth,” Lil Wayne nursed his active online personality from Rikers Island, where he’s serving a term on other gun-related charges, and released an odd collection of pre-jail tracks, “I Am Not a Human Being.”

Radric Davis, the 30-year-old Atlantan who raps as Gucci Mane, finished a six-month term in May for a parole violation stemming from assault charges. But unlike his peers, after his release, the droll and gruff-voiced rapper promptly cut his most confident and revealing album yet.

Davis’ jail stint forms the psychological backdrop of “The Appeal: Georgia’s Most Wanted,” his third full-length. But instead of a grim narrative of confinement, the subject is instead ground both for triumph and serious self-assessment. On the patio of the W hotel in Hollywood, nursing a glass of his favorite (and recipe-indeterminate) lemonade concoction, Davis admitted that the clink offers plenty of time to reevaluate what matters.

“I changed a lot in there,” Davis said. “I know this is serious now and I have a lot to get off my chest. This record is painful and gothic and epic, but it’s the soundtrack of my past.”

In August, the LAPD served the Echo Park performance space Echo Curio with the noise-scene equivalent of The Black Spot -- a warning to the venue operators to make their patrons stop brown-bagging booze. It was only a matter of time before the city noticed that the art and music venue on a busy stretch of Sunset Boulevard, open since 2006 and known for its loosely enforced $5 admissions, was missing a few other permits as well, namely the one permitting live music.

On Saturday, the venue posted a blog item noting that due to another city intervention, all shows in the space have either been canceled or moved to venues such as the Fretted Frog (for a stateside visit from Francophile folkie Francoiz Breut) or founders Grant Capes and Justin McInteer's houses while they procure the proper paperwork to continue hosting live shows. While the gallery will still be open, Echo Curio was on a hot streak of ambitious live bookings, including sets from Sub Pop's Tiny Vipers and disco revivalists Kisses, so we'll pour out a wrapped tallboy from King Liquor in memorial and hope that the music hiatus is a short one.

-- August Brown

Photo courtesy Echo Curio. Via The Eastsider LA

"I love those T-shirts!," Ellie Goulding said to a small coterie of young girls up front at the Roxy for the U.K. singer's debut in Los Angeles. The shirts were emblazoned with declarations of devotion to their new nascent favorite pop singer. "Did you make them?"

They had, in fact, made them. And Goulding should probably expect a few more sparkle-pen tributes in the near future. The 23-year-old's disco-bolstered, folk-bedecked pop has already made her a beloved festival act in the U.K., where such left-field things are allowed in the mainstream. But last night at the Roxy, with pretty much zero traction to date in the U.S., she gave hints that a well-oiled career may be ramping up in the spirit of label- and country-mate La Roux.

Goulding's breakout single, "Starry Eyed," is a scintillant but strange thing, full of stops and starts and reversed vocals and a big, ravey, filtered synth lurking about in the back of the chorus. It veers toward the precious at the big falsetto points (and, well, throughout the entire sparkle-saturated video), but then whips back to weird just as quickly.

It would be a fine little foundling of a single in itself, but the better part of her Roxy set seemed to cement her pop bona fides. They are considerable: Goulding's almost too perfectly named -- she tosses her goldenrod hair like its own instrument during the big dance breaks -- but she can reel off some pretty powerful drum and guitar chops when the song calls for it. And her voice, while really stylized and delicate on record, is a serious and sure instrument in person.

The first lines of Perfume Genius' album "Learning" are some of the most harrowing of the year. Over a simple pop piano line recorded to sound like it's coming through an apartment wall, Mike Hadreas promises that "No one will answer your prayers until you take off that dress.... But you will learn to mind me, and you will learn to survive me." It's the start of a 10-song pansexual psychodrama that's lovely to hear but a pretty terrifying one to listen to.

"Learning" is populated with Joy Division fans leaping to their deaths, addicts drinking mouthwash for a fix and a catalog of trailer-trash noir worthy of Harmony Korine. But the thing that takes the record from aggressively miserable to marrow-deep unnerving is the sheer loveliness of its production -- distant '70s New York minimalism run through a scrim of four-track static that has peers in William Basinski's tape decay, Arthur Russell's ear for repetition and open space and Antony & the Johnsons' sense of bloodletting grandeur. Hadreas not only makes the most of his jittery falsetto and rudimentary piano playing, he uses them to turn songs into letters in a bottle floating on a vast ocean of withering grief, bleak humor and, in the ambient suite "Gay Angels," maybe a tiny shred of redemption.

Hadreas rarely plays live, but he makes his L.A. debut tonight at the Masonic Hall at Hollywood Forever at 9 p.m.

-August Brown

Photo: Mike Hadreas, a.k.a. Perfume Genius. Photo: From Beggars Group