Interview: Outside Lands’ SOMA Is A Labor Of Bay Area Dance Music Love

San Francisco’s Outside Lands is a cherished West Coast music tradition beloved for embracing all things Bay Area. 

Returning to Golden Gate Park this weekend, August 9-11, the three-day multi-genre festival, co-produced by Superfly and Another Planet Entertainment (APE), boasts a slew of experiences that pay homage to San Francisco’s unique flavor, in addition to headline talents like The Killers, Sturgill Simpson, KAYTRANADA, Chris Lake, Post Malone, Jungle and more.

Alongside dedicated havens for Bay Area foodies, wine connoisseurs, cannabis enthusiasts, and the LGBTQ+ community, underground dance music, another pillar of San Francisco culture, has found its festival home at SOMA, Outside Lands’ curated space for house and techno.

The concept, a passion project helmed by veteran APE talent buyers Nick Barrie and Ben Bryan, has been a runaway success since its introduction in 2021. Outside Lands has always welcomed electronic acts, but the newly surging audience demand for dance music meant the team finally had a platform to share their love for San Francisco’s club scene with the festival.

“We’re huge house and techno fans,” Barrie tells EDM Maniac on a Zoom call with Bryan. “We go to our concerts with Another Planet, maybe a rock show at the Independent or something at the Fox. But at the end of the night, we find ourselves in nightclubs, late at night, dancing, socializing, and that always felt like such a great community and such a big part of the cultural lifeblood of San Francisco.”

Designed to emulate the indoor atmosphere of the city’s heralded South of Market nightclub scene, SOMA first took shape as an entirely enclosed tent. It conjures an authentic club vibe with extended DJ sets (relative to other major American multi-genre events) from genre leaders across all varieties of house and techno.

“You know, you go to a festival, you see a set—it’s a forty-minute set outside at 2PM. But let’s give people that ninety-minute set,” Barrie says of the concept. “Let’s put them in the darkness. Let’s give them a longer time, the full set, the full thing and full experience.”

Now, the appetite for this experience is swelling among festival attendees, and SOMA is outgrowing the indoor blueprint on which it was founded. Increasing tent size with each passing edition has done little to alleviate long lines for entry, and the stage will debut in an all-new open-air format upon its return to Marx Meadow this year.

But that doesn’t mean SOMA is sacrificing the vibe that made it a hit. More than anything, according to Bryan, it’s leveling up to “keep up with the times.” A 360-degree, in-the-round stage design will cater to growing demand across clubland for intimate experiences, while an expanded layout will allow more people to come dance.

“Three-sixty in-the-round-sets are huge right now,” Bryan says. “So we’re trying to bring that concept while also catering to the massive demand for the stage and making sure we get more people out there.”

The pop-up stage was forced to close “out of an abundance of caution” for two days in a row during Outside Lands 2023 after its floor collapsed. No one was hurt, and SOMA returned as an “open-air house party” on the third day of the festival—a precursor to the new open-air design that embraces the scenic environment of Marx Meadow.

“Though we all love a dark, sweaty club, we’re in one of the most beautiful parks and outdoor spaces in the country in Golden Gate Park,” Bryan says. “I think that’s going to play a lot into the new vision and version of SOMA, and am looking forward to seeing how that evolves over the years.”

Dedicated dance music spaces aren’t uncommon at major multi-genre festivals. Events like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza have long featured their own well-received electronic hubs, alongside longtime genre torchbearers like Coachella, which upped the ante last April with its new Quasar stage, made strictly for extended DJ sets.

What sets SOMA apart from the rest is its bookings. Simultaneously heady and accessible, this year’s lineup features underground heroes like The Blessed Madonna and Seth Troxler, chart-topping duos like SIDEPIECE and Shiba San B2B CID, niche club culture favorites like Idris Elba, Sofia Kourtesis, and Uncle Waffles, and many more.

“A big thing for us is keeping the lineup diverse as much as possible across the board. And that comes in a lot of different shapes and forms,” Bryan says. “Luckily, with dance music too, there’s so many micro genres.”

Barrie says, “Some of the stuff is a little more for the raver bro type and some is for the old club head. You know, the Troxler stuff versus the Disco Lines stuff. But at the end of the day, I think everyone’s on the same team, and you can see it all and enjoy it.”

Beyond genre, SOMA also champions diversity with equitable representation. People of color make up over 60 percent of this year’s lineup, and of the 24 artists on the bill, nine are women or non-binary, eclipsing a 30 percent average in electronic music per female:pressure’s 2024 FACTS report.

“We look around at some of these stages at festivals and it’s like ninety percent white dudes and I’m thinking, ‘Well, my ten favorite DJs are women and people of color,’” Barrie says to that end. “We should make this as diverse as possible, especially in San Francisco.”

“That’s where the culture comes from,” adds Bryan.

They’ve also added an extra set on each festival day this year, during which local DJ talent will kick off the festivities.

“As people who have really enjoyed the scene here in SF, we want to make sure we are also staying in the community and uplifting the local artists, because we know how hard that is to make it, especially in house,” Bryan says.

Above all, SOMA is made for San Francisco clubbers, by San Francisco clubbers. In spotlighting local talent while bringing in boundary-pushing dance acts emblematic of the city’s eclectic multicultural taste, SOMA is procuring a different flavor of electronic music culture than its major American multi-genre counterparts. 

As Barrie puts it, SOMA isn’t “dance music festival culture,” rather, it’s “dance culture at a festival,” the labor of love is all the more apparent as he and Bryan enthusiastically share their can’t-miss sets for this year.

Among them: The Blessed Madonna, Idris Elba, Uncle Waffles, Seth Troxler, rising local talent Kaleena Zanders’ homecoming performance, Shiba San and CID’s B2B debut, and Anish Kumar, a UK-based artist who crowds will be clamoring for this time next year, the pair assures us.

“We’ve got a little something for everybody. You know, whether you’re more of a mainstream fan or super underground, there’s a little something for everybody to get into over there,” Bryan says.

Check out the full SOMA lineup below. Tickets for Outside Lands 2024 are available at sfoutsidelands.com.