I kind of want to dedicate this set of dispatches from Lucidity Fest 2012 to Raoul, a little, sparkly-eyed older Mexican fellow who strolled up at like 2 a.m. Sunday and reminded me of the power of transformative encounters with new music. He had never seen anything like XyloVan. He kept saying, “This is … …
Chill time
Had a little party on the van’s roof deck with Marty (left) and Crystal (right) listening to Nick down below playing keys in an impromptu jam with whoever that is on stage. Calm, still, reflective and in the end quite revelatory. This is the atmosphere for lucid dreaming.
The hood trio
These three had a fantastic time hammering away on Keyboard #4 and bending it to their will. The gentleman on the right with the flashlight seems to want to help …
A little night music
This is the scene around XyloVan on Friday night at #LucidityFest. I love watching the interplay, ampoule the solo raving and overall free improvisation – and then moments of careful coordination – that occur with the random comings and goings of a festival – and particularly with this unique mix of …
Lucidity Festival 2012 – All about inner light
Now that was a hell of a thing. XyloVan is all packed away and my ears are still ringing with the music you all made together – with us and throughout Lucidity Festival 2012. There are plenty more photos and video where this came from (and still to come) but I’m too shagged (and back-to-work!) …
What is the sound of a XyloVan wash?
It sounds a little like this:
L.A. Burning Man Decompression 2011 – Photos of art, fire, music and mutation
Decom was glorious. Twice the number of installations we saw at last year’s Decom, an explosion of art cars, flamboyant fire, generosity, interactive experiences and deep, rich music. We loved talking with everyone who stopped to play the van, and everyone we met on walkabouts in this lush, dustless burn in the shadow of downtown …
L.A. Decompression 2011 – video
Just a little video clip here demonstrating how people can duet with each other on either side of the van. We wired the sound so that each side of the van can hear (but not see) the other – making it sonically transparent. Often, someone starts riffing on what comes out of the speakers, without …
Kids, darkwads, dubstep and jerks – A little feedback to the Borg on Burning Man 2011
There’s a fascinating thread over at the Burning Man Blog inviting feedback on this year’s burn. The Burning Man Organization (variously known as BMORG or the Borg) asked for feedback, and got an earful – on everything from the joys of big art and gifting to the miseries of unwanted noise and the hellacious exodus …
Burning Man 2011 – Mutant Vehicle pro tips from a first-timer
Sadder. Wiser. Exhausted. Dazzled. After building and piloting JANUS at Burning Man 2011 and living to tell the tale (Full build log here) I’ll go out on a limb to say this: Bringing a pre-approved mutant vehicle to the playa for the very first time in your life virtually guarantees that: You will work your …
Burning Man 2011 – Panoramarama
The vast expanse of the plana lends itself to cinematic views. You find yourself wandering around the desert like David Lean, previsualizing shots for “Lawrence of Arabia.” I used to hand-stitch photos together in Photoshop from whatever digital snapshot camera I was using, which was horribly time-consuming. This year, I discovered the iPhone app 360 …
Music in the night
The beauty of sharing a huge musical mutant vehicle is that – at any moment – something like this can happen: (EDIT: These blanks were once embedded Facebook videos. I quit the platform in 2018 for reasons. Sorry/not-sorry.) … or this … … or this … … or this … Thanks to THAT Damned Band, …
Built, spun and burnt – first panoramas from Burning Man 2011
Back in Silver Lake two days after leaving the playa, and I’m still foggy and bedazzled: That was the biggest, hardest, most invigorating burn we’ve ever had in eight residencies on the playa since 1996. XyloVan/JANUS took two and a half sweaty, sometimes lonesome days to build (my deepest thanks to David, Marcelle, Marcus and …
Pro tip
A neodymium magnet around the neck makes for a convenient third hand. Extra pro tip: Don’t forget to strip it before crawling into bed. Messy.
Bits and bobs – 3 days till liftoff
Because an art car is never finished. I disassembled all the light arrays from XyloVan 1.0, and I’m reassembling them onto the light bars I made for JANUS. This involves testing all of them, including the flasher circuits … … and then screwing them down. I’ll wire everything up later today. (It’s stupid-o’clock in the …
Mad dash to the finish
We have a deadline. I have to finish this by 7/30, since other obligations will prevent me from working on it much more until the week before Burning Man. So I’ve spent the past week solid (nearly) chopping through task after task. At right are the steel-conduit outriggers I installed at the top of the …
Meat report
Various blisters: attempts to cut cloud shapes out of perforated-steel-sheet drywall lath using tin snips, burning self with melted blobs of nylon cord while attempting to keep it from fraying, sticky hands because I used oil-based paint but had no thinner at hand for cleanup, chemical burns from the flame retardant used on the fabric, …
Skinning JANUS
After sewing JANUS’ skin out of cotton dropcloths and then dyeing said dropcloths blue, I discovered the fabric had shrunk. Yyyeah. All that fabric that I had meticulously fitted to the frame, and then sewn tightly together, was now smaller. I remedied this by slipping the covers onto JANUS’ piano-keyboard “shoulders,” (which still – miraculously …
Assembling the cloud deck
The security bars that I acquired turned out to be nearly the perfect size to fit XyloVan’s monster roof rack when turned on their sides – one pane wide and two panes long. Alan and I spent most of Sunday measuring the bars and then drilling holes through them for 3/8-inch bolts. We created a …
Color
I chose blue to counterpoint XyloVan’s shiny aluminum keyboards – I had in mind a Moroccan blue – sort of ashy, like it had been fading for a while … so it’s four boxes of Royal Blue to one box of Denim, and then it’s a matter of shoving all that fabric into that one …