![]() ![]() ![]() The Junkyard in particular deserves massive praise amidst its transition this year. With massive main stages like Lightning, Thunder and Woogie hosting incredible international talent like Glass Animals, Purity Ring, Monolink, Clozee, Seth Troxler, WhoMadeWho, Four Tet and Black Coffee, it would have been easy to miss the secondary staples like the Beacon, the Grand Artique, the Stacks and our beloved Junkyard (formerly known as Favela). Their magic is in the careful micromanagement of every element from beginning to end, much of which happens months before and after the actual event. While the campgrounds are certainly a sight to behold at LiB, the DoLaB doesn’t have that same luxury. Burning Man is famously successful by catalyzing thousands of camps and their themes. LiB, once a boutique event, this year cemented the fact that no other event so closely mirrors Burning Man in its artistic reach, to the point that you can’t just call it a music festival. It doesn’t get much more alien than eating African food with our neighbors and now friends-for-life from Santa Cruz, Ukraine, Iran, Mexico, Armenia and Turkey while being offered ice cream served off of the sexy asses of the Fungineers puppeteers, serenaded by the sounds of the splendiferous stages’ sirens, and bathed in the light of the Electric Dandelions’ art installations by Liquid PXL. Of course, necessary sustenance was also plentiful, with hybrid fusion eccentricities abounding. This is what the world could look like if art was incentivized and glorified for the transformational beauty it offers. This festival-as-a-way-of-life team pulls you into an existence that seemingly touches upon Maslow’s top-tier need for self-actualization more than any primal need for sustenance. The earthly reminders were so few and far between that the absolute hyperbolic creativity that spilled out from the seams could send festival-goers into an out-of-body experience or mass hallucination. In the carefully curated psychedelic playground that the DoLaB created, either scenario seems possible and both are certainly welcomed. Walking around the LiB grounds felt like a dual hallucination of either trying to take stock of reality after a neon explosive alien invasion or being transported to another extraterrestrial world entirely. They overstuffed the festival grounds with so much to do, see and experience that sleep was something left for those rare blips between living in the surreal present moment. As expected from a crew that has quite literally created a road map for burgeoning festival upstarts, the DoLaB proved why they are some of the best in the game. Approaching their 20th anniversary next year, the annual art, music and culture festival Lightning in a Bottle returned to Buena Vista Lake outside of Bakersfield this year with a vengeance after two long years off due to COVID-19. ![]()
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