Due to a massive thunderstorm in Chicago, Passion Pit, who was playing the North Coast Music Festival, was forced to play a DJ set after their gear was destroyed by the weather Friday night.

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat

Passion Pit was scheduled to headline North Coast Music Festival in Chicago on Saturday, but were forced to perform a purely DJ set due to severe thunderstorms that forced the festival to evacuate Friday. The storm destroyed most of the band’s gear, and they are still recovering. As the band described on their website:

[Friday night] in Chicago, our gear was completely annihilated by weather. 70mph winds blew tarps and covers off of our equipment, allowing enormous amounts of rain to destroy a large portion of what we now know, as of today, to be approximately 75% of our gear. As a touring band that is proud to actually perform electro-pop as opposed to just pressing play, using many keyboards, both analog and digital, this is a nightmare we’ve had for quite some time. It’s almost incredible that it hasn’t happened already.

Well, it happened, and now we’re doing our best to recover.

[Saturday] in Calgary — and tomorrow in Edmonton — we will be doing a kind of “DJ set” in place of performing. This is because we really cared about coming to these new territories in Canada. We felt that at least attempting to have some fun and connecting with our fans was a much better idea than canceling altogether. Again, we are a band obsessed with performance, and DJing is not close to what a real Passion Pit performance really is. However, that being said, we look forward to at least showing our fans, the promoters, and everyone involved, that we actually care.”

They plan on being back to their full performance capacity for their September 4th live appearance on Letterman.