Panorama music festival: Arcade Fire and FKA Twigs give standout sets

Reporting from NEW YORK —  NEW YORK — Toward the end of his headlining set at the inaugural Panorama music festival Friday, Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler looked around and offered an assessment of the outdoor grounds.

“We were here in 2007 and it was like a dustbowl,” he said. “Now they put in technology and Internet cafes,” he added. “It looks a little gentrified.”

Those who wandered outside the event space, on New York’s Randall’s Island, might have taken issue with that last word — forlorn public buildings, asphalt barrenness and highways only Robert Moses could love filled the space, with spiffy Starbucks nowhere to be found.

Yet Butler was right about what was happening inside the festival venue.‎ Kicking off Friday, Panorama bills itself as “three days of music, art, technology and local food offerings.” And indeed, there were numerous bids to honor that phrase. That meant the expected high-end culinary stands (eggloo ice cream, anyone?) but also sleek tech-filled pavilions from the likes of Hewlett Packard and American Express; Epcot Center-esque orbs that seemed to suggest a shiny (if steampunk) future; and those art installations, including a large digital projection of a moving graffitied subway car, that used technology to honor the spirit of New York. (Whether it was a clever 21^st century nod to history or a poor facsimile of it seemed a subject of debate to festgoers,)

These ambitions ‎all matter to music fans, including and especially Angelenos. Panorama is being staged by AEG Live subsidiary Goldenvoice, the same company that owns Coachella and Stagecoach. Whether Goldenvoice can effectively export its large-scale, hipster-but-accessible musical ethos to cities outside California has been an open question with Coachella’s expandsion in recent years. Panorama is one of the first tests of the principle.

On Friday, the festival showed some growing pains — long lines and delayed entrances for reporters and fans alike prompted vocal frustrations. “Panorama, I hope your parents get divorced and blame you for it,” said one young female fan outside for whom anger proved no impediment to wryness. Once inside, many festivalgoers seemed pleased; the sets and experiences mostly came off smoothly.

That included the Arcade Fire set, an appealing if mostly standard-issue affair, Butler sweating through his white suit as the indie-rock crossovers mixed in numbers from the recent-ish “Reflektor” and earlier records “The Suburbs” and “Funeral;” the fittingly tech-oriented “We Used to Wait,” from “The Suburbs,” was a standout.

Butler digressed into several screeds about Donald Trump, received impatiently by the crowd, and built a David Bowie component into the set, thanks to a montage of images of the shape-shifting artist and a spirited cover of “Rebel Rebel.”

Perhaps responding to the criticisms of a more-is-more approach to festivals — or maybe just because quality matters over quantity when it comes to inducing festgoers to spend three days in sweltering summer heat — Panorama organizers appear to have sought to streamline the acts, which will include Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens on Saturday and LCD Soundsystem and Sia on Sunday.

Few major names overlap, and even the two stages seem to alternate as much as go head-to-head. On Friday that was good news for those who wanted to catch a set of the Alabama Shakes (serviceable; open-air venues not ideal for their church-like appeal) in the penultimate set on the main stage but still catch most of the alternative R&B performer FKA Twigs on the second stage.

FKA Twigs, a former backup dancer, has been gaining renown in the last few years as a musical performer of almost religious intensity — equal parts show(wo)man and creative force. On Friday she demonstrated why, in the kind of buzzed-about breakout set that festgoers talk about years later.

Dressed in a revealing outfit of architectural sparkliness, the 28-year-old Brit gave a performance to make “Truth or Dare”-era Madonna envious or blush, maybe both. As she writhed, gyrated and slinked through techno-flavored R&B numbers like “Unknown,” FKA Twigs hinted at a flair for the dramatic. She ended one song by bending over in a tight crouch and crying, and then, a moment later got up and began laughing. Or maybe she was laughing the whole time.

The set was built around a series of shirtless male backup dancers, whose intricate and exaggerated movements were almost narrative, suggesting a kind of modern re-interpretation of classic dramas. The dancers would get in front of Twigs, behind her, around her and beneath her in various formations, conveying meaning of an indeterminate nature with their movements.

(FKA Twigs also has been part of an are-they-still-together drama with fiance Robert Pattinson, which may or may not have made the men emerging from a smoky midnight-black corner seem more vampiric.)

At one point, the dancers hoisted the singer on their shoulders and carried her across the stage like a post-Britney Cleopatra. Then they put her down and began walking like an Egyptian, a kind of cultural sacrifice to the gods above, or at least to the strobe lights. There was more choreography, and a Bollywood-like succession of movement from FKA Twigs. Then a house beat broke out.

The weather, it should be said, remains a question mark at Panorama — temps approached 100 degrees Friday and were expected to remain high throughout the weekend.

The politics locally are interesting. After trying but failing to secure a license at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in nearby Queens for June—it prompted a backlash and even petition from the rival Live Nation-owned Governors Ball that happens the same month--Goldenvoice rescheduled Panorama for July, landing on Gov Ball site Randall’s Island. For all the exuberance on stage, the festival is as much the latest salvo in the ongoing war between two promotional giants as it is a series of performances of au courant acts.

AEG has argued, at least publicly, that there’s room for multiple players in the same market. The value of their own production was proved Friday by the South Central hip-hop artist ScHoolboy Q. Performing his meta-take on ’90s rap about the good and gangsta life, the Crenshaw High grad played a energetic set, donning a hat that suggested a game of dominoes in Havana while sweating through his shirt like it was, well New York in July.

He dropped a jokey diss about the height of pal and Saturday headliner Lamar -“So I think I saw that [little person] perform in a bar,” he said between songs--and built his set to a crescendo with his swag anthems “That Part” (sans Kanye) and “Man of the Year.”

On several occasions he paused to tweak the crowd, saving his big shrug at them for the end.

“I’ve done a million shows in New York and this is the most turnt down I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You could do better than that.”

At that moment thousands had their hands in the air and were bouncing up and down in musical-festival zeal. They may not have given ScHoolboy the best show he’s ever experienced. But over the course of his and other sets, the proceedings certainly cleared expectations for the first day of a new music festival.

@ZeitchikLAT