XyloVan

Soak humans in art and the playa’s environmental extremes (harsh wind, high heat, relentless dust) and you bring out something significant in them: happiness. They’re working their tails off to be here, to create something meaningful (if temporary), and to delight and shock each other.

Black Rock City is populated by some of the most beautiful souls you’ll ever meet. That said, sailor guy here drummed so fiercely on Keyboard 2 that he actually snapped a fiberglass mallet. Ah, well – there are 20 more. That ought to hold us until the next burn.

Rangers stopped by in camp (here) and out on the playa …

Children loved XyloVan – this dude (probably barely 20 months old) banged away on the tubular bells for quite a while … Continue reading

Styles of the sudden xylophonist vary from one to the next, as diverse and rich as the variety of bodies, faces, souls and minds at Burning Man.

This cat was more of a percussionist than a xylophonist …

… but no less brilliant than this guy, who even does a little call-and-response with Hitgirl at the end of the clip:

Here’s a hodgepodge of images from Tuesday – art so thick you could barely see the playa – Black Rock City’s population was 51,000-plus this year, and it showed.

There were brilliant art cars, and an excellent installation called Tinytropolis, which consisted of internally-lit dioramas that 100 artists had stuffed into otherwise identical, solar-powered cardboard boxes.

This gorgeous globe of woven, welded steel spun just 50 yards away from our site, which made it a) easy to find at night and b) somewhat sickening. Biomass (my son’s playa name as of this year) got physically ill looking at it and had to be led away clutching my arm, while Hitgirl (yes, my daughter’s playa name, and more accurate than you would guess) spun herself happily around it like a glittery, giggling moon.

Extra bonus – here’s a video of my favorite art car at the entire event, the Maria Del Camino. Though I didn’t get to witness it, the car apparently lifts its body up to reveal the image of the False Maria robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rendered in tens of thousands of holes drilled into her body:

Our official site turned out to be pretty remote since we were assigned to it late (out near the Temple), but we still had visitors:

That evening, we took a circuitous route back to camp, stopping here and there to let people play:

Tuesday began with the lowering of Keyboard 1, which is truly a six-hand job – one roof-monkey to loose the straps and push it off, two adults on the ground to catch it and install the support stanchions (and one mischievous camera-girl to record it all. Never entrust videography to a 9-year-old if you want any kind of serious documentation.)

With the crew enjoying the view from the roof, I cruised down 5:30 to cross the Esplanade and head towards The ARTery to get our driving permit and site assignment.

Heady. That’s the only word I can muster for the sensation of ending eight months of building and preparing an elaborate art car by driving the goddamn thing out onto the open playa, where thousands can see and play it …
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Clean enough, anyway.

That wicked line buzz is gone. It turns out I needed to ground the mixer to the chassis, which involved tearing apart and then sewing up the 20-foot umbilical. That took a little while.

Pay no attention to my banging. I’m just banging. But it’s sounding pretty lush. And I”m excited to show it off. Thanks to everyone who pulled up and talked to us this afternoon. It’s all good.

Just a little more wiring to go.

Thanks to Michael Greiner and Doeri Welch for inviting us and XyloVan to meet Michael’s marimba orchestra last night. We had an awesome time banging on each other’s instruments.

Here are Michael and a couple of his students working out “Silver Bells” with the loud mallets.

So, we probably fit in with the circuit-bending loop/fizzbit laptop-jazz at Crash Space about as well as well as rubber boots at a tap-dance show, but hey, that was huge fun.

Thanks to everyone who (like these two) found their own sound tonight with fiberglass sticks and aluminum bar stock, somewhere between themselves and the van. I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing you play.

Tomorrow’s all about figuring out that line buzz thing.

I love this thing.

It’s a piece of scrap – a 3/4-inch-thick slug of aluminum sliced off the end of a 13-inch-diameter aluminum cylinder.


Whack it, and it rings for more than a minute, with an intense, Döpplering tone.

I’m going to mount it on the front, and maybe I can hook it up to a simple solenoid so it can be rung from the driver’s seat.

I cut a lot of metal. I’m still cutting. It sounds like this. It’s a little loud but the earplugs and dual-can respirator mask keep it from killing me.

When I’m done, the floor looks like this: