Written by Eric B. Thornton
Factory 93’s first show at the Forum put one German techno DJ in the middle of the floor, open to close, and a packed arena forgot where it was.
From the parking lot, the Kia Forum still looks like 1967. Architect Charles Luckman drew it to echo a Roman arena, all white columns in a perfect circle, and for three decades it was where the Lakers and Kings played before both left for downtown in 1999. On Saturday, October 3, those columns were glowing pink and lavender, and nothing happening inside had anything to do with Inglewood’s history. Inside, it was Berlin.
That was the bet behind OUTWORLD Los Angeles, the only U.S. stop for Klangkuenstler‘s traveling audiovisual concept and Factory 93‘s first-ever show at the Forum. One name on the bill. No openers, no warm-up, no one to hand the room to. The German producer, who launched OUTWORLD as a label in 2019 before it grew into an event series, played open to close. Three years ago, Factory 93 and Unreal put him in the exact same all-night-long format at Lot 613, a downtown warehouse that sold out. This time it was an arena, and from the floor it looked like it probably sold out too. There was barely room to move.
The production was built in the round. The booth sat dead center on the floor, the crowd packed in on every side and stacked up into the lower bowl, and above it hung a massive halo of white light, a ring wide enough to swallow the stage whole. When it fired, columns of light dropped straight down into the smoke like the bars of a cage, and speaker arrays hung from the rafters on every side. The lights were the star of the night as much as the music. Every time the strobes took over, the arena just disappeared. No seat numbers, no concourse, no reminder that you were standing where the Lakers used to play. Just haze, light and bodies.
It truly felt like a Berlin underground club, just one with a roof built in 1967. It wasn’t about a main-stage moment or a drop built for phones. It was one person, one long story, and thousands of people who had come to go all the way down with him.
And then he did something the purists would never do. Across the night, Klangkuenstler pulled several popular songs into his world, reworked hard and dark enough to sit right next to everything else in the set. The biggest one was his remix of Linkin Park‘s “In the End.” The second the vocal came in, the whole Forum sang, a techno crowd turning into a rock crowd at full volume, and then he dropped it right back into the pound like nothing happened. Wild doesn’t begin to cover it.
Factory 93 was born in Downtown LA’s warehouse district, behind doors most people never find. On Saturday it carried that whole idea into one of the most famous buildings in Los Angeles and didn’t lose a thing on the way in. The warehouse just got bigger. See you on the floor.
OUTWORLD: Klangkuenstler All Night Long, presented by Factory 93, The Kia Forum, Inglewood, October 3, 2026. Upcoming Factory 93 shows at thefactory93.com.
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