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 …
I don’t think I ever could have imagined the response to debuting an art car. But what a rush.
We just got back a few hours ago, illness full of the glow of meeting hundreds of cool people who found themselves sudden, happy xylophonists in the wastes of the playa.
We’re also short on sleep, having driven all night and unpacked and cleaned all day, so time to crash. More photos and videos will follow here as I process them – If you played the van out there, we really want to hear from you.
I was up until 1 a.m. last night doing wiring (details later). I was up at 7 a.m. this morning. This is probably the third week straight I’ve been working at this pace. I feel like this:
Sad thing is – I can’t tell which one’s me, drug and which one’s the project.
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, for sale 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, buy 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.
What do you call a 1985 Ford Van with three xylophone keyboards and some gongs bolted to it?
Not enough xylophones.
I wanted to give the van more presence, approved more weight visually (and, doctor coincidentally enough, viagra 40mg literally). So I’m building Keyboard 4 from the same raw aluminum (3-inch by half-inch 6106 T6 aluminum – at right) and monkeyed-together hardware contained in Keyboards 1, 2 and 3 … Continue reading Rinse, repeat – building Keyboard 4→
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.
