Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival 2012 in pics (Nicolas Jaar, Gold Panda, Photek, Nguzunguzu, Mykki Blanco & more)

photos by Oliver Correa & Amanda Rohowsky / HiFi Cartel

"Mykki Blanco freaking out the crowd at Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival. #fierceness #nobros" - Tavia Nyong'o

"#BEMF Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival
exceeding expectations after 1 set" - Schuyler Van Horn

Nicolas Jaar / Gold Panda @ MHOW, 11/10/2012

The 2012 Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival went down this past weekend (11/9-10) at Music Hall of Williamsburg, Glasslands, Cameo, Public Assembly, 285 Kent, and Brooklyn Bowl, with shows running until about 4 AM each night. A worthy alternative to people who don't like the excesses of major electronic festivals like Electric Zoo and Ultra Music Festival, BEMF has become one of the most forward thinking ones around. And this year may have been their best lineup yet with some great names in IDM, downtempo, post-dubstep, deep house, instrumental hip hop, and more like Nicolas Jaar, Gold Panda, Photek, Nguzunguzu, Kingdom, Mykki Blanco, Salva, Shlohmo, and many others.

N. 6th St. in Williamsburg was flooded with people, likely due to having Public Assembly right next to Music Hall of Williamsburg which is just down the street from Cameo, and the ticket pickup tent in the parking lot across the street. (Not that N6 isn't a madhouse anyway on the weekends.) But also very likely that on Saturday night it was due to one of the festival's most in-demand acts, Nicolas Jaar, whose set was pushed back from 1 AM to 2:30 AM after the last-minute addition of Dave P. Ashley from Et Musique Pour Tous wrote, "I've never seen Music Hall of Williamsburg as crowded as it was last night. For the first half hour of Nicolas Jaar's hour and a half long set, nobody could move, and dancing was an intimate experience to be shared with strangers." Hazel Sheffield call his set "precocious," writing:

He turned the chorus from Cat Power's 'Cherokee' - "Marry me, marry me to the sky," - into a slowburning, plaintive swirl of a lyric, then slipped the clanging chords from Dave McCallum's 'The Edge', best known as the opening sample on Dre's 'Next Episode', into an interlude, sending people wild for about two seconds, before they realised the joke was on them. Precocious, then. But completely absorbing.

He also wrote that "not all of the acts at BEMF were so wilfully subversive," and that some of the DJs like Salva, who played Public Assembly on Saturday, kept things on the more in-your-face dancey side.

More pictures from the festival below.