Gas Works Day Party 2026: The Show Nobody Was Allowed to Film

The stage was inside a ring. Not a platform at one end of a lawn with the crowd facing it, but a circle that closed behind you, with flame jets at intervals the whole way around. Then the fog, and there was a tremendous amount of fog. By five in the afternoon I could not see across the crowd, and I could not see the booth at all without committing to the front. Most of the day I was looking at orange light in grey air.

I had braced for a bad line. Gas Works is a hard park to move a crowd into and the city had the day permitted for around ten thousand people, which is the top end of what that lawn has held for a dance show. Footage from the early afternoon shows a real queue at the gate. By the time I turned up around 5 PM there was nothing to it. Everyone I talked to said the same, that it moved quicker than they expected. Food was thin, a few vendors, no shortage of bars.

The phones

The rule was real on paper. Ticket holders got an email before the show that read: “NO Photos or videos will be allowed at this event. Mobile phone cameras will be covered, and digital recording devices are not allowed.” A ticket holder posted the text of it to X in the week before, and Seattle Refined’s review confirms lenses were covered on the way in.

What it amounted to on the ground was a sticker, and a sticker peels. People were shooting all afternoon, and enough got out that DJ Mag ran clips a few days later. The thing that actually held the pictures down was the fog. From more than a few rows back there was nothing to point a phone at.

I don’t think that was an accident. Put the camera rule next to that much haze and it reads as a decision: nobody up there wanted ten thousand people watching a man behind a laptop. At most shows the fog is there to make the lights read. Here it felt like it was there to take the artist out of the room. You could not see the set, so you listened to it.

What actually happened

There was no opener and there was no headline slot. Skrillex was on when the gates opened at 3, which he had said on his Instagram story the night before, and Seattle Refined has him playing ahead of underscores. From there the day ran as back to back and three way sets that handed off without resetting.

Ninajirachi was the surprise. She is not on the poster, she was never added to the official event page, and she played: back to back with underscores, and later in a three way with Skrillex and Porter Robinson. DJ Mag and EDM.com both wrote it up after the fact. Dylan Brady and Nick León were the other two names on the bill.

That three way is the set the day gets remembered for, and I should be straight that I took it in the way everybody behind the first few rows did, as sound and fire in fog. The record of it is crowd sourced. Setlist.fm has it logged from 7:45 PM, running “First of the Year (Equinox)”, Avicii’s “Levels”, and “WannaCry”, the Porter Robinson and Ninajirachi collaboration that had come out in late August. Sunset over Lake Union that night was 7:57. Somewhere in there, per DJ Mag, Skrillex told the crowd to turn around: “Everyone turn around and look at the sunset, this is what I’m seeing. Shoutout to sunsets.”

Sound was the best I have heard in that park. The bar is low. Gas Works is open air over hard ground with water on one side and it has never done a sound system any favors.

The lake

The show read from a mile away. Lake Union filled up along the south side of the park with paddleboards, kayaks and boats, hundreds of them by KING 5’s count, and people filmed the whole thing from downtown across the water. Those clips are better than most of what got out from inside, which is funny. Nobody out there had a sticker on their phone, and nobody out there was standing in the fog.

When the permit ran out at 9 the night moved to a SoDo warehouse on a separate ticket.

The set times

There aren’t any.

Nothing came out with the announcement on July 30, nothing was published before doors, and nothing has surfaced since. What exists is fragments. Setlist.fm has underscores back to back with Ninajirachi at 6:00 PM and the Skrillex three way at 7:45 PM, both logged as fifteen minutes, which is how long somebody had to write things down rather than how long anything was played. Gates were 3 PM, Showbox Presents ran it, and the city permit ended at 9. Everything between those numbers is reconstruction.

So there is no timetable on this page and no wallpaper drop for this one. Two crowd-logged fragments dressed up as a grid would look identical to the real thing and be wrong in ways no reader could check. When a running order exists, we publish it. This time one never did.

Two things if it comes back next summer. The name at the top of the bill opened the day, so doors is not a suggestion. And eat before you go.