Operation: Hand Hug

In April of 2012, my sister Caroline and I founded and launched an original music news and culture website, entitled Operation: Hand Hug, where we wrote daily articles about electronic dance music and culture. We designed, engineered, and maintained, the site at www.OperationHandHug.com, which saw nearly 50,000 page views a month after just three months of operation.

Taken directly from our original website’s What’s a Hand Hug? page:

We here at Operation: Hand Hug are just like you.

We go to school or work everyday and keep our headphones on whenever possible. We are procrastinators, dreamers and instigators; we laugh at really dumb things and we love to boogie down. Mostly though.. we’re passionate.

I’m sure everyone reading this can remember the live event that ‘changed everything.’ The way it made you feel, the wall of sound, the hands up in the air – the people that you clicked with for just a few hours. It’s that night or festival or whatever that’s kept you telling all your friends they have to go with you next time, kept you coming back and back again and kept the artists busy while you salivate waiting for new tracks. Everyone has that experience, one show or artist that smacks you in the face with an epiphanal moment and changes the game. What’s amazing about music is that its always transformative, its always going to be changing and shaping folks who subscribe to it. Daft Punk knew what they were doing when they named one of the biggest albums (of life in general) ALIVE… this is living to the fullest on the highest level.

EDM is headed toward this big revolution of harmony that kind of mirrors that of other genres through the decades, this is a culture based on sheer love. It’s organic. Festivals and shows are selling out for no other reason than people loving this music, having experiences they will never forget and freeing their spirits. EDM shows feel like one big hug; you’re cheesin and shamelessly dancing off your calories for the entire month – and it feels damn good.

That puts us at the present, Operation: Hand Hug is here to tell the story of all the experiences this genre has brought you and maybe you’ll come meet up with us at a show or two. If you’ve been to a festival in the midwest this past summer (Summercamp, Electric Forest, Lollapalooza, North Coast) you may have seen a pink and purple, glow-in-the-dark robot head around… that’s us. What was once five friends is now an army of Bots, just a bunch of like-minded people that live for toe-tappin tunes. We’re gonna bring you tracks on tracks, keep you up to speed on your favorite artists, and show off YOUR good time! The fans are gonna run this site, we’ll just organize, so if you see our giant robot head at a festival come over and hand hug us – we can’t wait to meet you :)

 

A hand hug represents everything that is rad about music.
It’s personal, it’s cool… it’s an affirmation.
YOU are a magnificent piece to this big puzzle that is Operation: Hand Hug.

“THE WORLD IS DANCING, CAN YOU FEEL IT?”

The site no longer has a home at its original domain on the internet, but the photo above is the last updated screenshot of the homepage. You can even poke around and read some of the articles still through the Wayback Machine here, and the Facebook page is still up and running here.