The Sahara tent is back on the map for Coachella’s indie rockers. This year, more than in years past, the tent has been overflowing with curious Silverlake types hellbent on catching buzzing electro acts.

Berlin’s Boys Noize (Alex Ridha) is perhaps the perfect example of a dance artist it’s suddenly OK for rock fans to like. Although Ridha himself makes minimal techno devoid of cliches for the club scene in Germany, his songs have been resonating big time with rock fans in the U.S. lately — largely because of similar-sounding artists on Paris’ Ed Banger records.

But Ridha’s set Saturday proved he is no Ed Banger imitator. He expertly mixed together tracks from his stellar 2007 release “Oi Oi Oi” as if he were in his bedroom, causing the burgeoning crowd to pump their fists in time with the music. This is electro to bang your head to — and word is out that Ridha’s brand of dissonant, minimal techno (which sometimes veers into house territory) is the most exciting in dance music right now.

Highlights of his set included a sick reworking of the opening synth line from the Prodigy’s “Breathe” (Ridha smoothly switching up the pitch of the track and adding, then removing, his own drum lines, all the while showing remarkable restraint) and his own “Lava Lava.”

The Berliner ended his set (which stretched over his allotted time) with his take on Feist’s “My Moon, My Man,” leaving the crowd wanting more. Was Boys Noize the best Sahara dance tent act of the fest? Fan reaction at the end seems to suggest Ridha is onto something very big indeed.

– Charlie Amter

Photo: Paul Butterfield / Getty Images

I don’t know who listened to my silent prayers for better vegan options at Coachella this year, but the days of subsisting for a weekend off hockey-puck falafels are apparently over. There’s a dope organic sandwich stand by the entrance called Green Leaf that makes a mean tempeh wrap and an Indian joint by the Outdoor Stage called Bombay Station that has the single best plate of festival food I’ve had in Indio: coconut rice with dal and tomato-pea curry. I, for one, appreciate Coachella finally acknowledging the considerable filthy hippie demographic in its culinary planning.

– August Brown

The sweltering crowd that braved triple-digit temperatures for the 4 p.m. set at the main stage on Saturday at Coachella could have used a cold front along with the Cold War Kids, but somehow the heat was fitting for the Long Beach-based quartet’s sometimes-swampy, always-clattery blues.

The indie favorites emerged from the L.A. scene in 2006 with a reputation for steamy club gigs and road-tested intensity. The heat Saturday demanded every ounce of frontman Nathan Willett’s caterwaul, as he and mates Matt Maust, Jonnie Bo Russell and Matt Aveiro worked themselves into a red-faced frenzy. Their largely spare arrangements and frenetic percussion proved too daunting for the mix at times, but tales of woe such as “Hospital Beds,” “We Used to Vacation” and “Hang Me Up to Dry” still came off as boozy and forlorn, even in the harsh sunlight.

The foursome has been working on a follow-up to 2006’s “Robbers & Cowards,” and showcased at least four of the new tunes, a couple of which seemed to slow the set to a crawl. But maybe it was the lack of a breeze.

– Photo, post by Kevin Bronson

Now that’s commitment — the four aesthetes in DeVotchKa, the most refined of today’s world music mash-up bands, came onstage in the 3 p.m. heat attired almost entirely in black. Jeanie Schroder, the fetching upright bass and sousaphone player, wore a tango dress and a jacket with quarter-length sleeves and elaborate red ruffles. As guys in cargo shorts gathered before them, they seemed more ready for an audience with members of the Corleone clan. But soon enough, women were flamenco dancing at their feet.

DeVotchKa doesn’t have the party-hearty energy that friendly rivals Gogol Bordello will bring to the mainstage tomorrow; with roots in art music and burlesque, they’re more studied and, in some ways, more theatrical. The planned highlight of this set came when giant red and black strips of cloth unfurled and were ascended by the Slavic Sisters, acrobats who often perform with the band. They twirled and hung upside down and DeVotchKa’s singer-songwriter, Nick Urata, played a theremin and sang in his gorgeous high tenor. It was, of course, spectacular.

But the band really won over the mid-size crowd with its evocative B-movie jams. Tom Hagerman will probably be the only player this year to inspire thoughts of Paganini with devilish violin work. Shawn King’s drumming was sharp but never overbearing; he often let Schroder’s tuba determine the beat.

And Urata, though not a pushy frontman (he barely spoke, only pausing to swig from a wine bottle), has more style than a tent full of track-shorts-wearing Coachella trendoids. In a tux shirt and shades, he inhabited the noirish character he plays in his songs, crooning about ladies lost and desperate moments encountered. At times it was hard to tell his  voice from the sound of his theremin.

As for that dedication to style: I spotted Schroder after the band’s set, sitting backstage with washcloths on her bare shoulders as an EMT checked her out, probably for heatstroke. (The medical staff soon departed and she seemed fine, chatting with friends.) She’s hardly the only pale young woman who’s endangered her health this weekend. But she may be the only one who did it for art.

 – Ann Powers

Photo by Chris Pizzello / AP

The velvety Norwegian act 120 Days started late in the Gobi tent but they started right: with an electro purple haze that immediately made the crowd melt into the grass. The beats were low and thunked in the chest, the two keyboards traded off with bubbly bursts while singer Adne Meisfjord, blade-thin and bare-chested, cut in with raw vocals. It’s hard to do much of anything in the Gobi tent but hold down the fort/tent at this hour but these guys kicked it with aplomb.

– Margaret Wappler

Photo of Adne Meisfjord by Karl Walter / Getty Images

In the rush to appraise, each year, what it is that makes Coachella such a titan among major league, multi-act rock fests — to pinpoint what defines the festival in a given year (a Daft Punk electric pyramid, Rage Against the Machine fan bonfires, Madonna in the dance tent) — sometimes it’s easy to overlook the things that the festival isn’t.

So far this year, certain absences have registered, even if only on some subatomic level: More than a day and a half into Coachella 2008, there are almost no celebrities in attendance, and nobody except Sean Penn (who will take the stage at the Gobi tent tomorrow) seems to be talking politics — election year be damned.

Your humble correspondent searched high and low for signs of the celebrity-industrial complex but came up way short. Sure, there was Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler looking leathery and louche in a leather shirt and jeans Friday (dude looks like a Sleestack!). And Paris Hilton made a rather perfunctory appearance in the VIP tent last night (apparently distracting people bellying up at the bar enough to allow non-gawkers to more quickly score their drinks). But there’s been no Kirsten Dunst, no Lindsay Lohan, no Scarlett Johansson — none of the usual Hollywood suspects who have been seen at Coachella in recent years.

As well, a random and informal survey of festival-goers’ T-shirts revealed a pronounced political apathy. You had the girl in the “Shut up and vote” shirt, the dude wearing an “Obama ‘08″ T and the fashion plate in the “War is over” singlet.

But other than that, you were more likely to see T-shirt sloganeering more along the lines of “The Decemberists are terrible” and “I [heart] cage fighters.”

Oh, Coachella! Where is your social consciousness and celebrity quotient?

– Chris Lee

If you are looking for proof that French DJs are hot this year with the twentysomething set, look no further than Kavinsky’s well-attended early offering inside the Sahara dance tent. In what was essentially a warm-up for Sunday’s Coachella closer on the main stage (Parisian duo Justice), Kavinsky satiated dance music fans’ appetite for all things electro, with just a touch of disco Saturday.

The DJ’s mixing skills have noticably improved in the last year, as he deftly employed his cross-fader and spun tracks from his French contemporaries Justice and Daft Punk and Berlin spinner Boys Noize, for good measure, into his own material (”Testarossa Autodrive”). Kavinsky explored everything from house to disco in his set, tweaking tracks on the fly with a cigarette dangling from his lip and sporting a Def Leppard “Pyromania” T-shirt (worn with every trace of irony).

Despite the heat, the American Apparel-clad masses ate up his take on electro, which sounded at times not unlike the Knight Rider theme song, except a hell of a lot more danceable. Kavinsky even dropped a snippet of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger” (although, curiously, he chose to play Kanye West’s version, which features a sample of the now-iconic track — it was all very meta).

By the time Kavinsky played Justice’s anthem “D.A.N.C.E” to close his set, the entire front section of the Saraha was moving in time with the Frenchman. If the reaction to Kavinsky’s just-better-than-average set was this warm, expect a dance orgy for the ages when Justice takes the main stage tomorrow night. C’est vrai: Pigalle and Montmarte have come to the desert, and the kids are still saying oui to the new sound of Paris.

– Charlie Amter

Philadelphia’s Man Man sound like the gap-toothed love child of Modest Mouse after a sweaty night of inbreeding with Tom Waits. They all dress like Mr. Clean, go by names like “Sergai Sogay” and write songs called “The Ballad of Butter Beans.” They should be the worst band in the world.

But lo and behold, beneath the meth-y yelps and fashion idiosyncrasies, they’ve really found their sea legs as an inimitable indie rock band. Grafting chiming disco-punk onto swamp gospel and demonic circus calliopies on their album “Rabbit Habits” was a pretty unprecedented move, and live it came off like a Barnum & Bailey sideshow field trip to a church revival (and that’s a compliment, as this year is slim on weirdos).

If you could roll with the visual antagonism (expect lots of moustaches), they were an unexpected early-day treat.

– August Brown

Photo by Michael Buckner / Getty Images

It took some attendees more than two hours on Friday night to even budge a few feet — let alone exit — in Parking Lot 3. Both exits were coned off and officials working the exits each thought the other was open. Palm Springs police officers on duty explained that the traffic flow plan was devised by City of Indio officials – who, we wish, could have joined us for a friendly conversation at 1:30 a.m.

– Kevin Bronson

The Coachella festival’s afternoon set from Carbon/Silicon had all the trappings of a backyard barbecue when your eccentric uncles grab guitars, give you an eyebrow-raised grin that only implies they used to be a band and play until the beer runs out.

The quartet, featuring Mick Jones from the Clash and Tony James from Generation X, kept it  loose affair, and maybe, casually, a flip-off to Father Time. That Jones and James still have much to say poiltically and socially is without question; Jones, 52, and James, who just turned 50, merely underscore it with less abandon these days. If the guitar work is fairly ordinary, the content isn’t — songs off 2007’s “The Last Post” echo the inflammatory punk rock of the early days.

The early days weren’t mentioned Saturday. Instead, Jones bantered about things eccentric uncles might tell you — the song “Magic Suitcase” is about a trunk full of steroids but these days he’d settle “for International House of Pancakes French toast.” Dostoevsky is name-checked in “WTF?” — but, Jones relays later, he had a nice time this week at Disneyland. And did you know he has psoriasis?

Much respect was shown, from fans young (some of whom were mouthing the words to “Magic Suitcase” and “The News”) and old. Can we do this again next weekend?

– Post, photo by Kevin Bronson