What to see at Hard Day of the Dead this weekend

It’s almost like a horror movie: Just when you though the summer concert festival season was finally over, a bony hand reaches from the grave and grabs you for one last sequel.

Hard Day of the Dead wraps up the year’s fest glut at the Pomona Fairplex (and ends this strange year of festivals finding new venues while L.A. State Historic Park gets repairs). The top of the bill -- Knife Party, Pretty Lights, Bassnectar -- is pretty standard fare for Hard veterans, but there is a lot worth noting on the undercard this year.

While we’re personally thrilled that someone finally cross-booked Zedd and Zed’s Dead on a Halloween weekend bill, here are some of the more notable sets of the weekend.

SATURDAY

Deadmau5 vs. Eric Prydz

Though each of these acts is an established, headliner-level DJ alone, at DotD they’re teaming up for something … smaller? This collaborative set will find them trading tunes off the main stage, in a set geared more to the purist techno crowd than the teenage mob outside. Each act is known for visually intense stage production, so expect something worth watching as well.

Gesaffelstein

The producer born Mike Levy brutalized the Fonda over two sold-out shows in May, giving his industrial clang an air of French panache. He seems to get better as the stages get bigger. At the Fonda he made just a dozen onstage spotlights feel like a stadium show. Let’s hope that at this point he’s vaping onstage instead of smoking, as we want him to survive into a long career.

Ty Dolla Sign

Rap radio’s smooth-crooning lothario of bad decisions at a rave? Absolutely. Ty’s biggest hits use samples from old-school house keyboards, and for this crowd the walls between rap, electronica, R&B and club music have collapsed in a heap. Plus, at festivals with almost no live vocalists, it’s always nice to get some genuine hits to rally around.

Anna Lunoe

Disappointingly, big EDM fests are still boys’ clubs onstage, but the Australian Lunoe has been quietly correcting that by simply outdoing the dudes. At low volumes, her ebullient house is perfect for a late-night pool party; played louder, it gets more intricate and textural and proves her ever-refining craft.

Jeremy Olander

So much contemporary house music is either meant for teeming ravers who don’t even care what song is playing, or for purists from whom the slightest deviation in tempo or hi-hat sound means it’s out of their comfort zone. The Eric Prydz-affiliated Olander’s sound meets all the demands of a rising EDM star, and his production chops are growing sharper and more melodic on each release. But he spikes it all with sad-eyed New Order glitter and a Depeche Mode churn, which gives his songs staying power.

Zhu

Who knows the real person behind this smoky, anonymous house project? Dance blogs suspect an L.A. producer named Steven Zhu, but spare singles like “Faded” have been strong enough (think Sade singing over bleached-out vintage Paul Oakenfold mixes) to win a major audience with barely any information about who made them.

SUNDAY

Audion

The producer Matthew Dear has relied on this side project as an outlet for more club-ready, instrumental material. Yet at this show he’s taking a counterintuitive approach and bringing a live band with him. Singles like “Sky” are sprawling, spacey and rousing cuts that should only benefit from human hands performing them.

Sophie

This cryptic electro-pop artist uses annoyance as a weapon of the avant garde. Tweaking the chipper hues and high-pitched vocals of K-Pop to more sinsister ends, Sophie’s songs strip down club music for parts and rebuild it in alien forms. If they can deliver it for a dance floor, it could be one of the fest’s big revelations.

Void Team

Mid-aughts New York rap staple Cam’ron teams up with the beat-music producer RL Grime for a set that should be a refreshingly antagonistic palate cleanser from all the big-tent house of the night. If Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” annoyed you, here’s a blistering reminder of what Harlem is really like today.

Cajmere

One of the benefits of these big EDM fests is that they can shovel paychecks at the old guard who created this music. No one deserves it more than Cajmere, the pioneering Chicago producer without whom nearly every one of the acts at Hard would be doing something else today, like playing in an emo band or waiting tables. Buy the guy a drink and thank him.

Calvin Harris

Yeah, yeah, he’s the headliner and the best-paid DJ in the land. But given how he unexpectedly remade Coachella in his own image this year (with a late-afternoon main stage set that beat out Arcade Fire in terms of energy and crowd size), it’ll be interesting to see if he has the same cachet among more orthodox dance fans. His new album “Motion” was recently released, so will he use this set to introduce it and push himself as an artist? Or stick to that bucket of well-hewn hits?

The Zipline

The true top act of this weekend is a metal cable extending over the Fairplex grounds. In this context, all those EDM songs about getting high and feeling the rush and seeing the lights and whatever will suddenly take on a new, mortal urgency.

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