Fifteen Years in the Dust

The first time I crossed onto the playa was in 2011, into that immense alkaline expanse where a temporary city rises out of nothing each year and dissolves back into dust before the season turns. I have returned every year since, and each return has taught me the same lesson from a slightly different angle, which is that music becomes most fully itself in the presence of people who arrive ready to be moved. There are stages in the world that demand you perform for an audience already certain of what it wants. The desert asks for something rarer, a willingness on both sides to leave the familiar and travel together toward a place neither of us has been.

I compose, though the composing happens live, entirely in the room. I come prepared in only one sense, having gathered the instruments and materials I know a set might ask of me, and everything after that is built in the moment itself, drawn out of the people in front of me as much as it comes from me, so that what we reach together has never existed before and will never come again. The people who gather at Burning Man understand this instinctively. They arrive receptive, willing to be carried somewhere and to stay for the length of the passage, and there is no more generous gift an artist can be given than attention offered freely and held to the end. This is why the playa remains the place I most love to play. The reception there has shaped me more profoundly than any concert hall, because it asks me to create journeys rather than fill a room, and it trusts me to see them through.

Every set I will play this year carries a different facet of a single devotion, which is my love for the way music binds us to one another. Across the week the playing moves through introspection and collectivity, through joy and through dance, through nostalgia and the particular gratitude that arrives when you have been carried by sound alongside strangers who become, for the length of a song, something close to family.

When I shared the schedule with friends this week, nearly every one of them responded with astonishment at how much I will be playing, and the reason behind it is the simplest one I know. Each of these invitations arrived carrying an intention so generous and so unguarded that refusing any one of them became impossible. A camp offers you a stage and a share of their week, and what they are truly extending is the chance to alter how a person experiences a moment of their own life, to shift the way a day/night feels or the way a sunset/sunrise arrives or the way someone comes to understand their own capacity for wonder. I want to bring as much joy and thought and beauty into the week as the playa will hold. I said YES to it all!

Every year I like to share a story for those who have not read it before. In 2020 the event was cancelled, the gates stayed shut, and the playa remained empty. My friend Michael Benisty, the sculptor, invited me to come out to it with him, and our two crews found ourselves alone on that vast floor of cracked earth, the only souls for miles in a place built to hold seventy thousand. We decided to show our work regardless. Michael raised one of his sculptures into the emptiness, his labor in steel standing against the horizon, and we played for the small circle of us gathered there, my labor in sound moving out across the dust toward no crowd at all. The work carried no commission and no audience beyond the friends who had made the pilgrimage with us. We made it anyway, and in the making I understood something that has stayed with me since, which is that beauty is worth the full measure of its effort even when the desert is empty of everyone who might receive it and nothing whatsoever is offered in return. The horizon asked for the work simply because the work deserved to exist.

My dear friend Matt captured and told this story. We made a short film called Art Keeps Us Alive, a meditation on the way creation sustains us through the hardest seasons and a reminder, to myself as much as to anyone, that the human spirit endures through what we choose to make when the world grows quiet and uncertain. It remains one of the truest records I hold of why I do this at all.

I want to thank everyone who has ever invited me to bring my music to that desert, every camp that has offered a stage, every crew that has trusted me with the arc of their night or the breaking of their dawn, and every person who has stood in the dust and allowed a composition to carry them somewhere they had not planned to go. This year that trust carries a set of names I want to speak aloud: to Disco Space Shuttle and Camp Amma for their dance floors, to The Christina Yacht and Treble Makers for handing me the sun as it lowers toward the horizon, to Playa Alchemist for a blank canvas on which to show the Overview Effect, to Long Fen for the sexiest hours of the night, and to Robot Heart for the honor of playing as the Man himself comes down. There is one set that lives in a different register for me, a live performance at sunrise at the fire circle, kept burning by an ancestral ritual in deep playa. To MAXA I owe the stillness at the close of everything, facing the Temple as the last light drains from it. A gratitude of the most heartfelt kind belongs to TBA, the camp I will call home on the playa, where once the Man has burned, I will play for the very people I will have lived beside in the dust all week, a new family.

I invite you to download my set times to your phone so you have them on hand as you explore the playa.

See you out there!