If Glitch Mob were a well-dressed boy band parading around a 20-feet-high stage, we would be the droves of screaming girls in the audience throwing our training bras on the stage in hopes of getting noticed among the flashing lights and pubescent mayhem. At Lollapalooza at Perry’s stage, as the sun burnt us to a crisp, we really couldn’t tell the difference between Glitch Mob members edIT (“The Crunkmaster Himself”), Boreta (“The Iceman”) and Ooah (“The Mob Boss”) and their boy band alter egos because we were … er … screaming like little girls from the sweaty, gyrating crowd. We’ve had the pleasure of becoming freaks in the night to Glitch Mob’s notoriously bass-heavy sets with the moon suspended in the air (along with covering the boys on ChinaShop when they performed on the Red Bull Music Academy Stage at this past year’s Detroit Electronic Music Festival), but in the middle of the afternoon with the Chicago skyline all around us, the vibe took on a different feeling and meaning — one that reminded us of those midday warehouse raves we used to frequent in our teens (which, you know, is a good thing). Perhaps it was the amount of ineffective glow sticks floating around in the crowd, or the rows of passed out humans creating a sort of flesh border around the dancing perimeter — we can’t quite put our finger on it. But when the electronic trio, who are noted as some of the more accessible deejays around considering their innovative performance set-up, dropped their initial nugget of drum-and-bass splintered jams, we knew we shouldn’t have taken the blue pill … or was it the red one?

Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper, photos by Dustin Downing