M3F recap: 2 days of lasers, dust and bodies in motion

For the past few years, the lineups at McDowell Mountain Music Festival — better known as M3F — have been sliding from mainstream and alternative artists to an electronic-focused party.

This year we went from slide to full tip. The festival’s headliner slots were no longer for groups or songwriting artists — electronic scene heavyweights Peggy Gou and Mau P grabbed the festival’s top billing. It’s the DJs’ turn now, baby.

While the acts certainly did include major bands, by the time sundown came on Friday night, the vibe at Steele Indian School Park felt more like a club than a festival. 

There were at least three distinct phases of M3F. If the vibe of Friday night was clubby and dark, Saturday in the sun was a glorious day party. Then Saturday night tilted apocalyptic: dark, dusty, disorienting.

There was an odd lack of lighting around the festival grounds compared to years past. Festival organizers for months had hyped up a new, supposedly state-of-the-art lighting and laser system for the main stage. Once Chris Lorenzo threw down after night fell — and later as Gou mixed a lovely, eclectic, party-forward set — it started to settle that the hype was just not warranted.

Saturday’s headliner Mau P finally maxed out the spectacular, show-stopping laser light system. It was phenomenal. I’m truly not sure I’ve seen anything like it. So why on earth wasn’t it in full force sooner? What was the point of teasing us until the final hour? The move felt like late-stage empire in action, as if the festival stockpiled nukes for doomsday.

And this was after lasting through a Saturday evening of air so thick with dust, I could’ve coughed up a sizeable anthill. I’ve been to plenty of festivals, and I can honestly say those couple of hours on Saturday night were grueling work. If you were there, be on the lookout for Valley Fever symptoms. Seriously.

The dim lighting and the dust clouds gave the grounds a cinematic menace that you could interpret as a genuine mood. Harder to overlook was the lack of water stations. You could grab a (free) bottle at the medical tent near the festival’s entrance or sip out of a fountain beside the epic bathroom line, but that was it. Wandering the dark, dry park, coughing and parched amid the thunder of EDM beats, felt like arriving on a planet where the robots had finally won. At Friday’s festival afterparty inside Walter Where?House, one attendee said that this was the first festival he’d been to that felt like it was organized by AI.

But, look, I can’t heap too much flak on M3F. It has donated a reported $6 million for Phoenix charities over the years. And attendance at first blush appeared healthy: the mild weather brought out a strong crowd on both nights, Saturday especially. It was absolutely a party.

The lineup and overall vibe felt pared back from those of previous years. If you got past the corporate mush, you found adventure and art shimmering in the springtime desert sun.

Friday: swag, ‘Bulletproof’ and extra Cake

Let’s start with the lineup. Late 2000s pop megastar La Roux was one of the earliest acts of the day at 4 p.m., an intriguing spot for an artist with a hit, “Bulletproof,” that has racked up more than half a billion Spotify plays. But La Roux has been out of the game for some time. They took a hiatus from the music industry after going through what they called a “10-year mental health crisis” when we sat down with them after their performance. “I ran away essentially from the music industry,” they said. “I had a pretty traumatizing experience, business-wise and personal relationship-wise.”

Soon they’ll be releasing a new album and going on a tour supporting Hillary Duff. M3F was a chance to get back in the groove of performing. It’s appropriate too that it was in Phoenix, as the south Londoner is rising from the ashes.

“I was like, OK, now, come on — this is what you do. This is who you are,” they said of their return. “I’m very, very, very lucky and grateful for the fact that ‘Bulletproof’ will pay me whether I work or not.”

The audience loved their performance of the anthemic hit — a soft bounciness and delight settled on the crowd when La Roux played it at the end of the set. 

“Their outfit is so Portland gay — I love it,” festivalgoer Megan Claudio said. Told later of the comment, La Roux laughed and took it as a compliment.

And yet, we couldn’t help but notice: The intensity of their vocals didn’t quite line up with the coolness of La Roux’s gestures and the irregularity of the mic placement. It appeared La Roux brought their vocals pre-packaged. 

“This isn’t the ‘90s,” a festivalgoer named Rumin Tehrani said. “We’re not gonna let you get away with that.”

Over at the Cosmic stage, Neil Frances brought the energy, playing a fun, hip, wah-wah-heavy club set as the sun dimmed on the festival grounds. The set focused around their cover of “Music Sounds Better With You.” They played their own version while also mixing in the more upbeat Stardust original. This was the party getting started.

Back on the main stage after dark, British tech house DJ Chris Lorenzo played a darker, minimal set with punchy basslines — classic edgy club stuff with bombast and drama to his sounds. The highlight was when he played a remix he and Chris Lake (as Anti Up) made of Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket.”

Tokimonsta was one of the standouts of the evening, even if she was spinning a DJ set rather than drilling into her own (often superior) material. She’s “real swaggy,” someone in the audience said. She put on a clinic in funky disco beats in what might have been one of the most enjoyable sets of the day, deep enough into the night that the bedraggled audience was in every state of being: zoning out on their phones, shaking their asses, recuperating, or just getting their second wind.

If you’re more into music that makes you think rather than dance, alternative synthpop duo Magdalena Bay put on a more conceptual show (with elements of burlesque) at the same time. Sit back and enjoy the show, we did. They burst onto the stage with “Image,” the biggest track from their 2024 breakthrough album “Imaginal Disc.” The group’s singer, Mica Tenenbaum, flitted around on props and repeatedly changed costumes. When the set was over, she pranced off like a fairy.

Headliner Peggy Gou was an intriguing booking — and the South Korean queen of the decks did not disappoint. Her mixing has a wild, mercurial element. You just can’t pin her sound down as she pulls from all elements of music. Peggy Gou is thunder calmly composed and sitting in a chair delicately.

The electronic superstar also played the Cake remix that Chris Lorenzo had just spun. And while girls do it better on the decks, it was not quite as exciting hearing it the second time. A headliner in a lineup like Friday’s is always going to face this challenge: After an audience has been bombarded by nine straight hours of DJs, it’s no easy feat to bring truly fresh sounds.

Saturday: soul, euphoria and French extravagance

If you’ve never been to Burning Man, Saturday night provided a taste, minus the orgy dome. The dust was desert-thick, forcing many of the attendees to mask up with bandanas. Phoenix is getting warmer and drier year by year. The closing hours of M3F were a grim reminder that climate change isn’t only about Antarctica sloughing chunks of ice. It’s about you and your kids, coughing and squinting on a cool spring night.

But anyway, this is supposed to be an article about music and good times. There were a few of those, too!

I arrived at the festival with only seven minutes left in The Knocks’ set, and when I got there I desperately wished I had been there for the entire hour. The New York-based duo played fun, vibrant and groovy upbeat tracks with soul, finishing out their set with their star-reaching “Slow Song.”

Elderbrook’s set started out a bit slow and then halted completely as he paused for a medical emergency that took place near the stage. After maybe 15 minutes, the unfortunate, probably ketamine-infused festivalgoer was carted away. Elderbrook came back on with an electrifying vigor, at one point even shuffling and dancing while low to the ground in a terrifyingly metro, all-black outfit.

In the crowd, a woman named Amber Henderson said this was a departure from other Elberbrook sets she had seen. “It wasn’t like this,” she said. “It’s like he went to Envision (a festival in Costa Rica) and done ayahuasca or some shit.”

Delivering food to the masses, Daily Bread was filthy good. Deliciously fresh, baked to perfection. The Atlanta-native producer’s wide-ranging, bass-driven sound moved the crowd with vintage hip-hop beats, dubstep bursts, quicksand-thick drums, and smooth, crispy melodies. It was simply a delight. For ravers, this was a must.

Meanwhile the rarefied booking of Austrian DJ Salute — who spun over on the festival’s smallest stage — was a highlight of the festival. While sticking to a U.K. garage disposition, he pulled influences from across the spectrum, spinning an atmosphere that skewed dancy, wavy, comprehensive, euphoric and tantalizing. The vibe was loose, sexy, awesome. The people were shaking ass and locked in for this one.

Polo & Pan was delightfully odd and deeply (at times painfully) French.

I have seen Polo & Pan recently — including the night before, at Walter Where?House — but this was something entirely different. Dressed in oversized white suits, the duo’s calm, methodical set was very much a performance, an extravagant stage play driven by ambition with a bright take on De Stijl aesthetics. They promised a journey at the top of the set, and the array of animated dots and rectangles on their projection screen gave a sensation of blasting through a minimalist psychedelic trip.

The mid-tempo, flute-heavy set was delightfully weird. (The whole thing reminded me of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto.”) These two sophistiquetes, these gens du monde, seemed to be enjoying themselves superbly while carrying out their master plan.

“Vee can’t geet much highhhhher, Phoenix!” Pan shrieked into the microphone with delight.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about these guys. They’ve made me apprehensive since the fall, when Polo came to Walter Where?House for a solo set that folks in the electronic scene boycotted over an alleged set of right-wing culture war comments on social media, since apparently deleted. Their music relies on global sounds (heavy on the tropical vibes) in a way that doesn’t sit right to me. It’s like someone tapping springwater — something elemental, precious and essential —and packaging it in a plastic bottle to sell back to you as “good for the planet.”

Of the Trees played a set, but I couldn’t tell you much about it. Honestly, the wubby experimental sounds could barely even cut through the thick haze of dirt in the air.

And, more credit where it’s due, Mau P’s imperial, roaring set was remarkable for its laser show. Thanks, M3F, for letting us see that for an hour. We’re very grateful. But at that point I just wanted to go home.