After two sold-out years at Union Station, LA’s immersive Halloween party moves to the Arts District on October 31 with The Blaze live, an Arcade Fire DJ set, Claude VonStroke and a tribute to Kavinsky.
Written by Eric B. Thornton
The Arts District doesn’t need much help on Halloween. The loading docks, the rail spurs and the warehouses that look half-asleep at noon already feel like a set waiting for its cast. On Saturday, October 31, THE MAZE moves in and hands out the scripts.
For its first two years, Los Angeles’ immersive Halloween party lived inside Union Station, and both editions sold out. Last Halloween, Guy Gerber, Lee Burridge and Deer Jade had the historic terminal moving until 2 a.m. For year three, the crew behind it, SBCLTR and Minimal Effort, the same team that throws New Year’s mainstay Resolutions, has outgrown the train station and taken an entire city block centered on 613 Imperial Street. If that address sounds familiar, it should. It’s ORIGIN, the indoor-outdoor club that SBCLTR and Minimal Effort founders Roni Mehrabian and Cyril Bitar opened just three weeks earlier.
The format is two stages, one outdoors and one indoors, running 5 p.m. to midnight, 21 and over. Around them: hidden pathways, roaming performers and live actors, large-scale installations, open-air sets under the downtown skyline and warehouse rooms running on KV2 sound. The organizers’ own tagline sums up the dress code: “Costumes encouraged. Expectations abandoned.”
This year’s edition also carries some weight. Kavinsky, the French producer whose synthwave soundtracked Drive and helped define the neon-retro sound of the early 2010s, was originally booked to play. After his death this year, THE MAZE chose to honor him rather than quietly move on, with a dedicated installation, themed areas throughout the block and tribute content built around his music.
Added to the lineup in the wake of that news is the curveball of the night: an Arcade Fire DJ set led by Win Butler alongside Paul Beaubrun, the multi-instrumentalist from the band’s touring lineup, with live instrumentation woven in. This is the Montreal band behind Funeral and The Suburbs, a group built for arenas, now dropping into a costume party in a warehouse district. Nobody knows quite what that set will sound like, and that’s half the fun.
The poster runs the bill in order of appearance, starting with The Blaze performing live. The Paris cousins Guillaume and Jonathan Alric make their music and their visuals at the same time, which is how their debut video, “Virile,” won an international award at the UK Music Video Awards in 2016, two years before their first album, Dancehall. A second LP, Jungle, followed in 2023.
Last on the poster, and billed by the organizers as the headliner, is Claude VonStroke, the Detroit-raised Barclay Crenshaw who founded Dirtybird in 2005 and gave the underground “Who’s Afraid of Detroit?” a year later. On a night built around getting lost, ending with the playful, bass-driven house that made Dirtybird an institution feels like the right exit.
Porky b2b Bones, Valou, Araminta and Oren hold down support across both stages, so wandering between them is the point.
Pick a costume you can actually dance in. You’ll want to get lost.
THE MAZE, Saturday, October 31, 2026, Arts District, 613 Imperial Street, Los Angeles. 5 p.m. to midnight, 21+. Tickets and info at RA.
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Event Info | ORIGIN | Arcade Fire | The Blaze | Dirtybird