EDC is already the largest electronic dance music festival in North America, but that hasn’t stopped its organizers from raising the bar for a 2025 crowd that’s expected to rival the population of Sacramento at about 525,000 attendees.
To accommodate the 250-plus artists slated to play at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway May 16-18, the EDC team partnered with South African education nonprofit Bridges for Music to add a record-setting 16th stage to the mix. Set within the Nomadsland area of the festival grounds, the Ubuntu stage was designed to showcase a fresh blend of established and emerging African DJs representing subgenres like Afro-house, Amapiano and 3-Step.
The concept began to take shape about a month before last year’s EDC even started, when Bridges for Music founder Valentino Barrioseta received a phone call from a business partner named Sonny Moore—better known to the world as the nine-time Grammy-winning DJ, Skrillex.
Moore, a longtime supporter of Barrioseta’s Bridges Academy music school in Cape Town’s Langa township, wanted to introduce him to Insomniac founder and EDC head honcho Pasquale Rotella. It didn’t take long for the pair to hit it off.
“It happened in quite a casual way,” Barrioseta recalls. “[Rotella] was curious about our organization and wanted to know more about what we do. We ended up talking about this idea of bringing the sound of the township to EDC, and he immediately jumped on it and said they’d make it happen.”
The trio set out to develop a stage that would introduce American audiences to the “rawness, authenticity and vibrancy” of a typical Langa township street party. The name Ubuntu, which Barrioseta says comes from an African word meaning “I am, because we are,” seemed like a natural extension of that vision.
“This isn’t the shiny, glossy kind of stage that’s filled with pyroworks and lasers. It’s a much more intimate space that’s all about the music, the message and the talent we have here in Africa,” Barrioseta says.
The lineup will feature 21 sets, including performances by UK trailblazer Kitty Armor, South Africa’s DJ Lag and Sunday headliner Uncle Waffles, an Eswatini native who has helped pioneer an Amapiano subgenre that’s known for incorporating elements of deep house, soul and jazz with its signature log drum and melodic synth sounds. She’ll follow a pair of unknown special guests who will anchor the Friday and Saturday sets.
Barrioseta hopes their inclusion at EDC will inspire his students—who primarily hail from South African neighborhoods still haunted by the residual effects of apartheid—to continue chasing their dreams of joining the next great generation of African EDM acts.
“A lot of these kids are making beats out of little shacks, on an old laptop that may be refurbished or donated,” Barrioseta says. “We want them to understand that part of the global appeal of dance music is that you don’t need a band or fancy recording studio to make a track that travels the world.”
In the meantime, Barrioseta expects Ubuntu’s debut to mark another watershed moment for the African EDM scene.
“We always say the drums come from Africa because the reality is that everything stems from this continent,” he says. “It was just a matter of time before there was going to be an explosion of dance music coming from here, and we’re all very excited about it.”
Ubuntu Stage:
AfroMantis Collective, Andre Power, Aqutie, Da Capo, Dee/Ma, DJ Lag, Drėėėmy, Eli Fola, Jon Casey, Karaba, Kasango, Kilimanjaro, Kitty Amor, Meedy and Pizzi, One Tribe Presents (Amémé & Baron), Sarz, Uncle Waffles plus special guests.
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Tyler Schneider joined the Las Vegas Weekly team as a staff writer in 2025. His journalism career began with the …
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