San Francisco’s Portola Festival is for the music heads — but still has room to growPortola Music Festival is for the real music lovers, the ones that like to get down.
On September 28 and 29, seemingly every raver from the San Francisco Bay Area descended upon SF’s crane-filled Pier 80, transforming the active shipyard into a massive dance floor.
Portola’s strength is its expansive definition of dance music fortified by a hearty dose of live performers like Justice, Gesaffelstein, Tycho, RÜFÜS DU SOL, Disclosure, Soulwax, Barry Can’t Swim, and LP Giobbi (who showed off her deft piano skills in a sparkling hybrid set).
Launched three years ago by Coachella-producer Goldenvoice (owned by American live event monolith AEG), Portola has become a major event in California’s festival season. Amidst a shaky, saturated festival market, where events like Goldenvoice’s This Ain’t No Picnic and Barcelona-bred Primavera Sound, both held in Los Angeles County in 2022, weren’t renewed and even Coachella was unable to sell out this year, Portola’s success is impressive (and warranted). The two-day dance music festival sold out for the first time this year, spiking its estimated attendee count to 45,000, up from 35,000 attendees the past two years.
Justice at Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
While electronic music festivals proliferate across Europe, they remain more limited in the United States — EDC and Ultra are two of the biggest, geared towards the EDM crowd in the glitzy, bottle service havens of Las Vegas and Miami, respectively. Portola feels much more closely related to Detroit’s Movement, one of the country’s longest-running and most authentic-feeling dance music fests, where people show up to dance.
French electro duo Justice is the undisputed highlight of Portola 2024. Their dizzying new 11-ton light apparatus, debuted at Coachella, enraptures revellers as they mashup their catalogue in a raucous, captivating mix, where Mannequin Love, We Are Your Friends and The Party become one, for example. It’s hard to tell what gear Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé are commanding at their three stations, but the pair spent the captivating 75-minute set carefully attending their synths and controllers, meticulously crafting the sound design live. Even with an annoyingly quiet main stage (likely to avoid noise complaints), Justice still provided a transcendent space trip.
Chicago-bred, SF-based Portola three-time attendee Mike speaks for many of us when naming his favourite sets of the weekend. “JUSTICE in all caps. My friends and I jumped up and down until our bones hurt. The set was truly thrilling and probably a top 10 ever for me…I was looking up their tour schedule afterwards. I want more.”
Soulwax at Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
Disclosure’s set also stands out; a reminder that the Lawrence brothers’ 2013 debut album Settle still slaps. Their live set is a jovial demonstration of their musicality, with the lads playing drums, bass and synths, even enlisting help from a brass band for Tondo.
Other 2024 highlights include nu-disco queen Jessie Ware, representing the dance pop side of the lineup, who shook it until the Pearls came off in a silver-sequined, pink marabou-lined tunic. Landing a stunning cover of Cher’s Believe, she took a victory lap of the Pier Stage to party with her fans, closing with the unabashed enthusiasm of piano house bop Free Yourself.
Le petite dark prince Gesaffelstein slayed us with his abrasive, sexy synths from up high in his jet-black crystal lair, while Four Tet went into full rave mode in the Warehouse. On the complete other end of the electro spectrum, yet equally captivating, was Peaches with a poignant dose of activism, nudity and full-on camp provided by dancers dressed as vaginas and laugh-out-loud lyrics (see Dick In the Air).
The stacked lineup is the sell for many attendees and something the artists also appreciate. Four Tet could be seen vibing side-stage for Joy Orbison, and Marc Gilfry of funky dance pop outfit Neil Frances tells us that Soulwax’s set was “life-changing” while dancing to Gesaffelstein.
Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
For Carlita, who played the Warehouse stage with DJ Tennis as their Astra Club duo, the crowd was the highlight of the event. “The vibes were amazing, and I really liked the stage we played. People were really receptive to the music we were playing, and we were going a bit more experimental,” the Turkish-Italian DJ/producer says. “It was a music head crowd. They were not just there to be there; they were there to listen to music.”
The festival is a respite from the city’s notorious unfashionableness, offering residents a vital space to let their creativity shine and freak flags fly, with colourful, sparkly and downright silly attire encouraged. Cute coordinating ‘fits identified friend groups and couples, including an adorable partnered rave raccoon and disco chicken, a nod to Portola’s mascots. While he may have lost his fellow Teletubbies, gay icon Tinky Winky spread unbridled joy as he raged to Justice atop someone’s shoulders.
“We sorely needed a festival like this. People here love to dance (I think noticeably more so than my hometown of Chicago) and Portola is a wonderful venue for that,” Mike adds.
Nia Archives at Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
It’s refreshing to experience a lineup with an expansive definition of dance music. Portola leans into live electronic acts, including dance pop queens, with a fun helping of millennial nostalgia, including artists ripe for a “comeback,” like Nelly Furtado last year and Natasha Bedingfield and Peaches this year. Yet the decisions to offer M.I.A. a platform to rant about immigration ahead of the election and to keep Róisín Murphy on the 2023 lineup after making anti-trans comments online are deeply questionable.
There are women and people of colour on each lineup, but it could easily be more diverse and representative of dance music’s Black, queer roots in Chicago and Detroit. Futuristic 00’s Bay Area rap group Deltron 3030 was a welcome addition, but it would be nice to see more local acts young and old getting their shine. Portola 2024’s B2Bs were thoughtful, stellar pairings: Astra Club; Ed Banger icons Braxe + Falcon with label head Busy P; earth-rattling techno and electro from Boys Noize and VTSS. A few more pairings would be welcome at future Portolas, including ones uniting younger artists and their elders.
Braxe + Falcon and Busy P at Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
“Portola is a great lineup. It’s hard to find festivals in the United States where the lineup is focused on good music, there are a lot with lineups that are all over the place,” DJ Tennis asserts. He has some helpful suggestions, though.
“They need to improve the setting because it’s a bit generic. They have to transform the stages into something more special; club-oriented or something [unique]. That’s why I love festivals in Europe like Draaimolen in the Netherlands. They have custom-made visuals and stages and a setting that feels very special.”
DJ Tennis also suggests moving stages be closer to the crowd, to enhance the connection between the artists and fans. Noteworthy moments that collapsed the boundaries of the mainstage—when Jessie Ware danced in the crowd and Justice walked through the middle of the audience to high-five hundreds of fans during The End—underscore this point.
While Goldenvoice noticeably ironed out many of the new event kinks from the first year, 10,000 more guests felt chaotic and intense. Cell service dissipated early in the day, packed stages and very limited rest areas and décor amplified the matter, while bar and bathroom lines remained notably short throughout the event in both GA and VIP. The VIP offering felt worth it, offering prime vantage spots and dancing space at all four stages, with a new VIP area connecting the adjacent Crane and Ship stages this year, making bouncing between them much easier. Yet given the steep starting price point of $440 for GA and $670 for VIP (a slight increase from 2023) and the already not-very-underground idea of offering the latter in the first place, its value is relative. The lack of seating outside of VIP feels cruel, especially considering the ground is asphalt, not grass.
Jessie Ware at Portola Festival 2024. Image: Press
“It’s fun to see how it’s evolved,” Dallas-born, SF-based Christy, whose been to every Portola, reflects. “The lineup is always really great and not oversaturated. There’s only four stages, which is manageable; it’s not too big and it’s easy to get from one stage to the other.”
Portola is now a highlight of California’s music festival scene and electronic-centric North American fests. It’s a much-appreciated homecoming event for Millennial ravers, with a lineup fresh and eclectic enough to have more-than-something for everyone. As it continues to grow, using its platform to highlight the genre’s American-bred OGs and local innovators would be a welcome expansion of its concept.
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