The Haven Of EDM

Just to put a preface on this…myself (Lia) and Fenny grew up at a time when EDM (Electronic Dance Music) was still in the throes of the “Great Split”. Late 80’s through the 90’s the original techno and dance scene was splintering into all sorts of different styles of house, dance and club and myself and fenny followed a lot of those branches into what today is all lumped into the heading of “EDM”. So, as you can expect, knowing the full history of EDM going back to the time of the late 80’s into the splintering of the 90’s we can both become the “Statler and Waldorf” muppets when it comes to reviewing a general EDM club.

With Peak though, we were very surprised, those surprises though come with two huge drawbacks.

The Club

The club itself follows the same format you would expect for a club, stage for the host and DJ and main dance floor for the visitors to shake their pixel thing.  The odd thing about the layout of Peak though is a second terrace floor directly connected to the entrance going into the dance floor itself, this produces a massive bottleneck of idle avatars just standing around which if you are in an older PC, you will end up ploughing into.

As you can see in the picture above, its a serious bottleneck at the entrance.  You need to go through all that to get to the main dancefloor itself.  Lizzy who is using a mid-range laptop had to be teleported from the entrance, cause she simply couldn’t navigate through all that to join us at the dancefloor.

It also raises the question of whether some of those idle avatars who always seem to park themselves there and say nothing are actual REAL avatars or not.  I will say though, if they are bots, they are very well dressed, with mesh bodies, decent clothes and profiles that actually have stuff in them, so the likelyhood of them being bots is very low.  The entrance is a major issue though, something the club owners will need to do something about.

The interesting part about this is when all three of us were there for a quick dance (we are semi regulars at Peak) it was 2pm UK time, nowhere near peak time US or peak time UK…yet there were 81 people in the region.  Peak Lounge is almost always busy no matter what time of the day it is, and most of that is down to the major attraction of the place, the DJ’s.

The Entertainment

There is a massive amount of competition in the EDM scene when it comes to clubs, from the old guard like Ambrosia, to the new wave of clubs like Exhale.  Peak started in 2014 which puts it more in the “Second Generation” of clubs rather than the newer generation of EDM clubs which sprang up over the past 3 years.  Having been around for more than half a decade means that Peak has managed to entrench itself into a wide array of DJ’s which cater to the wide array of EDM styles that are now out there in the mainstream.

The other interesting note is Peak not only has a wide array of EDM style DJ’s, they are also very much international.  At the time of us three dancing around while i took the pics, it was a French DJ up doing some live mixing of what i would class as “Mainstream House” EDM.  Other times we have been there though there has been English, US, Canadian, German and Australian DJ’s popping up giving their own flair and their own style to mixing their selection of dance music.

The coverage is also practically 24/7 although i think they have a few spots open at really early times but for all intents and purposes they have major peak times for the EU, Australia and US covered with DJ’s and hosts.

The Major Issue’s

Anyone who has watched Jaws will remember that scene stealing part of the chum being thrown into the water, the shark popping up and Scheider backing up into the cabin and saying to Shaw… “You’re gonna need a bigger boat…”.  Well Peak, you’re gonna need a bigger club.

There’s no two ways around it.  Sometimes they do hold the dances outside in a sort of back alley themed side part next to the club, but that lacks the overall club theme and to be honest whenever the DJ is playing outside, we just leave.

The second major downside of the club being this busy is a simple one, dont expect to have a good time if you are using a PC or laptop which is 5 years old or older…here is the specs of my own PC…

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Sixteen-Core Processor     (4793.06 MHz)
Memory: 131,072 MB
Concurrency: 30
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080TI PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 12288 MB

As some of you tech minded folks can see, its basically “Current Gen”.  Peak is one of the handfull of places though where i start to struggle after 30 mins or so as the viewer starts taking up huge chunks of graphics memory.  If you do go to Peak, and you are on an older PC, go in, fond your spot, and then switch on “Friends Only” for avatars, or drop the graphics preferences to bare minimum.  Peak isnt only pushing the limits of EDM clubs, its also pushing the limits of PC’s and laptops running the viewer!

Conclusion

Yes, the place grinds most PC’s to a halt.  Yes, if you are in an older PC you will struggle, but the same can be said for a handfull of other very busy clubs out there (Muddys comes to mind, but not as bad as Peak).  However, when you go to Peak, and if you are a fan of EDM you will be in what is essentially one of, if not the top tier venue for not just current EDM, but remixed “Old Skool” EDM from the late 80’s and more especially the splinter decade of the 90’s.  At the time of writing this the DJ is playing a decent remix of an old Dario G hit.

Peak is one of those major EDM clubs which has managed to draw in DJ’s from across the planet, each of whom have their own unique take and preferences when it comes to the EDM scene.  It is also one of the few, if not the only EDM club which has been able to keep up with the changing times of EDM music by not limiting or shoeboxing the DJ’s into a strict style of what to play when they are up on stage.  It’s this reason, the general freedom that the DJ has, that has made Peak Lounge the haven for EDM fans in SL.

…but they do need a bigger club…

Peak Lounge – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/PEAK/47/123/3020

Written by Fenella with input from Liandra

Edited by Liandra