November 1, 2012 – Thieves threw a wrench in Protect-U's European tour this week when the D.C. duo's gear was stolen from following their set at a Paris nightclub. Mike Petillo, a co-owner of the Future Times label, and partner Aaron Leitko were left with only their passports and the tour money they had earned so far. Stripped of their extensive collection of hardware synthesizers, controllers, and effects, as well as two laptops, they say they likely will be be forced to cancel their remaining dates. "Its really devastating," said Leitko in an email. "I don't think we can ever earn our way out of what we lost, and that's not even counting what we will lose on this trip since we can't make the money on the rest of the shows. It's just a nightmare."After their set, Protect-U left their gear in a locked, "supposedly secure" room in the Parisian club Le Pompon.

November 1, 2012 – A Madrid Halloween party headlined by Steve Aoki ended in tragedy last night when three young women died of injuries sustained in the middle of a crowd crush, reports Spain's El País. Two more people remain in critical condition.Thriller Music Park, a dance-music event featuring Aoki and Autoerotique, among other acts, was held in the Madrid Arena, and had been authorized to admit entry to 10,600 people (out of a total capacity of 12,000). The event reportedly had not sold out, and a spokesperson said that the event was not full, but some attendees complained that the space was overcrowded; on Twitter, one concertgoer estimated that there had been 20,000 people crammed into the space.Around 4 A.M., roughly 50 medical personnel were called to the scene to respond to two victims who were unconscious and in cardiac arrest; when they arrived, they found five people in distress.

October 31, 2012 – Steve Aoki loves to soar above the crowd, whether riding an inflatable rubber raft or simply diving over a melee mustache first. But the Dim Mak honcho's acrobatic inclinations were thwarted this past weekend at a performance in Puerto Rico when an ill-considered trampoline jump sent him ricocheting against the side of the stage, reports In the Mix. (Insert EDM-themed "drop" punch line here.) The rambunctious producer of "Dangerous" and "Emergency" emerged more or less unscathed. "I wanna let everyone know that I'm A-OK!" he tweeted upon his return from the emergency room.

October 28, 2012 – Saturday night's Haunted Coliseum party, an all-ages event held at New York's suburban Nassau Coliseum featuring Swedish House Mafia's Sebastian Ingrosso, Alesso, and Otto Knows, was billed as the "Biggest Dance Music Party in Long Island History," but it may go down as the biggest dance-music clusterfuck in Long Island history, thanks to lax security, scores of intoxicated teens, and one ambitious helicopter pilot.Around 11:15 p.m., just over an hour after the party had begun, police officials, responding to numerous reports of dangerously intoxicated attendees, shut down the event.

October 26, 2012 – Scott Wilson has a new column on Juno Plus devoted to "outsider dance," in which he suggests that the margins of dance music are moving steadily outwards. Citing a recent radio show in which Ben UFO shouted out the Trilogy Tapes, Bill Kouligas' PAN label, and the increasingly out-there Hieroglyphic Being, Wilson writes: "If I will remember 2012 for anything, it will be as a year that more emphasis was placed on these individuals operating at the fringes of the fringes rather than labels, genres or scenes – almost as if the genre issue had become not just irrelevant, but dull."For the most part, I agree with him. My own tastes have certainly moved steadily away from traditional club-music aesthetics, which have become increasingly safe and stagnant.

October 24, 2012 – Zombie Nation returns to Tiga's Turbo label with Meathead, a five-track EP that, despite its title, bears little in common with 'roid-raging weightlifters. That's not to say that the Munich musician (Florian Senfter) has gone soft. Armed with beefy distortion, he knows how to pack a punch, but his lanky, slower-than-usual grooves are a far cry from the juiced-up electro house that has dominated EDM bro-downs as of late. As on his recent records with Tiga in the duo ZZT, Meathead explores the more sensual properties of the fuzzbox, wrapping lanky grooves and quavering synthesizers in a halo of white noise."Attic Sundays" finds him putting an unusually acrid spin on pitch-bent synths and detuned toms over a sputtering machine groove. Curiously, given the music's sour, singed qualities, the producer shares a name with senfter speck, a South Tyrolian type of smoked, cured ham.

October 24, 2012 – Additional tickets have been released for the Sensation Innerspace events coming to Brooklyn's Barclays Center this Friday and Saturday, October 26 and 27, giving dance-music fans — and those who just want to dress up as Tom Wolfe for a night — a chance to catch the inaugural stateside edition of the popular global event series. Launched in Amsterdam in 2000, and now held in more than a dozen countries around the world, Sensation is known for its spectacular production values, trance-heavy lineups, and a dress code, strictly enforced, mandating that attendees dress entirely in white.

October 23, 2012 – On Friday, DJ Mag announced the results of its annual Top 100 DJs poll, an institution in overground dance music. The results suggest some surprising shifts in a wildly mercurial and increasingly globalized assortment of overlapping scenes, even as they ignore vast swaths of some of the world's most dynamic, creative, and progressive electronic dance music.When it began as a print magazine's readers' poll in 1997, the list largely reflected the tastes of the U.K.'s clubbers, with a heavy emphasis on trance, house, progressive, and techno.

October 23, 2012 – Giorgio Moroder is nothing if not generous. We know that much from his 1975 hit with Donna Summer, "Love to Love You Baby," a tantric ode to extended eroticism that ran to nearly 17 minutes — a fairly unprecedented length for a dance-floor track in that era. Now, the Italo-disco pioneer is giving back to his fans in another way, by unleashing a massive trove of classic songs, alternate mixes, outtakes, instrumentals, and live versions on his two SoundCloud accounts. (It's unclear why he has two separate accounts; presumably, he opened a new one after maxing out the first.)He kicked off his spree three weeks ago with "Giorgio's New Dancing Shoes," a new production, and he continued with selections from the American Gigolo and Scarface soundtracks.

October 18, 2012 – Given his name, it's perhaps unsurprising that Damian Lazarus has a predisposition for themes of rebirth and renewal. (His predisposition for ponchos is another matter.) In December, the chieftain of the Crosstown Rebels crew will lead his ragtag band of rabble-rousers to a crossroads of a different sort — a spiritual one, if you will.Set at a picturesque site near the tourist town of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Day Zero is the kind of party that only comes around once every 25 millennia or so. As the organizers explain in a press release: "The occasion will mark the end-date of a 25,625-year-long cycle and fifth and final cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.