Lightning Strikes … again and again: FROM HUMBLE ORIGINS TO MAJOR FESTIVAL PLAYERS, LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE IS BACK

Just look at the top three headlining bands playing at this Memorial Day Weekend’s Lightning in a Bottle and you can get some sense of how this once-tiny festival has matured. There’s electronic duo Phantogram, Swedish popstars Little Dragon, and one of the godfathers of EDM (that’s electronic Dance Music to the uninitiated) Moby. From a tiny birthday celebration in the forests of Los Angeles, to up above Santa Barbara County in our own hills, to the mountains of Santa Ana, this verdant, pocket-sized Burning Man-like festival has been a victim of its success, moving on to another location as attendance threatened to spill over the boundaries.

Though it started as a private party in 2000, it was really the 2006 move to Live Oak Campground off of the 154 freeway that got the three Flemming brothers, who go by the event name of DoLab, imagining the Festival as bigger than its humble beginnings.

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The Dragon that Roared: WITH FOUR ACCLAIMED ALBUMS, SWEDEN’S LITTLE DRAGON IS ONE OF HIGHLIGHTS

Little Dragon will headline the Lightning main stage Saturday night
Little Dragon will headline the Lightning main stage Saturday night

Little Dragon is exactly the kind of group to play at Lightning in a Bottle during its transition period. They are not DJs and they are not laptop electronic noodlers. But this Swedish band uses the sounds of Electronic Dance Music, or EDM, as one color among many on their palette, and they incorporate just as much hip hop as they do jazz, R&B, glitch, rock, and ’80s textures. With singer Yukimi Nagano’s soulful voice the common thread through all of Little Dragon’s discography, the band has constantly evolved over its four albums, culminating in the dark tones of this year’s “Nabuma Rubberband.”

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