Wasteland's schedule gives you sixteen choices and no compromises

Most festival schedules leave you room to cheat. Catch forty minutes here, walk over during a changeover, pick up the back half of something else. Wasteland does not.

Basscon's hard dance weekend at NOS Event Center on 4 and 5 September puts 48 sets across three stages. Every one runs exactly 60 minutes. Every one starts on the hour. And every one starts and ends at the same minute as the two sets running against it. All 48 of them.

So the weekend is 16 hours, and each hour is one clean vote between three rooms. You will see 16 sets. Not 17. There is no half of anything to catch.

Sixteen hours, three doors

The Hangar, The Scrap Yard and The Shelter each run eight sets a night, 6pm to 2am, Friday and Saturday. That makes 42 changeovers across the weekend and every single one is zero minutes long — the next DJ starts the second the last one stops. One set length on the entire bill.

Two things fall out of that.

The first is that nothing here is a partial catch. Every set is buried inside another set, because when the clocks match exactly, buried and identical are the same thing. Forty-eight for forty-eight.

The second matters more on the night. Because all three stages turn over at the same second, there is no gap to walk in. On a staggered grid you move during a changeover and lose nothing. At Wasteland every stage change is paid out of the set you are walking to. The walk is the whole cost.

No other grid we have read looks like this

Counting only sets that carry both a start and an end time, across every schedule this year:

North Coast is the opposite end of the same weekend: twelve different set lengths and a third of its changeovers carrying real gaps, so you can move around it. Splash House never once ran two sets on the same clock. Wasteland is a lattice.

Nothing on the bill breaks the tie

Normally you let demand decide the hour for you. That does not work here either.

Not one of the 53 names on this bill sits in the app's 25 Most Booked. Upcoming show counts across the weekend run from one to six, and the middle of the bill is two. In five of the 16 hours all three DJs are within a single show of each other.

The two clear exceptions are both closers. Restricted shuts The Shelter at 1am Friday with six upcoming shows against three and one. Angerfist does the same to The Scrap Yard at 1am Saturday, six against one and one.

Those two are also the ones with the strangest weekend. Both are on the North Coast bill in Chicago at the same time. Restricted comes off The Shelter at 2am and is on a Chicago stage 14 hours 40 minutes later. Angerfist finishes at 2am Sunday and plays North Coast 16 hours 30 minutes after that. Alignment runs it in reverse — Chicago on Friday night, The Shelter at 9pm Saturday, 25 hours apart.

They are not alone in arriving tired. Seventeen of the 53 played Creamfields or Decibel Outdoor in Europe the weekend before.

Pick a stage, not a lineup

The useful thing to accept about this schedule is that it is not really an artist plan. It is a stage plan. Sixteen times you choose a room, and the only way to change your mind mid-hour is to give up the top of whatever you are walking to.

So decide it in advance rather than on the night, and give yourself the two hours the numbers already answer. The full grid is on the Wasteland event page — all 48 sets, all three stages, in your own time zone, with the sets you pick saved to your phone.

Tickets

Ticket links below are affiliate links.

• Wasteland — tickets via Front Gate

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — set times, lineups and the boards this post is computed from.

Make music as well as go to hear it? Bounce is our pocket studio for iPhone and iPad. A session, not a song.