Elephante To Highlight Up & Up Music Festival

Alex Goodlive
Contributing Writer

Profanity is used in the video embedded in this article 

Something big is coming to Dayton.

On Oct. 24, the Up & Up Music Festival will arrive. It will take place at Masque, a gay nightclub on N. Jefferson Street, and last from 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. The festival will star Elephante, a relatively new DJ who is quickly rising in popularity and who has performed at various music festivals, including EDC Las Vegas and Lollapalooza.

The DJ expressed his excitement for starring in the upcoming festival.

“I cut my touring teeth on a lot of college shows,” he told Press House. “So to be able to come back now on such a bigger scale after all these years feels very full circle. Some of the best times in my life were in shows like this.”

According to his bio from Lollapalooza, Elephante, whose real name is Tim Wu, started out playing classical music on the piano and soon began to write songs and sing them for bands throughout high school and then at Harvard. Upon graduating, Wu found a desk job but knew it wasn’t right for him and instead became a DJ, calling himself Elephante to symbolize the “elephant in the room” of wanting to escape the confinement of a desk job. Since then, he has released two EPs.

Local music fans can thank students from UD for the festival’s appearance in Dayton. Up & Up, sponsored by Monster Energy, comes to a few college towns every year, and colleges are chosen by a contest. On Sept. 10, 43 colleges, including UD, were given the chance to pre-order tickets, and the top four schools with the most pre-orders were declared the winners. With many students eager to bring the festival here, Dayton managed to finish in the top four along with UNC-Wilmington, Washington State and Penn State.