HARD Summer Music Festival Makes Its Presence Known

This weekend marks the return of the annual HARD Summer Music Festival and thousands of dance music devotees are expected to converge on Los Angeles State Historic Park in downtown L.A.

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For the first time in the five years since launching at nearby Shrine Auditorium, the 2012 event will take place over two days and feature performances on four stages. Headliners include Grammy-winning EDM titan Skrillex and indie favorites Bloc Party. Other noteworthy acts on the bill include Boys Noize, Miike Snow and Little Dragon. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is among the DJs  tapped to play as well for late night revelers.

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Musical variety and an open playing field has made HARDfest a destination festival in the vein of a smaller SoCal Electric Daisy Carnival, which migrated to Las Vegas in 2011. But with HARDfest attendance growing from 10,000 to 30,000 last summer, that’s meant extra strain on a city already battling a bad image when it comes to uninterrupted dance parties. Perhaps partly because of that setback, but more as a result of the potential traffic nightmare, HARD Events, which was recently acquired by Live Nation, has teamed up with the Los Angeles Metro to provide free Metro Rail fare locally.

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Previously, the festival has featured popular but fairly PG-rated acts like alt-hip-hop duo N.E.R.D., party rockers LMFAO and DJ Steve Aoki . This year’s lineup features more adult fare like 70s funk legend Bootsy Collins and pedigreed producer A-Trak along with plenty of next-big-thing newcomers. Not yet sold out a day before the gates open, it has yet to be seen whether HARDfest itself fits the same criteria.

Watch a trailer for the 2012 HARD Summer Music Festival below:

Twitter: @THRMusic