BAAAHS started a bit late due to some electrical technical problems, so we missed the beginning as it was over 1.5h late and we didn't know where to meet it as a result. I ended up missing Alvin's set, sorry :(
I even made a screen to cheer him on during his set :)
But we found it in time to see Karin Dash:
It was then time for Dave Dresden to take over. This time I got my led outfit ready (last time Dave played during daylight hours anyway, so that wouldn't have worked):
After Dave's beautiful set (I took more video than pictures, see this recording):
Afik took over:
love ya, Afik :)
Great trance, great DJs, therefore great night. Also we had and awesome view of the playa from BAAAHS. Thanks to all.
Again, here is the video summary:
Lots of music this year, so much music that it was hard to see it all, but I went to see a fair amount:
Monday Night at Opulent Temple, Playing with Fire and Lights
my friend knew one of the pyro guys, it sure was fun to play with all the buttons :)
great outfit, Syd
Video Sumary:
Trancesend on Tuesday
Video Sumary:
Crystal Method Illuminaughty Tuesday
Crystal Method was supposed to come at the LED party in 2019, but didn't make it due to a flight issue. He did this year, nad we sure had fun :)
Video Sumary:
Carl Cox at Playground Tuesday
The night continued with techno night at Playground with Carl Cox:
Video Sumary:
Tuesday Night Psytrance at Opulent Temple
Tuesday Night still had more with some delicious Psytrance at Opulent Temple:
Video Sumary:
Charlotte de Witte at Playground Tuesday
The night was still not over with more techno Playground with Charlotte de Witte B2B:
Video Sumary:
and then the night was finally over, that was a lot of music, especially for a tuesday
Aphexcx at Shackleton on Wednesday
Doing a party in a fridge truck in the middle of the day? Genius idea... Inviting Afik to play trance in it? Even smarter :) Great to run into my friends Natalie and Tom there.
Video Sumary:
Psytrance with John Connor at Badlands Bordello on Wednesday
More day trance to be enjoyed, with my other friend John Connor, psytrance this time. Nice!
It had been 3 years since last burning man. Another beautiful flight to 88NV which now has a full control tower with frequency, ground frequency, and unicom for parking.
The CA scenery on that route is starting to become familiar :)
Squaw Valley and Alpine Maedows (now Palisades Tahoe):
Squaw Creek hotel
Tahoe
Northstar
Truckee Airport
Reno and Reno-Stead were next:
nice little racetrack on the way
Onto pyramid lake and finally burning man
airport already had a fair amount of parked planes for a sunday
city entrance for the cars
surprisingly the car entrance had almost no line
you can see the triage entrance, waiting lot for will call and real entrance. Short wait.
this really was surprisingly short for a sunday
I did a couple of loops around the city:
temple
city was already quite full for a sunday afternoon
Then it was time to land:
landing strip 23L
nice ramp vehicle to get a ride to the parking spot
After landing, got some help from two nice ladies to tie down the plane and tape it up:
fly ties did a great job again
plane all taped up
After the event, got dropped off by the gate with all the luggage:
lots of luggage fit in the plane
Takeoff was a bit long due to density altitude and luggage, but there was plenty of runway. Got to see pictures of the exodus:
pulsing
very long line to get there
eventually people got released on the road, but it took 8 to 12H to make it there
The city got a bit bare obviously, but still plenty of people there monday afternoon:
Like the previous years, it was a lot of work to process/fix/sort all the pictures and write this summary report (Around 3500 pictures, trimmed down to 2684, and 478 selected as the better ones sorted in different categories, 216 are in this page because I'm not good at picking :) ). All pictures are geotagged, so you can click on them to see where they were.
As a way to say thanks if you enjoy the report, share it with your fellow burners, or friends who might be interested in burning man.
If you'd like to see reports from previous years, you can go to my main BM page, and especially if you don't know burning man, you should read my 2002 page which has more of an introduction.
If you'd like to use my pictures in a commercial setting, drop me a line to discuss and I can give you full resolution pictures (marc<at>merlins.org).
If you'd like to say thanks with cash, please donate money to one of the many camps and art installations that are often out of pocket after burning man. If you don't know which one, please donate to Opulent Temple: https://www.opulenttemple.org
Summary:
Despite the very warm weather every day, I went out biking every waking hour, and barely managed to bike every street this year! That said, all in all I only biked 150 miles/240km, which is less than some other years, go figure...
This year, I didn't bring back my 4096 neopixel matrix, it had been too damaged by playa dust and it felt too unreliable as a result. Instead I brought a new RGBPanel display that is equivalent to my wearable outfit, but with bigger pixels. See this page Putting some P5 64x32 Azerone Panels To Good Use, a Big 128x192 Matrix for build details. It looked like this:
I wrapped it up carefully to avoid playa dust damage
Anyway, let's get on with the pictures:
Black Rock City
Easy and unevenful flight:
thank you to the lovely airport volunteer who helped us tie down the plane
Flight pictures here.
Another year, another Burning Man with its infrastructure:
Center Camp:
The post offices were always fun to see:
Hillarious that they show you how to fill a postcard for those who never have :)
Also a passport office this time around:
Lost and found was super well organized:
pictures of all the phones returned
shoes, clothes, and water bottles just went in bins
and thanks for those who helped direct traffic through the hundreds of intersections by adding red lights :)
Like each year, thanks to our lamp lighters:
And yes, weather was tough this year, lost of dust storms, one was severe and lasted most of the day:
but with my trusty GPS, it was easy to get to places even with 0 vis, which I had to do several times:
But the weather, sunsets, and sunrises are beautiful:
Some people were even camping in deep playa to avoid the crowds:
BMorg even nicely put a few porta potties for them :)
Another marked change was the amount of drones, I think there were 3 different teams this year:
Art
Glad to be back to enjoy a bunch of art on the playa:
great to see art at sunrise
Sunset is always magical:
and given the temperatures, it was a lot more fun to see art at night:
comfort and joy was beautiful
Good to see Paraluna again
Very cool to see a movie theatre in deep playa:
A cool change is burning man that has been helping some art installations by providing solar power and batteries to avoid generators:
Camps
Like last years, we stayed at Dustfish. I tried to improve our solar system for this year, and managed to make just enough to power all our electronics: my power hungry flashlights, and LED outfit, soldering iron, and laptop:
I had 2 sets of solar panels as input, and a meter to show how much power I used
our camp had a big generator though, but happy I didn't need to plug into it
it was good to power art like this one
and my art piece which I wrapped carefully to avoid playa damage
Despite high temperatures every day (100F/37C), and dust storms on some days, I managed to go see every camp and bike every single street. Here are random pictures of camps:
Lots of camps offering food as always, thank you to everyone:
Night camp pictures:
One night was the Illuminaughty LED party:
Then, we have the sound camps. So happy to see so many camps offering lots of music.
I made 3 different pages on these:
it was fun to wear my outfit at BM of course, plenty of poeple liked it :)
didn't see as much wearable LED, but found this
really nice to have Rick Doblin again for an update on MAPS' research
the people you randomly find: I biked by a camp that offered to fix your bike lights with a soldering iron, and it was no one other than Bunnie Huang, famous hardware hacker
also cool to run into Louis Beaudoin, who wrote the RGBPanel library for the previous version of my outfit
It was fun to go see the Billion Bunny March and Bunnies vs Carrots:
Fire
Outside of the big fire, there are plenty of other ones, and some are quite impressive too:
Fire Planning:
Nice to see fire dancers as always:
Due to weather and art this year, there were fewer pieces of art that burnt before saturday, but saw a few:
Vehicles
As usual, I enjoyed all the crazy vehicles, art carts, and bike-like constructions :)
Lovely cuttlefish:
Mayan Warrior was awesome as always:
As well as Pulpo:
And my friends' BAAAHS sheep art car:
Lots of other random vehicles:
nice plate
there is a nice shuttle system now linked to the burner express
Another fun sight is the sea of bikes at night:
Some very cool bike lights:
The Man
For this year, thanks to my friend Afik, I tried something different, and watched the burn from an art car. Unfortuantely the angle wasn't perfect, and it was hard to get good shots of the fire dancers, but it was still interesting:
Then it was time to go see the see the fire close-up:
And the fun part is going around the circle of art cars:
nice to see the nice folks who were nice enough to feed us
Temple
The temple was super nice this year, fun to take a few pictures:
Always great and difficult to see inside:
And this year, I stayed for the temple burn:
Conclusion
It was interesting to stay the last day for the temple burn, definitely a low key day, and then it was time to fly home. Very glad to see the exodus line from the sky, and not be in it:
Well, that was 12th burn after a 3 year wait. It was probably the toughest weather-wise, and maybe missing a few things compared to usual, but still, it was so glad to be back.
I hope you enjoyed this report. Feel free to say thanks to me by simply sharing it with your friends, and see you on the playa in the future (or you'll see me at night with my lights).
We were so happy to have John 00 Fleming back with us in SF for more hypnotic trance, which he sure delivered.
As always, John was having the time of his life while playing for us, which is always so much fun to experience.
And yes, I had time to make a new display with him :)
This time I went saturday with one of my friends. We drove separately and she left her car at Bring a Trailer at Laguna, which gave us free entrance and free parking, which otherwise aren't cheap.
it was foggy as it often is early in the morning
nice parking behind turn 3
Bring a Trailer had a nice collection of customer pictures:
very cool Citroen DS, hatchback no less
nicely done, manual coffee grinder, coffee and croissants
leather straps for the win
We also got to see parts of a few races:
best view was from the corkscrew
nice to see a pagani lap the track
I have a short video:
We got to see a few races after that:
Then, we got to see the other cars on the track:
Next we went to Exotics on Broadway in Seaside, which was quite busy:
interesting split wings
Next, we went to Pebble Beach, but we arrived a bit late (15:00) and most things were gone:
Ferrari had a corral you could pay extra to look at closely:
Also some concept cars:
We were supposed to go see Bentley, but we never found them until they were closed, so we saw a few other cars and were done for the day:
As luck would have it, just 5 days after seeing Ferry Corsten as Gouryella at Untold, we got him to perform his "What the F" OTC at Midway, SF. That was a great 5H set, going all over his repertoire of genres. Lucky us!
Ferry was there bright and early:
great thing was the track names in the visuals
I love the lyrics tha I can re-sing the song with:
I had so much fun at Untold last year, that I wanted to go back. I got there right after 4 days at tomorrowland, and I'm so happy I went back. It was definitely more fun for me than tomorrowland on many levels:
This time I flew to Cluj directly, although there aren't many flights there. Lufthansa failed at their one job to put my luggage on the plane, though, and it arrived 1.5 days later. Thankfully I didn't trust them and brought my outfit and anything crutial, with me.
the airport had plenty of untold related things, including trance music when I arrived :)
Ok, those who know me know that I often have rants and thing that each festival could improve. in the case of Untold the list is very small: please ditch the fake money and get rid of in-town.ro, it's broken beyond repair.
Untold is one of those festivals left not to use contactless credit cards. Their system was broken last year, I had to waste time in line to get them to activate my bracelet so that it would even accept money, and money put online didn't get there. This year, same deal, it still didn't work and the money I put online never appeared ever. I was able to put money at a top up point eventually after they fixed my bracelet, and the money I put online never appeared after 4 days. I ended up putting a credit card dispute to get my money back. This is stupid, just stop this BS and take credit cards.
100 I paid onsite worked eventually, the 100 I put online, never worked
the special tech support (only one person) was only able to activate my broken wristband, but never got my online money applied
https://in-town.ro/ is broken in too many ways, get rid of it. Last year, I never even got my wristband barcodes and they had to fish out my payment in some special system to get my wristband. This year, I got the barcodes, but I had to activate my account (for extra money). They took the money and didn't activate the wristbands, forcing me to go back to the same place to fix my wristband and take a picture before being able to go in.
Other problem was that this is the site used for topups of your fake wristband money, and of course it never put the money on my wristband, but it also never worked on any of my 2 phones, the website just wouldn't log me in. It worked on my computer each time, but obviously I'm not carrying my computer around to the festival. Sigh, computers are hard, let's go shopping :)
small improvement: the android app has a few issues, and is totally missing an interactive map to help you find the nearest top up point (although those need to go), or bathroom, or even where is the galaxy stage?
The Grounds
The venue is really good, and I love the fact that you can literally have lodging less than 10mn on foot from the entrance. That's a huge win compared to every other festival I've been to.
Security was quite reasonable and quick, just like tomorrowland. It was probably a bit more permissive, no issues with my outfit, or slightly oversized LED backpack (A4 paper size is the official limit):
the venue is pretty big, although it would have been nice to have the map on the android app
One thing I like about untold is they don't bother with unreasonable searches, and instead have plenty of security onsite. This is by far the way I prefer, thanks for that:
Although it's not with tomorrowland or EDC levels of money, Untold stands out for its many decors and nice things to see. You don't have to spend more money, that level is already quite a lot of fun and enjoyable
Like those animated fireflies, I'm sure they didn't cost much, but they were totally awesome:
Lots of fun things to see, get makeup, take pictures:
Food options were plentiful, with the caveat that you have to pay with the wristband fake money that doesn't work well:
If you smoked enough (lots of smokers in Romania), you could win some iFly ride, although it was more fun to watch the performers do it:
including an LED dancer
The Attendees
This is one thing that makes Untold special, it's not just a festival for the few, but it feels like the entire town comes to party, including children. That's awesome:
Untold has lots of costumed dancers:
And some of the attendees too, of course I did my part, and it was great to run into some of the same friends from the around the world, again:
Aryel was having way too much fun again :)
Also fun to see some of my favorite DJs again:
Videos
I took *a lot* this year, this is partially because I have 2 cameras in addition to my 2 phones, and I attached one to a pole with battery packs, to record some sets while still being able to enjoy them:
While Lufthansa didn't get my luggage there, at least they got me there on time, which given all the flight issues in Europe was not a given. After getting settled at the apartment I was able to find closeby, time to go enjoy the show, day 1 out of 4. I had all my outfit in my oversized and way heavy carry-on, so thankfully I was ready for the night :)
Well, except for the stupid in-town.ro website that failed again, and didn't allow me to register and required a special visit to the reconcilliation tent again. Thankfully they fixed it quickly.
I tried to go to mainstage a bit more. For the most part, not my music, and dumbed down EDM, but can't argue with the lighting, lasers, and fireworks :) On the first day, we had Vini Vici and Above and Beyond, so that gave me an excuse to spend time there :)
Next was above and beyond, it was my 3rd time seeing them in less than 2 weeks :)
After that, back to fortune for more trance:
Video Summary of the night:
Day #2
Let's do this again:
I was super excited to see Steve/The Thrillseekers as Hydra, so good to have him back, it was a stellar set that I was able to record in full:
Lots more at fortune that night:
stop the war in Ukraine
Aly & Fila was next, great to see him again after just a few days. I was also able to record that set in full:
Then, we had Sean Tyas, another set I was able to record in full:
And more, I also went to check out mainstage a bit:
they had a mosh pit, great
clearly I've been missing out :)
Day #2 Summary:
Day #3
One unusual thing at untold is the daydreaming stage. It's not something I'd listen to all night, but it's definitely enjoyable to spend some time at:
But spent most of my time at Fortune as always :)
It did briefly go check out Galaxy, interesting stage but not my music:
Back to the safety of fortune :)
Just in time for Ruben de Ronde, for which I have a full set recording:
Giuseppe Ottaviani was next:
Had a bit of a look at other stages:
Back for Andrew Rayel:
And finishing the night with Xijaro and Pitch, for which I have a full recording:
Day #3 Summary:
Day #4, Home Stretch
I opened the day at daydreaming:
Then went to see my friends Exolight and Suncatcher, for which I have a full set recording:
Much more trance for that night:
ATB was next to play his first set at fortune, it was packed. Here is a full video:
I ducked out quickly to mainstage for the closing ceremony with fireworks:
Came back just in time for Emma Hewitt, also have a full recording:
And Xmas was not over, Ferry Corsten was next for a Gouryella set, so much love (also fully recorded):
Jorn van Deynhoven was next:
But ATB went to do another set, at mainstage this time (mostly recorded):
And had a bit time left to see the WLT:
After that fortune went back to hardstyle, so I went elsewhere for fun :)
The night actually finished with some good rain, made good use of my umbrella so that my outfit didn't short and catch fire :)
'till next time
Lots of fun like last year, Fortune was pretty much pure joy all the way, except the hardstyle sets during the last hour: not my thing and felt pretty out of place for that stage.
It was lots of fun. Please fix the fake wristband money so that I can not worry about that again next time, as I hope to come back:
Made my flight, long trip back to California, sure slept on the planes :)
I didn't get to visit this museum last time I was in Bruxelles, and it has a lot. It's definitely an "everything museum" and took much longer for a proper visit, than I had planned, but I gave it a good shot:
Very cool section on how rome used to look like:
And much more of course:
By the time I got the basement, I realized how much there was to see, and that it would take a *long* time to really see most of it:
Definitely an interesting musuem, well worth visiting.
Chocolate Nation is a good way to start a visit in Antwerp, and it's definitely one of the better Chocolate Museums I've visited, and they were generous with samples :)
Antwerp has lots of things to see and Museum Plantin Moretus on how printing was invented and used, was definitely not one to miss. I arrived a bit late due to only so much time in one day, but was able to see most of it within the time left:
And still plenty of daylight and sights to finish the day in town:
And that was it. Antwerp has plenty to things to do. If you want to be thorough and go at a reasonable pace, 1.5 to 2 days isn't too much, but it can mostly be done in a day, like I did here.
Leuven wasa quick train ride from Mechelen. It wouldn't be terrible to spend a whole day there, but I only had have a day, so I made the best of it, as usual :)
Timing was a bit tight, so I had to organize things in the order that they would still be open. The Museum by the library/clock tower was a good way to start the visit:
nice view from the top, of course
Another main plaza with beautiful buildings:
Time was running a bit short, so I went directly to Museum Leuven, another museum of everything :)
Then, there was plenty of daylight left to go visit the Botanical Garden, which was quite good, and the walk there was scenic:
It was a bit quicker/shorter than I originally planned, but I feel like it was still a good tour of Leuven, and it was definitely worth a visit.
