Lights All Night Turns 10

The 1990’s birthed the sound of contemporary EDM-which lead to mainstream dominance in the 2000’s. The music and culture that fueled underground raves morphed into the soundtrack for mega-festivals around the world. Dallas has always maintained a strong and sizeable community of EDM fanatics. Scott Osburn and Hank Keller saw their hometown of Dallas as fertile ground to host its own large-scale EDM festival. In 2010 the duo produced the first Lights All Night at Plaza of the America’s headlined by Ghostland Observatory. From those humble beginnings the festival has grown to become a marquee destination music event attended by fans from all over the world.

After Plaza of the America’s, the festival spent a one-year stint at Fair Park and three years at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center before settling in at Dallas Market Center which has been hosted LAN since 2015. Name an EDM icon and chances are they’ve performed at LAN. Calvin Harris, Tiesto, Kaskade, Flosstradamus, Deadmau5 have all graced the stage. To celebrate 10 years of success and cap off the decade this year’s headliners included Skrillex, BassnectAr and Porter Robinson performing under his hardcore alter-ego Virtual Self. Lights All Night should be viewed as a source of inspiration within the burgeoning Dallas-Fort Worth music festival scene. The producers of this event have managed to find success in a business that causes most entrepreneurs to go broke, and within a genre saturated with competition. We should all tip our hats to Lights All Night for 10 years of blissful sensory overload and hope that beat keeps dropping on the last weekend of every year for decades to come. Onstage Systems did the lighting design. Photos by Andrew Sherman