Outside Lands’ dance-centric SOMA Tent reopened as an outdoor venue Sunday after experiencing moderate structural failures that led the San Francisco festival’s organizers to close it Friday afternoon and again on Saturday.
Fortunately, the pavilion-like setup lent itself to the hasty reconfiguration, as the bass-heavy tent was tucked into a far corner of the festival grounds to minimize sound bleed as well as create a nightclub-like environment during the day.
The tent itself remained in place, with the DJ setup now in front of it rather than inside. There were also a few schedule changes to Sunday’s lineup, with WhoMadeWho dropping off and Phoenix-based DJ M3 getting on the decks at 12:30 p.m., pushing the other acts back by 90 minutes each until the final back-to-back of Âme and Trikk, who will go on at 8 p.m. as scheduled.
Electronic dance music is an ever-growing component of festival culture, and with rare exceptions, Outside Lands confines acts to the SOMA Tent. Fans tend to camp there, leading to long wait times and overcrowding, and in combination with Golden Gate Park’s soggy soil, the floor began to give way on Friday, leading to the tent’s closure.
Workers labored Friday night to shore up the tent with reinforcements, and The Standard confirmed with the festival safety team that the San Francisco Fire Department signed off on the work, but a separate area of the floor nonetheless began to give way. No injuries were reported on either day.