Insomniac Events’ Pasquale Rotella reflects on 30 years of festival production

In a warehouse located on the corner of Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in South Central Los Angeles, electronic music fan and up-and-coming promoter Pasquale Rotella threw his first Insomniac rave in 1993.

It was a DIY labor of love for which he personally handed out flyers that included a phone number for people to call to listen to a voicemail that gave the exact address and other sort of vague details about the event. About 300 people showed up to dance and party and he continued to throw these events, while promoting his new company’s message of “peace, love, unity and respect.”

Now, 30 years later, Rotella, the creator, founder and CEO of the Beverly Hills-based Insomniac Events, has thrown some of the biggest EDM parties around the world. He’s also launched festival brands that continue to sell-out annually, including one of its most popular, EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival), which began at The Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles in 1997 and is now held on the grounds of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, drawing up to 150,000 fans from all around the world each year.

Though the events have gotten larger, Rotella said the company continues to uphold its original messaging.

“While I’m talking on the phone right now, I’m looking at a gift from a raver, they dropped it off at the office and they framed a picture that they took of me working at one of the first Insomniac warehouse events we hosted on Fridays,” Rotella said during a phone interview.

“They are also coming to Nocturnal Wonderland and they are so pumped about it,” he continued. Nocturnal Wonderland is Insomniac’s longest-running event that launched in 1995 and is now a two-day camping event held at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino.

“For me, it’s so amazing to see people who went to the very first events come back every year. These aren’t people in the industry who made their lifestyle by being able to work in the business. These are people who just love it. There’s no better feeling than that; It’s powerful.”

The Past

In the early ’90s, like clockwork, Rotella would assemble a pack of emerging DJs from the Southern California area, gathering them for weekly parties that were barren of the typical LED lights, stilt dancers or extravagant stages that would later become synonymous with Insomniac Events. Instead, it was a simple congregation of house and techno devotees united by a shared passion for the scene.

Rotella was scouring Los Angeles, seeking out rundown packing houses as potential venues, distributing the flyers and enlisting the help of friends and early fans who were eager to join the growing movement — and they got to attend the events for free. Despite grappling with intense burnout as the months moved by, Rotella said he stayed busy and continued to foster relationships and attempt to rejuvenate a sense of community within the electronic scene that had faded in Southern California by the early ’90s.

As he stated hosting raves, Rotella remembered that time as “an era of misery.” He said shows were frequently raided by authorities before they even began, promoters struggled to curate suitable lineups and there was the whole upheaval following the 1992 Los Angeles riots. All of these things, he said, ultimately led to the downfall of the electronic music community within the area.

Though he continued with Insomniac events every Friday for a year solid in 1993, Rotella decided to call it quits because they became so difficult to produce. However, he wasn’t gone long since the fans, those loyal patrons who saw the events as much more than just parties, but an escape from all of the civil unrest and madness going on around them, pleaded for him to continue on.

Discontinuing his Friday series wasn’t the end, but rather the start of something new. Two years later, he hosted Nocturnal Wonderland in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s currently the longest-running electronic music festival in the U.S.

The Present

Now, Insomniac produces some of the largest electronic music festivals worldwide. In 2023 alone, the company has hosted and partnered with others to hold events in more than 1,500 nightclubs, 200 concert venues and put together 40 music festivals.

Feeling nostalgic upon the company’s 30th anniversary, Rotella and his team created Anniversary Lane, an immersive walk-thru experience that’s framed by two 80-foot video walls that showcase photographs, videos and music from various Insomniac events through the decades.

“I’m a real visual person and I wanted to create an activation that fans can partake in at each festival we have going on this year that would pay homage to the shows, the visuals, the ravers and the overall evolution of the brand,” Rotella said of the walk-thru experience. “It was important to pay respect to the decades of production, parties and people that have come through. You even have the old-school ravers greeting fans on the screen when they enter Anniversary Lane. I love the energy that I feel when walking through it, especially when someone has been around since the beginning, it takes them back. There’s 30 years worth of stuff to show off and it’s hard to narrow it all down, but we tried our best and it’s incredible.”

The Future

Insomniac continues to push the boundaries and test the waters by adding innovative festival experiences to its ever-growing roster. Among the latest are the Interstellar Festival, which was a collaboration between Insomniac’s Factory 93 and the trance brand Dreamstate. It was scheduled to take place a the LA Waterfront in San Pedro in August, but failed to launch day-of due to the threat of Hurricane Hilary.

They also introduced Hotel EDC, a unique concept held during the EDC Las Vegas weekend in May; the EDSea Festival embarking on a Caribbean voyage aboard Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Joy on Nov. 4-8; and the Forever Midnight New Year’s Eve series, which will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Dec. 30-31.

Insomniac also introduced a brand new collaboration with the Los Angeles-based Emo Nite earlier this year dubbed Grave Rave. The first big local event is called Grave at the Torch and will take place on Dec. 15 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. This partnership was a move that Rotella said “just made sense.” The collaboration was organic, driven by a similar energy that both communities find within the music. The partnership promises to offer fans of both brands new shows, projects and a line of apparel as they infuse the sounds of electronic music with the muse of emo, punk and rock.

Emo Nite didn’t capture Rotella’s attention until the 2020 global pandemic, which forced the company to throw virtual Rave-A-Thons almost weekly. He noticed artists who were streaming would frequently remix classic emo tracks that had the virtual crowds, as well as his staff, headbanging along behind the scenes. That led to Emo Nite being booked at EDC in 2021.

“I was talking to these guys for years actually,” Rotella said. “And the synergy between our two worlds was pretty much undeniable. You know, they even made a shirt that says on the front ‘Before you liked EDM, you liked emo.’ And it’s true. I’m so proud of this partnership, we have so many special events ahead and I think its something that both worlds are really going to enjoy.”

Though this new era for Insomniac feels like “30, flirty and thriving,” Rotella is uncertain of what the future holds. But he envisions one that continues the legacy of innovation, paving the way for even more electronic music festivals. For him, it’s not solely about the achievements already unlocked, but more about pushing the envelope even further.

“It’s a loaded question to think about what the future holds, but we’re going to continue to evolve. Whether that’s through our stage designs, technology, unique event concepts and venues or new partnerships, we’re just going to keep pushing on,” Rotella said. “I’ve been all over the world and I have to say that the energy in Southern California, there’s nothing like it. There are some beautiful events out there, but the energy that people have here is something you can’t replicate. All roads seem to point here; there’s something special in California and I really want to do my best to bring that all over the world.”