Tatiana Mikhailova has posted this beautiful moment from the burn.
After burn of Embrace riding my bike in a middle of the desert I saw White Baby Grand Piano build by the Genius every note light up as you play. I seat down and composed a peace, it was highlight of the BM 2014 for me!
deephouseamsterdam picked up the story about booing at Robot Heart, saying:
Being a multi-million dollar grossing DJ doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get the same amount of adoration everywhere you go. This is exactly what Diplo and Skrillex found out the hard way during the third day of Burning Man.
From globaldanceelectronichq:
Diplo has responded to the early reports of Jack U being reportedly booed off the stage. What is for sure is Diplo did in fact play the commercial tune, ‘Turn Down For What’, as joke to close off their techno set at the Robot Heart Stage. Skrillex and Diplo have been jumping from stage to stage at Burning Man delivering different sets at each performance.
Diplo has been quick to dismiss all of this as rumor, while still standing behind his decision to play the song as an “inside joke:
@PulseRadio @burningman of u check the video we played techno for an hour and ended w turn down for what and people cheered lol ask robot💗—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 02, 2014
“Despite rumors .. I wanna thank robot heart crew for putting together and awesome lineup or surprise guests and attendees that is gettin lost in a really lame false news story.. Although robot heart is anonymous and strictly a deeply quiet crew .. One of the founders .. Jaspn swamy loves this funny moment and is astounded that this is one of the busiest press stories from this years burning man.. Not only me and skrillex popped in but also above and beyond , thievery corp and Seth and many more underground artists.. No one is ever listed or promoted and all the lineups word of mouth .. I have been friends of Jason (who’s has booked me outside of bm in other countries) for many years and nothing on hear articles is true .. There was no booing .. No bad vibes … Nothing about seth troxler was true either… I wanna say one thing… I’m a dj thru and thru .. We did about 8 sets thru our few days at BM.. Ranging from trap dubstep at question mark to uk bass on the opulent temple .. Dub and classic reggae on the dancestranaught car and even deep techno and tribal house on robot heart.. Everyone on stage had a fun moment when we played a few tunes as we were Just killing time while the next dj was setting up.. We weren’t kicked off or booed .. Jus wrapped our set up with an inside joke … And of all the stories to come out after an amazing week… This is pretty tabloidish that’s not what burningman is about.. Everything we did there was good fun and all the people that attended knows it..”
Despite Diplo’s claims, we have a number of eyewitness accounts corroborating (and disputing) the booing. Of course, he has a lot of money riding on this, in terms of his bookability as a major international festival DJ. That is, if you think the Robot Heart crowd is cool and influential. I think they are; although I wasn’t there this year, every other time their crowd has been first-rate.
Diplo is one of the biggest stars in the $6.2 billion EDM market. Even his lawyer is a rising star.
The addition of [Diplo's lawyer David] Rappaport will help build the firm’s new artist and electronic dance music (EDM) roster.
EDM has grown into a $6.2 billion business, according to a recent report, and Diplo (currently on the cover of Billboard) is among its biggest stars whose successful Mad Decent label and block party events have helped earn him some $12 million in 2014.
@danielisee we already got invited to play next year—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 03, 2014
@RandomWhiteDude @EDMsauce totally true !! its all part of a bigger plan – next year we play robot heart every night!—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 02, 2014
Most talked about set at burning man? 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 http://t.co/mQ6MPioDd6—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 02, 2014
All music was created equally (some music sucks, but music elitism sucks more) -Abraham LincolnLogs google.com/search?q=abrah…—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 02, 2014
RT @Skrillex: @SportsMgmtGrad @diplo @burningman @burningmusic @BurningMusicPro ppl wish we got booed off, was the opposite everyone had th…—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 04, 2014
burning man #werandom http://t.co/se9iOWCtfW—
CATEGORY 6 PLURICANE (@diplo) September 01, 2014
Syd Gris has publicly stepped up to Jack-U’s defense, saying that Skrillex and Diplo killed it at Opulent Temple, and their 7 other gigs on the Playa.
What’s kinda bugging me is how many links and stories are going around about if Diplo & Skrillex were booed off at Robot Heart. Like really? That’s the biggest music story to be told from BM this year? Let me stand up and say NO, it isn’t.
After 2 years and near misses of talking to Skrillex’s team about playing at OT, we were excited to see it finally happen this year. The fact Diplo was in the mix with him was all the more exciting.
They bought their own tickets, asked for no special treatment and came out, and despite being scheduled back to back to play separately, played a 2+ hour awesome tag set as ‘Jack U’ of infectious excellent eclectic party music. People had an amazing time and I know the other sets they played with Roots Soceity, Dancetronauts and others were awesome. They were super friendly, down to earth and totally classy when they were at OT.
Let THAT be the dominant narrative of them coming to play BM. 2 music lovers who shared what they do well with thousands of other happy music lovers. The obsession with if they did or didn’t get booed off (one website is offering money to anyone with a video of it) is to me cheap, gossipey and a bottom feeding waste of time. If Diplo did depart from Robot Heart’s generally ultra deep ethos to challenge the norm, good on him. If people really booed cause their expectations were so threatened, they really need to loosen up.
Let’s focus on the do-ers, the creators and gifting, not the drama. Thank you.
This has been corroborated by some OT fans:
Dan: Opulent Temple, the Jack-U set was one of the top 3 shows of my life. Absolutely incredible! Does anyone have a download of their set? Want to listen to it on repeat for the next month!
Tony: Im not a fan of Skrillex, to be honest I didnt even know who he was or what he played, but we ended up at OT when he came on and all i saw was a couple thousand kids having the time of their life dancing their hearts out…so whatever it is that people are bitching about him playing Burning Man i dont quite understand? What i saw happening at OT seemed to me to be exactly why we all go to the playa…to have a great time! Thanks Syd and all of the OT crew who do it for the love of the people…we thank you!
Erin: One of the most epic performance experiences of my life!…during Skrillex/Diplo set. Thank you, OT, Syd Gris, and all the amazing crew who helped make this happen! Xoxoxo! $ (I’m the lucky batch in flight, in the top right corner)
I think rather than a DJ faux pas, this sounds more like yet another Burning Man prank that fizzled on its ass to some of the crowd. People couldn’t tell the difference between satire, snark, prank, or a sign of the broader commercialization that seems to be rapidly gentrifying the event. What’s funny to the San Francisco crowd might not be taken the same way in Miami, Las Vegas, New York, London, and so on. Burners are not your typical EDM festival crowd. For starters, they’re all surviving together in one of the harshest environments in the world. And they’re probably not all doing shots from a bottle of Grey Goose with a sparkler in it.
Perhaps the Burner boos were themselves a prank. The Burners were not really booing, they were just being ironic.
Speaking of irony (or is it?), the hilarious BRC Weekly piece on Earning Man with their re-framing of the Tin Principles was outstanding and is highly recommended.
Burning Man’s official Decompression is not until October 12, but for those who still have the beats of the Playa ringing in their ears and wish they were back there, there’s plenty of good stuff going on this weekend in San Francisco. Playawear is encouraged.
Got another Burner gig? Post it in the Comments.
Opulent Temple are off the Playa and straight back into it, bringing Stanton Warriors to Public Works this Friday night.
Friday, September 5th
Opulent Temple & Public Works presents ‘Dust Off’
While the playa glow is still fresh and because we’re gluttons for punishment, before we’ve even unpacked we’re getting back together to swap stories and smiles at Public Works with the kings of jack!
THE STANTON WARRIORS (stantonwarriors.com / UK)
+
SYD GRIS (Opulent Temple / Opel)
MATT KRAMER (Distrikt)
BILLY SEAL (Opulent Temple)
ELiKi (Opulent Temple)
TAMO (Space Cowboys / Angels of Bass) Vs
VIAJAY (Angels of Bass)
DJ DANE (Dusty Rhino)
& more TBA
Visuals by FulMelt
A 100% benefit to help OT get out of what is looking like some inevitable debt from this year’s (soon to be) epic camp.
Presale tickets available now HERE:
http://www.ticketfly.com/event/636547-stanton-warriors-uk-san-francisco/
If we get enough pre-sale we’ll look at adding a silent disco outside so commit early :-P
9:30pm-3:00am+,
Both floors of Public Works.
161 Erie St @ Mission.
21+
Dress funky!
Both the boyz are in town for this one (and neither are at Burning Man), and we’ll have OT residents and playa staples joining us to dust it up some more! Save some mojo, this party has always kinda totally rocked.
Space Cowboys will be rocking it at Monarch.
A Space Cowboy knows that reentry is always harder than takeoff. It’s all the work in reverse but minus the energy and enthusiasm. So coast into home with us at our Space Port of choice: Monarch. We’ll shake off the last of the dust and help spin new memories into epic legends as our DJs do their best to piece it all back together. You can wash those costumes next weekend, you won’t need um till Decom anyway.
8Ball
ShOOey
DJ Deckard
Kapt’n Kirk
Tamo
Special Guest tba
On Saturday September 6th, Mighty presents “DUST-BUSTER #6″, a Post-Playa bash featuring some of the most talented DJs representing Burning Man’s top sound camps. Open bar 9-10!
Syd Gris (Opulent Temple)
Anthony Mansfield (Disco Knights)
Ben Seagren DISTRIKT)
Josh Vincent (Heart Phoenix)
Alvaro Bravo (Dusty Rhino)
Derek Hena Pink Mammoth)
Photos and videos from this year’s Burning Man will be projected on the Mighty screens throughout the night, so if you had FOMO from not making it to the Playa, or want to relive the experience, come on in! Playawear encouraged, the dustier the better! Otherwise just come as you are.
FRI, SEP 5
to
SAT, SEP 6
Since bursting onto the scene with their multi award-winning compilation “The Stanton Sessions” back in 2001, the Stanton Warriors’ irresistible and inimitable sound has consistently remained the soundtrack to some of the world’s biggest and best parties over the past thirteen years; from East London warehouses, Miami boat parties and illegal Detroit raves, to the stages of Glastonbury, Exit, Burning Man, Ultra and Coachella, selling out global tours and topping DJ lists along the way.
In the studio, Bristol’s Mark Yardley and Dominic Butler have honed a trademark, uncategorisable sound that is at once all their own, but also utterly indefinable, leading to high-profile releases on XL Records, Fabric, Cheap Thrills, Central Station and Universal, alongside official remixes for everyone from Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim, to MIA and Gorillaz. This phenomenal output and remarkable longevity has ensured the Stanton Warriors legendary status amongst not only their fans, but also their peers, as they remain fresh, original and relevant; obstinately dancing to beat of their own drum and helping to pave the way for new talent.
In 2013 alone, the Stanton Warriors topped the Beatport charts (again), inspired Disclosure’s Grammy-nominated album Settle, got Annie Mac dancing on her living room carpet, opened London’s 3k capacity Building Six club, saw their podcast shoot to No. 3 in the iTunes chart and smashed the stages of Coachella, Ultra and Glastonbury.
In 2014, the Stanton Warriors typically show no sign of slowing down, with sold-out Stanton Sessions tours across the USA and UK, collaborations with Claude Von Stroke’s Dirtybird-signed Cause & Affect, a re-release of their smash Bring Me Down, main stage slots at London’s SW4 and Miami’s Ultra festivals and a slew of exciting releases on their own tastemaker label Punks.
“Stanton Warriors’ Bring Me Down is pretty much the perfect garage beat. Everything about that song – the vocal line, the chords, the melody – is totally original.” DISCLOSURE
“Oh my Gosh, SO good! This is the kind of music that makes you literally want to go mental on the nearest dancefloor. As tried and tested on my living room carpet!” ANNIE MAC, BBC RADIO 1
“Stanton Warriors make bass music; intentionally vague, un-pigeonholeable, brilliant bass music.” NOISEY, VICE
“Their relevance and influence has grown with every year and their Stanton Sessions parties simply reaffirm their position atop the pedestal.” MTV
“Stanton Warriors always deliver, this latest track just takes it to a whole other level.” ZANE LOWE, BBC RADIO 1
Here’s a selection of what has been released so far. Want more? JedenTagEinSet has compiled a Soundcloud playlist of 58 Burning Man 2014 mixes
The Scumfrog – Driving to Burning Man
Syd Gris – Opulent Temple
Loboman – Live from the top of Charlie the Unicorn on Burn Night
K-Dust Playa)(Skool, Thursday
Salinger – Mystopia
Anthony Mansfield – Space Cowboys Hoe Down
Brett Rubin and Violin Girl – Slutgarden
Yental Beats – live at Funky Town
Isaiah Martin – Dreaming of Home
Sanedrac Dustfish
Well Groomed at Darwin Fish Tank
Chus & Ceballos at Distrikt Thursday
Allgood Funk Alliance at Robot Heart
Tycho Black Sunrise
Miyagi @ the Kazbah
FunkAgenda @ Opulent Temple
Simon Shackleton Nutz Camp
David Hohme – Heart Phoenix
KingPlow – Camp Feral Fauna
DJQP Celtic Chaos
Robot Heart; photo by Peter Ruprecht
MC2 Audio has a story about what goes into the sound at Ooligan Alley. It’s heavy on technical details, which will be interesting to some readers. A team from the UK brought out a serious system, featuring 12 Funktion1 speakers and 12 subwoofers power by MC2 amps and XTA processors. The DJ booth was the cockpit of a Boeing 737, and they kept the audio equipment in an air-conditioned Hexayurt. Even the DJ’s monitor speakers were Funktion1′s!
In case you don’t know, a setup like this is expensive - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of kit. And I bet it sounded ridiculously good. Thanks Ooligan Alley, and everyone involved in gifting this level of sound experience to Burners.
Here are some of the sets played through this setup:
DJ Professor Stone: “The Great Plane Throbbery”
DJ Vitor Friday Morning Sunrise
re-blogged from MC2 Audio:
The ephemeral Black Rock City, a place that exists only for the length of the spectacular Burning Man festival of counter-culture, music and arts is a gruelling test of endurance for both man and machine alike.
Taking place in the middle of the Nevada desert, where the temperature regularly reaches well over 40 degrees in the day and can plummet to below zero under the clear skies at night, you need to be a special kind of animal to adapt and survive in these conditions. With dust storms whipping up every few hours out of nowhere, it takes the community spirit and a love of all things avant garde to get the best from what some see as one of the most “out there” global events in the world.
Yet, despite the challenging conditions, over 60,000 participants are drawn to the desert location each year to take part in over a week of 24 hour exploration – of each other, of arts events, of music, dancing and parties, and testing individual limits of self-expression and self-reliance.
Whilst part of the ethos of Burning Man is to create “Black Rock City” out of nothing each year and, when the festival ends, return the desert site back to whence it came leaving no traces of humans even having been there, whilst the festival is in full swing, facilities must be created and basic needs met.
Music is integral to the backbone of the entire experience, with performances spanning individual acts of self-expression up to full-on dance music systems of the slightly more traditional form, as you might see at Glastonbury. This is where our story starts, with a British company shipping out to be part of the “Ooligan Alley” project, equipping and manning music and dance events at Burning Man.
Oz Jeffries, from pro-audio specialists Audio Feed based on the south coast of England, takes up the story for us:
“Having been to Burning Man 3 times before, I was excited to take part on the Ooligan Alley project, but I knew the challenge ahead. Black Rock City is the ultimate test of survival, endurance and self-reliance on us, and therefore on all of the equipment out there in that environment for 10 days.”
Audio Feed supplied a huge Funktion One speaker system for the event, which was exclusively powered by MC2 amplifiers and XTA processing. Twelve F1 Res4Ts and twelve F1 F221A subs made up the main PA. Such a serious system demands a seriously cool look, and the focal point for the set-up was the Jumbo 737 airplane cockpit that had been cut in two to become the DJ booth. Monitoring in the cockpit was via a pair of Res2s and F-121s.
Oz continues:
“We powered everything with 4 x MC2 E100, 4 x E25 and the XTA A6 amplifier modules [for the subs], all running through XTA 4 Series processing including 2 x DP448 and 1 x DP428 [same as DP448].
I was very happy to be powering everything with XTA and MC2 equipment knowing their reliance, and we decided to use a sealed Hexiyurt to house the amplifier racks including the XTA A6 modules which we took out of the back of the bass cabinets to protect them from the dust as much as possible. We then ran 2 air conditioning units within that yurt to keep control of the temperature, all run from an isolated generator with an output of 230v to reduce the amperage. We wired each bass cabinet with 4 core cable to allow us to have independent control of each driver.
Each single 4 Ohm Funktion One 21″ driver was run from a single MC2 channel E-100 channel, or a single A6 module channel, therefore giving the best output power with plenty of headroom. Running as a 7 way system we had full separate control of the top Resolution 4′s to cover the back of the arena, all controlled via our iPad using the DP4 remote app connected to the 4 series processors, this control is invaluable throughout the event for front of house control.”
In case you haven’t heard of the A6 modules – a little bit of history: The A6 modules were XTA’s first foray into the world of digital amplification and were a collaborative project with Funktion One, producing a 2 x 2.2kW amp with full DSP and remote control in a package not much bigger than a telephone book! These modules were fitted to the back of the sub cabinets and could power an additional sub each. There was also a smaller A4 module which was used with the Res2 speakers.
Oz was delighted with the results:
“All of the equipment performed outstandingly. After an 8000 mile journey across the Atlantic and a 4 hour truck drive out into the desert, within hours even with the best will in the world all the equipment was covered in dust, so a lot was expected of the moving parts and electronics. Being in a very desolate location for 10 days we had to rely on the equipment with only limited spares. No spares were needed, and even in the dust storms and 14 hour a day running times through 40 degree temperatures differences all the speakers and electronics blinked not once, and upon inspection afterwards we found no dust inside the amplifiers.”
Burning Man shows no sign of burning itself out growing in size and popularity year upon year – a British rental company making a pilgrimage across the ocean with no speaker or electronic casualties shows just what a dedicated and professional a team of people work at Audio Feed. Whether there were any human “casualties” due to party overload is something that will surely stay on the road!
image: Rolling Stone
Seth Troxler is about to tour Australia, and he’s given an interview to Henry Johnstone at Pulse Radio. When asked about the infamous Robot Heart incident, he pulls no punches:
HJ: The magic of the internet.
ST: You guys are quite magical. There was this Pulse article about me at Burning Man – I thought it was quite funny, even though it was only partially true. But I was wondering how you guys magically got the information from Burning Man to the internet so fast? That’s what astounded me.
HJ: Are you talking about the Diplo/Skrillex/Robot Heart incident?
ST: Yeah. I thought the vibe was horrible and I don’t stand for anything that Robot Heart believes in and who they are. But it was Jamie [Jones] and his friends who weren’t allowed on the bus, but he played anyway. Earlier in the night I got on the bus and the guy from Robot Heart was really rude to me…see they have a thousand DJs who that want to play there, and Craig Richards and I were like, “Yeah well we’re the ones who don’t.” And then we left, because they’re obnoxious assholes and I don’t have time for that.
Seth also has a lot to say about “Pop EDM vs the Underground”:
HJ: You’ve been quite outspoken this year in the whole ‘EDM vs underground’ debate and you believe they’re two completely different scenes. I was speaking to Sasha recently and he seems to share your view. I asked him whether or not he thought that eventually the kids in America who are into EDM will start to dig a little deeper and discover more obscure music. He wasn’t so sure. What do you think?
ST: Yeah I do think there will be a trickle down effect. Mass marketed EDM did bring in a lot of young 12 year-old kids who will hopefully one day get older and realise, wow this music fucking sucks. But they’ll also realize, OK I like dancing and I like electronic music and then they’ll find cool stuff. Or maybe they’ll find Gorgon City or whatever next level shit there is, and then hopefully give in to elitist, underground dance music [laughs].
But I do believe that our scenes are completely separate and should remain separate because our communities and end goals are completely different. To be honest I don’t think any of us want to be involved with them, even though there’s plenty of them who want to seem credible to us…but they never will be. So I’m just like, let’s stop playing games and acting like we should be involved with each other. You do your thing, we’ll do ours and we’ll call it a day. And please don’t ever mention yourselves in the context of real dance music. It would be so much better if they could just come clean and call themselves a pop act – they’re entertainers who make pop music. I didn’t get into dance music to hear it on the radio. I fucking hate the radio. The pay to play system goes against everything I stand for.
Read the entire amusing interview here.
Here’s an interview about Burning Man that Seth did with BBC’s Radio 1 in 2012.
Seth Troxler at Robot Heart in happier times, 2013
The best thing about science is that to the uninitiated, it can look like magic
Nigel Stanford from my home town of Wellington, New Zealand, presents Cymatics. It’s spectacular.
thank you :) it was a lot of work, I’m glad that people like it
His double album is called Solar Echoes.
From Nigel’s blog:
Nigel Stanford
The most unusual part of making Cymatics was the fact that the music was written after the video was filmed.
In 1999 I watched a documentary on ‘Synesthesia‘ – a disorder that effects the audio and visual functions of the brain. People with the disorder hear a sound when they see bright colors, or see a color when they hear various sounds. I don’t have it (I don’t think), but I have always felt that bass frequencies are red, and treble frequencies are white.
This got me thinking that it would be cool to make a music video where every time a sound plays, you see a corresponding visual element. Many years later, I saw some videos about Cymatics – the science of visualizing audio frequencies, and the idea for the video was born.
In 2013, I approached my friend Shahir Daud, a talented film director working in New York, and asked him if he was interested in collaborating on the video with me. I don’t think he really knew what I was talking about, but happily he said yes, and in July 2013 we started researching the experiments and buying bits and pieces online.
Read more here.
Cinematographer Timur Civan also discusses filming the video here.
Coming to us thanks to Approach Mag, is an article about the top earners in the EDM world. They are
[Source: Approach Mag, Forbes]
The data was published by Forbes, who sourced it from:
earnings from live shows, merchandise sales, endorsements, recorded music sales and external business ventures. Earnings totals were calculated for the 12-month period from June 1, 2013 to June 1, 2014. Sources include Songkick, Pollstar, RIAA, managers, lawyers and some of the people at the heart of the EDM revolution.
Calvin Harris outsold Jay-Z last year:
Scotsman Calvin Harris seems quite at home in the desert
When Calvin Harris topped last year’s Electronic Cash Kings list with a stunning $46 million in annual earnings, it seemed symptomatic of a bubble in the burgeoning EDM scene. But since then, the only thing that has popped is the income of the world’s highest-paid DJs.
…Harris, whose total surged to $66 million for the past 12 months, is once again EDM’s Cash King. The top ten earners on our list racked up a staggering $268 million this year, 11% more than the $241 million haul of last year’s top ten. Playing more than 50 festival and nightclub gigs, Harris even out-earned the likes of Toby Keith and Jay Z – but not Beyonce.
That’s an average of $1.3 million per gig for young mister Harris, who is the first artist to ever reach one billion online streams. He just bought a $15 million mansion in Beverly Hills, 18,000 square feet with 11 bathrooms.
Who wants to go to Calvin Harris’ pool party? The world. Image: Daily Record
Superstar DJs are choosing Nevada over Ibiza:
Guetta commands some of the top fees in Las Vegas but stays true to his European roots, maintaining a weekly residency in Ibiza. That’s increasingly uncommon, as DJs have been choosing the greener pastures of Nevada over the Mediterranean music Mecca.
“I’ve been going there for the last 10 years, it felt there was nothing special,” said third-ranked Tiësto last year, shortly after ditching his Ibiza residency. “And then I got the offer to play in Las Vegas … They made me a great proposal, not just the money but also what they’re going to do there, the biggest club in the world.”
That club, Hakkasan, is responsible for a large chunk of Tiësto’s recent earnings
Some famous Burning Man DJs made the Forbes list, but not the Top 10 like Skrillex:
Swedish House Mafia, which scored $25 million last year in its swan song as a group, are now earning more than they did together in 2013: Steve Angello alone pulled in $12 million, good for No. 12 on this year’s list.
“It’s just grown gigantically because it’s such a great business,” he says of electronic music. “And it’s a great business model because you have all these kids that want to go to all these events, and that’s a great way of making a business stand very fast.”
Angello’s former colleagues Sebastian Ingrosso and Axwell are among this year’s near misses. Both of them earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million, as did DJ Pauly D, Diplo, Paul Oakenfold, and Daft Punk. The latter came within a disc’s breadth of making the list thanks to album Random Access Memories, and certainly would have made it if they’d played even a handful of live gigs.
Nice work if you can get it.
David Guetta is one of the world’s most popular DJs. He ranked # 7 last year in MixMag’s Top 100 DJ poll (down from 2 the year before). He’s #2 after Calvin Harris in Forbes list of top earning DJs, bringing in an estimated $30 million in 2014. When it comes to actually doing the Disc Jockeying, though, he seems to be a little rusty….
In a recent interview, he complained about having to go through his USB sticks for his Coachella set choosing each track to play individually, rather than just relying on a pre-set playlist.
Guetta’s got the high-profile hook-ups, too. On the first weekend, the Black Eyed Peas made a cameo to debut a comeback track and close it out with “I Gotta Feeling.” Meanwhile, on weekend two, Beyoncé watched from the sidelines, while Nicki Minaj sauntered out for “Hey Mama” in a tartan skirt, Run DMC singlet and a crown made of feathers.
Not everything went smoothly behind-the-scenes, though, as the DJ recounts. “Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend],” he says. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”
He goes even further, revealing that he got his manager to download “I Gotta Feeling” for him off iTunes and he just played that as part of his set, with Fergie “live” on stage – lip-synching, perhaps?
The Black Eyed Peas’ surprise appearance also threw a curveball. “When Fergie decided to come last minute, it was like, OK, but I don’t have ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ because I don’t play it any more. I called my stage manager to go download ‘I Gotta Feeling’ on iTunes so I could play it. It was just completely crazy, but I loved it. And actually the set went amazing, and in a way the stress adds to the adrenaline.”
I thought this story must have been from Wunderground Music, but sadly, it’s an interview he did with Beatport, where he had the #7 track last year. Put it down in the truth is stranger than fiction category.
In the fiction is truer than truth category, Wunderground reports on the new art of miss-mixing, DJs making deliberate mistakes in sets to show they are not just pressing a sync button…something I really believe some of them do.
The latest craze, known as miss-mixing, is proving very popular amongst digital DJs as a way of highlighting that they are actually manually mixing tracks rather than using the sync button.
Michael Briscoe, also know as DJ Whopper, spoke about miss-mixing with Wunderground, “Flawless mixing is now a thing of the past, especially for any up and coming digital DJs. You just can’t afford to mix without mistakes these days or you’ll be labelled as a ‘sync button DJ.’”
“I learned how to mix on vinyl years ago so naturally I’m pretty tight when it comes to matching beats,” continued the resident DJ. “I swapped to digital format a couple of years ago because it’s convenient, now I spend more time practicing making mistakes than I do practicing actual mixing. [Source: Wunderground Music]
Now THIS is some old-skool DJing:
This DJ explains Why Old School DJs Are Complaining, And You Should Too
Image: Dominique Bray/Photo Bucket
Now this is an art project I can get behind.
Rockstar Librarian has been publishing a guide to the music of Burning Man for the past decade. It has now grown to a 32-page booklet, listing more than 5,000 DJ sets and live music performances.
Rockstar Librarian, President of the Galaxy, 2008
She is raising money to help with the production costs. Now that the guide is so big, it creates a lot of work for her and her designer who have to work around the clock for 3 days straight.
It’s an amazing offering, and one that BMOrg themselves could easily donate $5,000 to, given how integral it is to their event.
As well as the guide, she also compiles as many of the DJ sets from the Burn that she can link to. Sign up for her free newsletter to get access to last year’s sets. Here are the 2013 sets on Soundcloud: 229 of them. It takes a massive amount of time to put this kind of information together, and it is incredibly useful to all Burners – as well as fans around the world of the thousands of different DJs .
Please support Rockstar Librarian, let’s thank her for all the spectacular work she has done for the Burner community to date and encourage her and her team to keep working so hard for us in the future.
Donate here.
If you want to get your set listed in the guide, the deadline is August 12 – but please don’t leave it to the last minute, if you can avoid it.
When news came out that Dancetronauts had been banned for at least a year for being Too Loud For Burning Man, we wondered if there might be more to the story. Was this part of a bigger pushback to exclude “Broners” from our culture, an attempt to differentiate Burning Man as “more than just another EDM festival on the circuit?”
Well, speculate amongst yourselves, Burners…meanwhile, the coincidences continue to mount. Now we hear that Playa stalwarts Opulent Temple have been denied placement. Why? For not being interactive enough.
This is a sound camp with at peak moments more than 10,000 people being entertained. By the world’s best DJ talent, for free.
From Opulenttemple.org (emphasis ours):
2014 saw us go big once again. We produced and gifted our 11th incarnation of the camp, doing so for our 7th time anchoring a corner spot. We built a new (partially) crowd funded DJ booth we called Armagan, aka OPod 3.0. We also built new 3D screens for visual mapping known in OT slang as the snowflake screens, new I-beams and support structure to put the raised stage platforms together, and a custom made 3 shower stall on a trailer. We moved warehouses, did upgrades on our fire effects manifold, built a paneled LED light effect DJ booth for indoor events, threw 16 fundraisers, and we bought a swing set. We also founded a new 501c non-profit organization called Sacred Dance Foundation to formalize with the IRS what we always been in action, a non-profit community, gifting an experience in the hopes it will do a small part to plant seeds of goodness in troubled times.
So yes, we’ve been extremely busy, expended a high amount of financial and personal resources last year to make it all happen and ended up with a considerable amount of debt. It took us quite a few events just to come back from the deficit so we head into this year’s burn needing a different and less risky experience. Our core team has never had a year since starting or joining OT where we haven’t produced a large sound camp. It takes a massive coordinated group effort each year to raise enough funds to bring our production to the desert and I’m sure you know that we, like every other sound camp, do it all with only the support of our community, without any help from BMorg. We attempted to apply for a grant for our large-scale fabrication projects last year but were denied because sound camps and music are not considered art that the powers that be wish to support. While other art installation projects have access to almost $1 million in grant money, free tickets for crew and validation from BMorg, sound camps get no support even though we also contribute a highly interactive and memorable experience to tens of thousands of burners every night of the week at BM and beyond. It would be safe to say that sound camps play a big role in why many of the BRC population make the trek each year so the lack of support and respect from the organizers is disheartening… so much that they didn’t even assign us a placement for our camp this year.
So now the plan is to step back and have a different BM experience while still maintaining an OT presence and vibe in Black Rock City. There will still be a great OT camp that will be close to the many dance floors in the 10:00 and Esplanade vicinity, and we’ll still do a number of events, but they just won’t take place in our own sound camp and dancefloor. We’ve asked why we’re not getting placed and were told our camp is not ‘interactive’ enough since most of the events we’re doing are mobile. We’ll be announcing our events here in the coming weeks but definitely keep Wednesday night open for us with your creatively fabulous white attire for our annual Sacred Dance ‘White Party’, but this year on the open playa, stationed around the Flaming Lotus Girl’s Serpent Mother. We hope to enroll as many art cars as possible to link up and add to the epic party. Please contact us if your art car would like to join that sonic train and participate in the overall experience.
Thank you for the ongoing support to help us do what we do. Seems like the community based sound camps (in contrast to millionaire funded ones) are dwindling; many of the popular sound camps from years past will be absent this year: Roots Society, Osiris, Dancetronauts, Digital Apex. At this point we don’t really know year to year where the wind will blow us, but you can certainly bet whichever direction that is, we’ll be forging ahead with fire, beats, community and a mission, forever purposeful.
See you in the desert!
The only major sound camps we’ve heard that got placement are billionaire camp White Ocean and Disorient. Burners this year will also have to make do without:
Root Society
Osiris
Dancetronauts
Digital Apex
If you’ve heard of any other sound camps that won’t be returning this year because they were denied placement or couldn’t get enough tickets, please let us know and I’ll update the list.
When the Founders first announced their retirement and transition to a non-profit, then followed it up with an Anti-Burner ticket lottery, we speculated as to their motivation. Was there some perverse element disgruntled at Burners, and actually trying to destroy Burning Man from within?
I’m not sure what the motivation is, maybe you guys have some ideas. The decisions they’re making at BMHQ in the Mission just seem to be getting worse and worse, the older the Founders get. A tragedy, really.
[Update 9/13/15 5:25pm PST]
Thanks to a source for sharing this. From OT’s recent email to camp members:
This year is a unique year by OT standards because for the first year since our inception in 2003, we are not building a large sound stage / camp-central dance floor. After 12 straight years we decided this was finally the year to step back and have a different BM experience while still maintaining an OT presence and vibe in Black Rock City.
So, there will be a great OT camp…But please be clear, though there will be many dance floors in our immediate vicinity, most of the time it won’t be our own.
The camp will have limited space this year for ~120 people, including no more than about 20 RV’s. (for comparison, last year we had about 275 people by the end of the week). So by our standards will be on the mellow / intimate scale. The requested camp placement is 250 feet back from 10 & A (so essentially behind whatever sound camp is on 10 &A). That puts us well behind the usual loudness that’s generally been part of the OT camping experience but still close to the Esplanade and the action.
So that’s all they were looking for – somewhere to put less than half of the previous year’s camp. That’s the placement that was denied them, for not being “interactive enough”. So do the camps behind the 10 o’clock sound camps all have to be interactive now?
They were going to have events every night which were all open to the public.
EVENTS
Party wise we will do 5 events (only one of which is a full on OT scale blow out.)
-Tuesday Sunset: OT Happy Hour – Meet and greet for all camp members and open to the public to invite friends, live DJ’s and drinks.
-Tuesday Night: OT partners with an Art Car tba for an OT vibe and DJ mobile party.
** – Wednesday Night: our biggest event of the week – our annual OT Sacred Dance ‘white party’ – open playa locale TBA.
-Thursday Night: OT hopes to partner with a placed sound camp to synergize vibe and talent with our crew and theirs.
-Friday Sunset: OT Happy Hour – Meet and greet for all camp members and open to the public to invite friends, live DJ’s and drinks.
Would it have been so hard to reward their loyalty with placement? If not where they requested, then anywhere?
Burners on social media are saying that MOOP is the “actual reason” Opulent Temple were denied placement. This allegation has now been completely debunked, see below.
In other veteran news, Dusty Rhino was denied placement on the Esplanade, for not being interactive enough.
Let’s hope this means there will be incredibly interactive camps along the Esplanade this year, and in the back streets behind the sound camps.
[Update 7/11/15 6:34pm]
Opulent Temple themselves, perhaps fearing further ire from the Borg, have moved to downplay the situation, and distance themselves from any speculation about motivation.
Hey folks, OT here. We know people love getting drama-tastic about Burning Man, but while we appreciate Burners.me a lot for their support of music at BM, we feel this headline is a bit sensationalized. We don’t want to get pulled into some conversation about ‘war’ on EDM music, because frankly we don’t see it that way. Our scoop is in the web posting and we encourage people to read it on our site. Again in a nutshell – Unlike previous years, we don’t have our fixed stage. We never planned on having it for the reasons outlined in our post, which has nothing to do with placement. We are doing a number of OT events though, that will be at various spots around the playa, and because our camp itself did not have an interactive element, but is more of a base camp for our events around BRC, we weren’t placed. We’re still going to be there, it just makes things harder for us than we hoped it would be. We thought and wished partially based on legacy and previous contribution we’d get a reserved spot, but we didn’t. We’re not trying to call victim, it is what it is, we’re well versed in being disappointed in decisions from the org and we choose to be there with open eyes. It had nothing to do w MOOP either, for the record… There was zero mention of MOOP in their reasons for their decision. Thanks for everyone’s support and we look forward to seeing everyone out there, especially Wednesday night at the Serpent Mother. Peace.
[Update 7/11/15 7:00pm]
Thanks to MzFit for helping clear this up. Despite the haters’ claims (which we can put down to disinformation, or maybe familiar smear campaign tactics), OT was green for MOOP last year. They had a single red dot, which presumably was dealt with. It was a lot less than most camps, including most camps that only had one MOOP mark.
[Update 7/14/15 9:03am PST]
This is from last year’s Piss Clear BRC Weekly. It reveals some of the Founders’ attitudes towards EDM and ravers:
White Ocean got placement. Dancetronauts and Opulent Temple got punishment. One is a billionaire camp (the founder owns 50 private jets), the other two are long time Burner camps who have put years into the event. Draw your own conclusions…welcome to Burning Man 2.0.
[Update 7/14/15 11:28am]
Someone suggested that 300 camps were denied placement this year, but officially it was 95. See the comments to this story for details.
From Opulent Temple:
For the record – 95 camps that asked were not placed (not 300). From our placement communication: “More camps requested Theme Camp placement than we have dedicated space for and as a result, we were unable to place 95 camps. Unfortunately your camp is one of these unplaced camps.”
Secondly, though yes – our in-camp interactivity was low (we know), it’s not like it was non-existent. Our interactive elements in the camp will be a large & plush public shade area open to anyone to come enjoy. (The same we always had on Esplanade for anyone to come chill) + 2 public sunset happy hours with guest DJ’s and drinks. + we’ll do 3-4 ‘mobile’ events and out about BRC, with Wednesday being the biggie. We’re doing more at our camp than some placed art car based camps that do nothing at their camp except park their art car when not in use.
Lastly, having some time to reflect, we say the reality of the placement thing is not that serious, it’s just been blown up because some have thought our normal big sound camp wasn’t placed, and we never intended to do the sound camp. It’s just the redundant, and consistent illustrative principle. We were, admittedly, hoping and assuming that our years of huge output of contribution was good for something in the consideration. Now we know it isn’t.
Last weekend as part of the build up to the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, they threw a Hackathon at Weebly’s playful office in the Financial District. The idea was to make something that would enhance the experience of artists and fans at Outside Lands. I love this idea – a festival that can improve, based on ideas and input from its patrons. Call it Radical Community Reliance.
From Fest300:
This past weekend at the third annual Outside Hacks Hackathon, over 200 developers, designers, and technologists of all kinds gathered at the San Francisco headquarters web hosting company Weebly for the mission of “building something that enhances the experience for artists and/or fans at Outside Lands .”
For the uninitiated, a hackathon is an intense competition where teams of coders attempt to build an app, feature, or program in a limited amount of time (usually between 24 and 48 hours). Outside Hacks allotted its participants a total of 24 hours. One of the organizers of the hackathon Travis Laurendine says “Hackathons are like dance marathons, it’s like a sleepover party, except no one is sleeping.”
At the end of the long and hyper-intense 24 hours – which left many of the coders exhausted – the judges chose the app Dave Sent Me as the Grand Prize Winner. That includes a $5,000 cash prize, an Outside Lands VIP experience, and perhaps most importantly the integration of their app technology into the Outside Lands app.
Dave Sent Me is described as a “personalized Outside Lands schedule recommender.”
Outside Hacks Organizer and “Entre-pee-neur” Travis Laurendine
New Orleans Burner Travis Laurendine is one of the geniuses behind AirPnP.
According to Fest300, Burning Man was involved in Outside Hacks too, kicking off the event with an address by social alchemist Bear Kittay.
…the symbiotic relationship between technology was a running theme for the weekend and its presence was as noticeable as the sound of hundreds of fingers hitting keyboards and the smell of pizza fueling the coders.
In the opening remarks, artist and social alchemist for Burning Man Bear Kittay addressed the hackers by saying, “We’ve got to remember that the intersection here between entertainment and technology is a really relevant space. It’s been separated for a really long time, but it’s not often we get together with all these brilliant engineering minds to solve some big problems right at the precipice of music and technology. Think about what a really disruptive tool you could create can be, that could really help to transform the way music and technology worlds come together.”
Travis Laurendine, who has witnessed the hackathon significantly grow since its inception in 2013, points out that, “Art is often enabled by technology. A lot of art is dependent on technology. Technology has led us to new art forms. A lot of these people who have the mind for art also have minds for tech, and vice versa. That’s why so many incredible developers are also musicians, because they have the mind for it.”
The incredibly diverse and youthful participants in the hackathon were all united by their passion for music and their drive to make music a better experience for listeners and artists alike. Greg Cerveny, a founder of music startup Groove and one-man team, created his app Dance Commander to facilitate dance parties at the festival by people holding up their phones open on his app displaying a dancing stick figure, thus inviting other festival goers to join in on the dance party. Cerveny says his goal was to give “someone a more awesome time or a really awesome experience because they engaged in a dance social circle.”
[Source: Fest300]
Burning Man has been involved with a hackathon before, a “Burner Hack” conference being held at [freespace] in 2013. It’s not clear if anything was produced from this to help Burners. The event was linked with hacking again this year, with news that at least 200 people pushed to the front of the ticket queue by “routing around” the Ticketfly/Burning Man custom system. In a recent Medium story “Burners Don’t Hack Uber, People Do”, they described a smartphone app called “Burner” that is being used to hack Uber to get free credits.
The intersection of music and technology is a really relevant space. So is Burning Man in that space? Are we really at the precipice – what does that even mean?
Outside Lands is coming up in a couple of weeks. The lineup includes Elton John and Billy Idol.
Recent announcements from the Org make it seem like Burning Man is trying to deal with Electronic Dance Music like it’s a new problem. In fact, this is not the case. Burning Man has been taking place in the desert since 1990 and ravers started playing there in 1992, the third party. Since then, rave has grown from a few DJs to more than 5,000 different sets listed in Rockstar Librarian last year.
Not only was it fine to post the names of DJs on flyers from the very beginning, it was also personally endorsed by Larry Harvey.
Burning Man Flyer Advertising DJs, 1992
DJ Niles recalls:
I was DJ Niles and organized the first rave at Burning Man. I met with Larry Harvey in his kitchen to pitch him on the idea and he thought amplified music would be awesome at BM though warned me that any of the old timers wouldn’t like it and made us set up a mile from center camp with our speakers facing away from camp. We had about 20 people that came specifically for the party and about 50 people that came from BM camp. We had The Fly hotsprings to ourselves.
From Edgecentral (writing by Graham St John):
What was then known as “rave” music was first amplified at Burning Man in 1992 when a small “rave camp” appeared a mile from the main encampment, “glomming parasitically…onto the Porta-Johns.” The camp was organized by Craig Ellenwood of the early Oakland acid party crew Mr Floppy’s Flophouse. The headline act was Goa Gil, who played from Aphex Twin’s “Digeridoo” on digital audio tape to no more than 25 people. Also playing to hardly anybody were Brad Tumbleweed, Dave Synthesis (aka “Dsyn”), Craig and Terbo Ted. Terbo Ted has the mantle of being the first person to DJ at Burning Man. Ted informed me that in 1992 he “played on Friday afternoon to literally no one, with only ten miles of dust in front of me. It was awesome”. While he can’t recall it with precision, the first track played was some “spacey stuff” from a Jean Michel Jarre 12 inch from Craig Ellenwood’s record pile, “a record he was willing to sacrifice to the elements … it was literally a sound check” (ibid). Here is a link to a short excerpt from Terbo Ted’s live acid techno set in 1995, which was the first electronic music recorded at Burning Man to be released on CD (“Turbine time” on Shag).
The period was primitive to say the least. As Charles A. Gadeken reported in 1993: “I remember going out to the rave camp, it was five guys, a van, a couple of big speakers, a card board box covered in tin foil, colored lights and a strobe light. It was all cool.” But the reception was generally less than enthusiastic. Ted recalls that the punk (add your own prefix: anarcho, cyber, steam, shotgun, etc.) sensibility predominating at Burning Man held DJ culture complicit with “consumer society and a stain on an otherwise anarchistic, art-oriented event.”
Even in the early days, this was an issue for the hippies – one they were ready to get all “stabby” for…
On one morning near sunrise in 1993, a hippy dude came up to me while I was playing music on the sound system and he holds up a knife towards me and yells “are you crazy?” And I say “no, you’re the one with a knife”. And then he says he’s going to cut me or the speakers. So I turn it down, ditched the decks and circled far and wide off into the desert. He tried to cut the speaker cones with his knife but they had metal grills on the fronts, he looked like a fool and gave up and wandered off. I put on a cassette of Squeeze’s Black Coffee in Bed as he was walking away.
As early as 1994, there was an “official rave” listed in the Burning Man brochure.
Burning Man forced the techno reservationists to maintain their isolation a mile from Main Camp between 1992 and 1998, during which time the camp evolved into a kind of outlaw satellite of Black Rock City. Over the following two years, San Francisco’s DiY music and culture collective SPaZ (itself co-founded by Ted and D syn, along with Aaron, No.E Sunflowrfish and various others) orchestrated the sounds exclusively. It was extreme, eclectic and haphazard…Listed as the official “rave” in the Burning Man brochure for 1994, SPaZ would effect a great influence on sound system culture at the festival.
It was the ravers who encouraged Burning Man to let anyone bring their sound, big or small. A number of music collectives then converged on the Techno Ghetto. This was the first expansion of Burning Man’s crowd beyond its San Francisco Cacophony Society roots that kept numbers steadily in the low hundreds for the first 7 years. After the rave camp was established, Burning Man’s population started doubling every year.
SPaZ, members of which later initiated the Autonomous Mutant Festival, were effectively encouraging Burning Man to be “more like the UK festival vibe where anybody could bring their sound, big or small”. So, in 1995, while SPaZ set up their small system at four points amplifying everything from minimal techno and drum-n-bass to psytrance under a four story three-cornered scaffolding with lights and “variously garish and random streamers, banners and tarps, from punk to dayglo-indian-balinese-cybertrance-batiks to outright monstrosities” visible from Main Camp, Wicked (the famed UK derived outfit who held full moon and other parties on beaches and in parks around the Bay area between 1991-1996) arrived with their turbo rig and scaffolding supporting their black and white banner. SPaZ hosted artists including Minor Minor (Gateway), Theta Blip, Chizaru and Subtropic. Featuring himself, among with DJs Markie and Bay area guest’s Spun, Felix the Dog, Rob Doten and Alvaro, Wicked co-founder (and now running Grayhound Records) Garth stated to me that they “played for 4 days and nights through hail, wind, rain and electrical storms”. North America’s first free party tekno sound system, Pirate Audio, also made an appearance that year. On the windblown frontiers of techno, in this nascent vibrant ghetto accommodating the eclectic, experimental and inclusive sounds of SPaZ, the house sounds of Wicked, and other sounds besides, Burning Man had begun to attract a variety of socio-sonic aesthetics, paving the way for the mega-vibe it would later become
Poop was being MOOPed at dance camps even then: by BMOrg, who were dropping it on rave camps from the sky:
In this period, besides differences between the habitués and proponents of varying dance aesthetics (from the inclusive to the more proprietary) there was considerable conflict between those who regarded themselves true Burners and those they held as little more than raving interlopers. As Ted remembers, “ravers were always pariahs at Burning Man …. it’s like we were the poor people on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of the man”. At one event, a bag of human excrement was dropped on the dance camp from a low flying aircraft. According to Garth, Burning Man had the porta-potties removed from the rave camp before the festival ended. “When people started crapping on the desert for lack of options, someone carried over a bag to main camp …. Burning Man was so enraged by this they flew over and apparently dropped it on one camp.“
From the beginning, Rave Camp was a mile away from The Man, but back then it was still possible to drive your car around the Playa. That all changed when tragedy struck in 1996: a stoned driver ran over a tent, sending one person into a coma for months.
In 1996, the year of Helco, they tried to re-integrate the rave camp with the rest of the city – creating the Techno Ghetto as an outer suburb. The plan failed:
But, things didn’t go according to plan in the ghetto. According to Garth, “the honeymoon ended that year. The theme was “Hellco” and that was what they conjured up… by this point there were too many [sound systems], all bleeding into each other…. it felt more like a super club on the playa”. As Terbo Ted recalls, the “ghetto” was an “abysmal failure … DiY gone mad… Music snobbery and cliquishness and DiY anarchist tendencies prevented an orderly camp from forming and the resulting spread-too-thin sprawl proved to be dangerous in an era when cars were still driving at every vector on the playa at high speeds in dust storm white outs”. Both Garth and Ted are in part referring to a tragic incident in 1996 when three people were seriously injured sleeping in their tent near the Gateway sound system, one in a coma for months, after being collected by a stoned driver.
It looks like ravers got the blame for the incident. An “unofficial anti-rave policy” was formed, to appease the complainers:
Together with an apparent perception that the “rave” was giving Burning Man a bad name within official circles, and the likelihood that techno was perceived as disturbing electronic chatter for many participants…this incident generated an unofficial “anti-rave policy”, which was effectively countered through the compromise entailed in Gosney’s innocuously named “Community Dance” in 1997.
We have an unsung Burner hero to thank for rave surviving at Burning Man in the face of this early anti-EDM sentiment from the old-timers. BMOrg, predictably, tried to ban doof – saying that only 100W systems were allowed. Luckily Mark Heller, Raver Marine, saved the day – and Burning Man was able to grow from 4,000 in 1995 to 70,000+ in 2015.
Ironically I was looking for info on Global Underground – looking to see how or if Narnia was still going on, and something of a TRUE RAVE which I attended 90-94, before moving to SF…. And of course hitting Burning Man 95-02… However I have news for you in the context of BM and raves… And not the stuff you can copy out of wiki..
Burning mans ‘community’ was, and IS rather anti-raver… They are just not openly hostile any longer – yes you heard me – hostile!
Let me explain the experience this stems from. I first heard of BM in San Diego in 94, with some irony at Narnia a much different ‘music based’ event. Much of my set, after finding that I was headed to SF decided to hit ‘The Man’, and we did. As I had an inordinate amount of time off that day and age, I volunteered and went early. (As I did following as well for a number of years.)
Anyway, a little correction of view and history is in order. And I’ll provide that for you here. In ’95 and years prior, were just tagging along, to the “Art Festival” that is BM, 95 being a clear demarcation of that. With two clear and distinct camps seperate and litteraly 2 miles away from each other. I’ll explain, upon arrival in 95 I got early and full access as a volunteer, as well as insight in the controversy of the time. The ‘Art crowd – Organizers’ were sick of the noise, and relagated “Rave Camp” to be at a distance, with a connecting road, and was seperately organized to boot.
This distance proved FATAL, as a couple were run down in their tent along the ‘road’ I planted flags to demark. These were deaths #2&3 of 3 that year. (The other being vehicular suicide of sorts.) In response, driving, apart from art cars was banned the year following in 96. Also of interest in this context. [Clarification: 3 people were critically injured, 1 person died from vehicle accidents before the gates opened in 1996]
96, came no cars, and with it, NO RAVE CAMP! And a full blown discouragement of the rave community to attend by the BM authorities that be to this day. Find a ticket and map for that year, and you’ll find the typical desert death disclaimer on the back and with the hand outs, and also an interesting RULE, the first of many. “No sound systems over 100 watts allowed” yes you heard me! Where did 100 watts come from? – it was the biggest boom box you could find… Generators were also not encouraged, and a “centralized power system” would be provided for the limited center camps. (I have a unique perspective here as well…)
In 95 through 97, I volunteered with the guy running the generators in the BM base camp, which was very similar to what I did in the Marine Corps. (Yes, I was a Raver Marine – put your finger on that – try…) Anyway, on arrival in 96, the animosity was high, most of the art community was pleased with no rave camp & sound policies, thinking they could finally get some sleep…. I kid you not! HOWEVER – there were a lot of familiar faces from Rave Camp from the year previous and I got to know them much better this year as they were trying to fit into the new BM mold. And here’s why. I was the guy going camp to camp to find out your ‘power needs’ and drag the cables to many of them. “Hey how many amps you need?” And this is when the REVOLUTION began! And likely the only reason BM survived and grew! 95 was TOO BIG TOO LOUD TOO DANGEROUS! 96 was to be smaller quieter – but more people showed up…. To include a lot of ravers upset about what they helped build shunning them. 1/2 of the base camps requested 50A to 100A. And of those, almost all had HIDDEN DJ BOOTHS AND SPEAKERS IN GIANT PAPER MACHE ART! 10-20 THOUSAND watt systems. Right in the middle of the main camp.
In the few days prior to the first official night, the running joke was ‘don’t call the cops, my boom box is over 100w’. The first official night – THE SOUND CAME ON! AND IT WAS AWESOME!
You don’t have ME to thank for still referring to Burning Man as a “Rave” I was just a cog in a wider revolt that I did not even know was happening until I was trusted to help in the effort in an exchange of winks and nudges. An enabler…
But it was then, that the “Art Festival” known as Burning Man, embraced the chaos and the Rave community that helped make the event what it was at the time. (IMO it’s not what it used to be, and maybe that’s good too – different topic)
[Source: Burners.Me]
Burning Man flyer advertising DJs, 1998
Burning Man flyer advertising DJs, 1999
In 1998 Burning Man was described as “the ultimate meta-rave”. This year saw the integration of EDM and big art burns, with 2000 people at the Temple of Rudra (yes, they had Temples there before David Best’s first one). BMOrg shut it down on the first night, pulling the plug from the generator:
In 1998, a community sound system featuring New York’s Blackkat collective, The Army of Love, SPaZ and Arcane was unpacked on the playa. Holding their own desert dance gatherings over the previous five years in the Mojave, Moontribe also set up that year, with artists performing for three consecutive nights next to The Temple of Rudra, with the final party drawing 2000 people following Pepe Ozan’s opera. Symptomatic of the ongoing tensions, as Ozan apparently neglected to inform the Burning Man organization about his deal with Moontribe (they were providing the soundcheck for his opera), the event’s unique peace keepers, the Black Rock Rangers, unplugged the generator at dawn on the first night. With the all-too-familiar experience of having “Rangers” shut them down, Moontribe’s Treavor successfully pushed for an agreement for an all-night party after the opera on the Friday night, which also happened to be a full moon. According to Treavor, with himself, Petey and Matthew Magic performing: “we kicked in with some full on Psy Trance/Techno madness and tons of people came over and stayed in front of our system until around noon when it was about 110 degrees and time to end”
The anti-raver sentiment went beyond just BMOrg and the Rangers.
That known DJs were being targeted by Burning Man organisers was a circumstance endured by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), who was apparently pursued on the playa by “Pipi Longstocking” in the mid 1990s. But the tension between ravers and Burners seems to have been appropriately dramatized in a performance which saw a standoff between Goa Gil and a giant peddle-powered flamethrowing drill and Margerita maker called the Veg-O-Matic of the Apocalypse—or, more to the point, anti-rave crusader Jim Mason who was peddling the beast. Mason’s Veg-O-Matic is described by Robert Gelman in his article Trial by Fire: “It’s straight out of hell, suggesting engineering from the industrial revolution transported to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Part vehicle, part flame-thrower, part earth drilling device, I envision this machine being used to battle creatures in a 1950s monster movie, or to torture souls of the damned in the realm of satan”. With a pressurized gas-charger spurting flames as far as seventy feet from its barrel, and a gathering mob inciting it to greater acts of destruction, the Veg-O-Matic was known to burn installations in its path following the demise of the Man. On its post-Burn rampage, when the Veg-O-Matic rolled into the first Community Dance camp in 1997, Mason found Goa Gil directly in his path:
The crew of the machine is tilting the flamethrower’s barrel up at the console. Gil is staring down the 12-foot barrel of this jet powered char-broiler. I had to remind myself that this is theatre, or is it? I’m still not sure. “Burn it!” the mob chants, “Burn THEM!” Like an opposing pacifist army, the ravers are standing their ground, some shouting in defiance of the threat, some in disbelief that this could really be happening. Chicken John, like the demented circus ringmaster that he is, issues his now-familiar warning over the bullhorn [“Stand Aside”]. We seem to have travelled back centuries in time. I don’t remember ever feeling farther from home than this.
Ravers have been far more effective at bringing Burning Man culture back into the Default world than any other group. What have the hippies done to spread our culture, other than a few panel discussions?
The spirit of Burning Man is raised throughout the year in San Francisco at events such as the pre-Burn Flambé Lounge, the annual Decompression Street Fair, the How Weird Street Faire, the Sea of Dreams New Year’s Eve events and numerous sound art camp fundraising events held between May and August every year. The Decompression events have become hugely popular multi-area dance parties, and attracting many who’ve never been to Burning Man. The San Francisco “Heat the Street Faire” Decompression party is a reprise of the Burn held on 8 city blocks two months after the event.
[Source: Edgecentral]
So EDM has been at Burning Man pretty much as long as there’s been a Burning Man. This is nothing new. It hasn’t turned into Coachella or Glastonbury in 23 years, so why are people suddenly afraid that it’s going to now?
Surely a bigger problem is the miraculously consistent quota of 40% Virgins – every year it just gets harder and harder for Veteran Burners to get tickets, and more safari tourists come. BMOrg is trying to blame EDM for this, but we had EDM 20 years ago. What we didn’t have back then was a Ruling Group determined to promote themselves in the mainstream media: The Simpsons, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Fast Company, Town and Country, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, PBS, the New Yorker, airline in-flight magazines – not to mention all the celebrities and politicians encouraged to name-drop Burning Man and give media interviews from the Playa. I think if anyone is to be blamed for ticket scarcity, it should be the promoters who did this massive PR push into Default society so they could sell more tickets at higher prices – not ravers, who have been gifting awesome experiences at Burning Man on their own dime over the past 3 decades.
If ravers were there 10 years ago, and not creating huge amounts of MOOP ; and they were there 20 years ago, and not creating huge amounts of MOOP – then it is false to blame ravers now for MOOP. What else has changed, over all those years that EDM has been at Burning Man? Perhaps the entitled attitude of the Millenial generation who think they’re making the world a better place just by being in it is more of a factor.
The philosophy that has been promoted by the official propaganda channels in the past week is that if someone sees Burning Man on The Simpsons on FOX and wants to visit once to have a drug experience like Marge, they are a good person and coming for the right reasons; but if someone sees that Lovefingers is going to be on the Mayan Warrior on the art car’s Facebook page and wants to go because they like that DJ, that is a bad person and we don’t want them at our festival. Which isn’t a festival.
You can’t have this AND Radical Inclusion.
See also: Ranting and Raving
Did you download the free Rockstar Librarian Music Guide? This year, it seems a little light – listings from major camps like White Ocean and Robot Heart are not there at all.
If you were conspiracy-minded, then you might see this as related to the War on EDM, the declaration of a DMZ and new rules for loud art cars, and BMOrg’s request that no camps reveal their DJs until after the OMG sale. Perhaps digging even deeper into the underlying motives, if no live entertainment is ever promoted before ticket sales, BMOrg can try to argue they’re not providing Live Entertainment which would make them subject to a 9% tax like other large events in Nevada.
Those more inclined to view the world through rose tinted glasses will have to just shrug this off as maybe this year all the camps here had time to make flyers, but most were just too busy to email their flyers to RSL at the same time they were posting them on Facebook. YMMV – we report, you decide!
This particular conspiracy theory was first articulated at burningman.com in July 2014
Anyway, if you want to know if your favorite DJs are going to be there, and make plans to meet your friends at events, here are all the flyers I can find for this year. If you have another one that’s not listed here, please share and I’ll add it. You may want to print this page to a PDF and take it with you to the Playa.
A big thanks to K-Dust’s Definitive Music Guide and The Music of Burning Man on Facebook, where many of these were posted.
Opulent Temple will be everywhere…and Carl Cox is playing at their White Party.
Base vehicle: Bounce
(Car departs @ 10:30 & moves to Serpent Mother around 10:45)
Base vehicle: Thor Bus
(Bounce peels off from Serpent Mother party around 12:45 to re-establish new spot)
Base vehicle: Bounce
Image: Timothy Stoner | Facebook
Just when you thought that the horse was dead and had been flogged beyond a bare semblance of a carcass…we get Daft Punk. At the trash fence. Burning Man 2015.
Earlier in the year, Burning Man’s “other” Nevada regional featured Daft Punk.
They did a trial run, even writing a guest post on this blog about it…and then decided they needed to do it One More Time.
At the Burning Man Facebook Group, Burners tried to make sense of it all…
Image: Stephen Pemberton | Facebook
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Whether it was some dudes in helmets playing a CD, or a cover band, or the real Daft Punk – can we all just agree to move past this “joke” now? It was never funny.
Image: IRDeep via Spin
Spin magazine has an interview with Opulent Temple founder Syd Gris. Some highlights:
The organizers behind Burning Man deny any affiliations of being a “music festival,” but, for all intents and purposes, this is the wildest music festival in the world.
The denial of their identity as a music festival lets Burning Man rely heavily on crowdsourcing the 24-hour, over-the-top productions, visuals, DJ booths, sound equipment, and world-class music performances to ticket holders…
Attendees being responsible for their own entertainment is exactly what separates Burning Man from any other music festival. You bought the ticket, and have to do all the work.
Gris is the co-founder, lineup curator, and overall production director for more than 13 years with the sound camp known as Opulent Temple.
Opulent’s major objective is twofold: to provide a platform for spiritual dance expression and for DJs to explore the more artistic (and perhaps unacknowledged at other commercial festivals) side of their craft…
This year, Opulent Temple took a step away from their typical stage build for their popular Wednesday night “White Party.” Instead, they provided attendees a truly magical alternative that captured the true essence of Burning Man by forming a commutative stage consisting of multiple art cars from other camps. The Opulent team set up their DJ stand on top of an art car, outfitted with large speakers, to drive deeper into the open center area of Burning Man. Various cars from other camps outfitted with large speakers met them at a specific location and linked up wirelessly through RF technology to form a makeshift half circle dance floor. While each car was synced directly to the Opulent DJ performance, additional art cars unaffiliated with the camp would drive in and the Opulent workers would link them up to join the party as well.
What was the sound camp scene like when you arrived at your very first Burning Man?
Back in 2001, there were certainly less of them and most every scale of production was downsized compared to current standards of Burning Man sound camps, especially the scale of sound systems. I say that mostly because camps such as “Lush” in 2004 and “Sol System” that same year (fondly known as Sol Henge) were even by today’s sound camp’s standards massive productions, but those were definitely outliers and seemingly burned both crews out because neither ever came back after that year.
Is it true that you fought for the rights of sound camps at Burning Man?
Yes, I organized a bunch of camps in 2008 including representatives from camps like El Circo, the Deep End, Green Gorilla, and others to approach the Burning Man organizers to request some changes and support. The premise was basically that collectively we’ve felt like we give a lot to the event. Which, of course, is fine; it’s why we started creating such camps in the first place. But we hoped we might get more support and resources from the organizers to do what we do since it is our perception the role of the Large Scale Sound & Art Camps had evolved to be an integral part of a large number of attendees experience and reason for coming. What we asked for and what we got for our efforts were different. Spoiler alert: not much!
Did artists like Tiesto find it unique having to purchase their own ticket?
Yes. We are a volunteer and fundraising camp. All the equipment, food, shelter, and electricity comes out of our own pockets, while we all have day jobs outside of Burning Man. He provided a donation to our camp debt after he played for us in 2005, he said, “It’s the only time I’ve paid someone to play for them.”
What did Opulent Temple do to set the standard for today’s music scene at Burning Man?
What we did to raise the bar was really just building on the precedence of the great camps that came before us but taking it to a higher level. We make our own art and the production pieces that make up our camp, and we build new stuff every year to add to our recognizable look. We were the first to have a DJ-operated flame-throwing booth, and the first to consistently bring out an eclectic range of so-called ‘big-name’ DJs, and we did it all year round through volunteers building the camp and making the art.
What’s the future of the music community of Burning Man? Will the music be too much and eventually take away from the art as it slowly becomes the main attraction?
I think people’s association and experience of Burning Man — unless something drastically changes — is always one of art and music. For now, it is by far primarily dance music. Though it sounds ironic to say, in one light you could say the organization has gone to great lengths to do nothing to support music at Burning Man beyond allowing it to exist. They do a lot to nurture the art scene, so I don’t see it becoming too much.
[Source: Spin]
Read the full interview at Spin Magazine.
Here’s a Syd Gris set from last year’s Halloween.
The latest Burning Man music video is out, from ThE DuCk. If you like the song you’ll probably like the video, I like the song, YMMV…
New Bohemia NYE 2016 is the 3rd Annual NYE’s event at the iconic Armory. It is, and has always been designed to be a special and co-created destination, bringing together the best of the avant garde and underground creative worlds of the Bay Area. A world like no other. You’re invited to part the velvet red curtains to find an SF twist on those timeless bohemian values of Truth, Beauty, Love and Freedom. Deeper, and higher into this castle find cutting edge sounds, SF’s most dynamic music collectives and the synergy of intentional revelry on the precipice of a new year.
Poets and performers, aerialists and DJ’s, burlesque dancers and live painters, acrobats and absinthe hawkers, Art Cars and visual treats, crimson busts and decadent costumes; are all to be found in different markets, plazas, private upstairs chambers and titillating dark corners and streets inside New Bohemia NYE.
We have amazing music, but we don’t go ‘mega headliners’, because we’re much more interested in creating a community based spectacle of art and talents amongst friends and the amazing people of our circle of friends. And – we wanted to keep the ticket prices accessible for a party this big and offering so much on NYE.
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The curtain is raising again on the show worth getting excited about New Years Eve. Let’s ring it in together.
YES – we’re totally aware of of some of the previous venue kinks (pun intended) around lines, seating options, bathrooms, and security. Trust us that we care A LOT about making sure that even the things we don’t have total control over is 100% right for you on NYE. Our goal is to get you inside as fast as possible and enjoy an evening with friends in a World Like No Other and that everything clicks at a high standard all night. It’s a huge priority and you’ll be able to tell.
Artist Nigel Stanford sent us this unique take on industrial music. It’s not something you see every day…but don’t expect to see this band on the Playa any time soon
