Insomniac is launching a new ‘warehouse’ series in downtown L.A.

As the EDM wave appears to be slowing, much of the momentum in dance music is shifting to underground styles and venues. This is true for the mass of roving parties across downtown Los Angeles, and for mid-tier festivals such as CRSSD that have sprung up in the wake of interest in deeper house and techno sounds.

Now Insomniac, the L.A. company that produces Electric Daisy Carnival (and is more associated with the EDM wave than almost any other American promoter), is trying to get back in on the “warehouse” scene as well.

The promoter announced that it’s launching Factory 93, a new concert-promotion brand that will throw shows focusing on emerging talent and veteran acts from the more challenging ends of dance music.

“I’ve loved warehouse parties since the day I walked into one as a youngster,” Imsomniac founder and CEO Pasquale Rotella said in a statement. “Those experiences changed my life and made me want to devote my life to dance music. I couldn’t be more excited to go back to my roots with Factory 93.”

The series, whose name is an allusion to the 1993 founding of Insomniac (not New Order’s “Confusion” single), is set to launch May 21 with a set from the producer Hot Since 82. The venue location is still unannounced, but will be in downtown L.A.

Aside from Electric Daisy Carnival, the promoter runs shows at glitzier clubs including downtown L.A.’s Exchange and Hollywood’s Create. Factory 93 is far from Insomniac’s first foray into underground dance music culture, as the company sprung up in the early ‘90s as one of L.A.’s first large-scale rave promoters.

But the new brand is pretty clearly an attempt to shift some of the conversation away from its massive mainstream EDM festivals (which have been dogged by drug overdoses and an ongoing corruption investigation at the L.A. Coliseum), and toward the more current styles and venue locations that are driving the dance music cultural conversation.

However, whether the current generation of underground club music fans will buy into the new brand, from a name long synonymous with mega-raves competing against a well-established network of growing underground parties, is yet to be seen.

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