Jonathan Davis of Korn Throws a Late Night Party in Hollywood

Review by L. Paul Mann

Around the corner and down the alley from one of the most famous intersections in the world, Hollywood and Vine streets, a nondescript high rise building houses Dim Mak Studios. The dimly lit multilevel structure offers cavernous recording studios, and nightclub stages, that morph into various late night Hollywood happenings.

On a sleepy Monday, April 9th, the lead singer of Korn, Jonathan Davis threw a late night CD listening and DJ dance party, featuring tracks from Korn's latest release, “The Path of Totality”.

Walking through the graffiti covered hallways, lit by ultraviolet light into the dimly lit bar and stage area, the club offered up a decidedly dank European feel, minus the thick smoke now banned in California establishments. The eventing began with complimentary Russian vodka feeding a diverse group of late night Hollywood creatures out for their hard core musical fix. The new CD, that Davis describes as his favorite recording in the bands near twenty year History, was played first while the growing crowd strived for a bacchanalian trance, before the DJ's began.

Opening DJ, Back To The Future, played a fitting trance jam set that quickly had the crowd undulating to the electronic beat. By the time the baton was passed to DJ Nick Suddarth (AKA SLUGGO), the packed house was in full dance mode. It was easy to see why Korn chose SLUGGO, the Phoenix based DJ, to be the opening act on their next tour. With bass drenched hardcore Dubstep emanating from the speakers, the DJ launched a brutal assault on the dance floor. The crowd responded ecstatically writhing to the heavy beat.

By the time that SLUGGO passed the controls to Davis, the crowd had the mindset of whirling Dervishes. Befittingly, just after midnight Davis began what was billed as the Devil DJ set. The larger than life persona of Korns' front-man does indeed invoke a Mephistopheles comparison. The tall dark singer creates an ominous facade, complete with long dark corn rowed hair, black contact lenses and what appeared to be darkened metal filed teeth.

The animated performer had just had an unspecified accident and had a badly injured knee. But by the time he was halfway into his hardcore DJ set, he couldn’t contain his frenzied persona and began to leap about the stage, seemingly oblivious to his injury. The hour long set seemed heavily influenced by his friend, hardcore EDM DJ extraordinaire Steve Aoki. In fact he played several of Aoki's most well known tunes, but turned the energy up a notch by singing the vocal tracks, in his trademark scream pitched voice.

The fans on the dance floor responded with a ballistic dance trance fever, following his every note. The singer turned electronic Maestro seemed to be right at home behind the Mac computer, mixing a kitchen sink of sounds into his hard core mantra. Music riffs as diverse as a vocal soundtrack from the “The Exorcist“ movie, to classic 70's disco tunes, could be heard brewing in the Electronic Warlock's cauldron of dark hardcore EDM music.

As the music ended, the satiated and saturated hardcore music fans stumbled back out of the dark narrow passage way of the club, and disappeared into the Hollywood night, with the music still ringing in their ears.