The temperature was close to triple digits, making one wish for the downpour that largely prevented us from seeing Vampire Weekend only a month ago at SummerStage. So it was then that the crowd of mixtape heads, bopping nonstop for close to four hours, cheered the day's electro-music acts with as much lunatic zeal as they did the merciful gust of wind that too-infrequently slapped across our faces. On the ground beneath our feet, a sea of blankets and water bottles, and before us on stage…an M.I.A. by proxy concert? Kid Cudi, happily flaunting the free-ness of his new mixtape (you can download it here), was the first of many that day to give "Paper Planes" a new spin while Diplo—tag-teaming with A-Trak—pleased fans of both his M.I.A. collaboration Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 and his killer Fabriclive 24 with familiar but not unwelcomed beatmixing. Baltimore's Rye Rye, a fixture and highlight of M.I.A.'s People Vs. Money tour, was nowhere to be seen, but Mz Streamz shook it to the ground in her place, with Blaqstarr in tow. Last but certainly not least, a sweaty, spot-on and genuinely cheery Santogold worked her way through most of the tracklist from her awesome self-titled debut, but as I beat myself up a day later for not having applied any suntan lotion, it's the fierceness of those three ladies who danced in sick sync to Diplo and A-Trak's knob-twirling for close to two hours that I can't get out of my mind. Where can I rent one of them?













Photos by Ed Gonzalez