DoLab’s signature festival, Lightning in a Bottle, “has been on my list” for a long time now. Ever since Jade Moyano rumbled up to the fest in a camper van in the early days of Uproxx Life, this Memorial Day weekend bacchanal has called to me. In the years since, we’ve run photo drop after photo drop from LiB and my anticipation has only grown. Especially after being thwarted back in 2021, when the festival was canceled altogether during the pandemic.
That said, when I finally planned to go this summer I didn’t have a very clear idea of what was to come. I’d heard that LiB was something akin to Burning Man, or at least influenced by it, but I didn’t know much about the music, the vibe, or the setting. I’d hardly even glanced at the lineup until I started driving north.
That was ~ to some degree ~ by design. So much of travel is measuring your impressions against the impressions of others that the act of going anywhere is often relegated to seeing things and deciding if you agree or disagree with what you’ve heard about them. Traveling without any information allows me to make impressions for myself without vetting them against what I’ve been told.
Besides, it’s a music festival next to a lake? It’s not like a lack of prep could really hurt much. I hit the road in a Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 SUV and figured the rest out on the fly.
The lakeside location — and the chance to bask in the water in the heat of the day, rinse off after a night of dancing ’til sunrise, or lounge on inflatables which were shared freely by all — turned out to be a huge perk. The most unsexy thing about Burning Man is clearly all the dust and the general lack of moisture, so I’m always glad when Burn-inspired fests remedy that error. But while Buena Vista Lake, near Bakersfield, proved an ideal setting, what impressed me far more was the general approach and philosophy of the Lightning in a Bottle team, which I’ve tried to pin down (as I see it) in bullets below:
- My biggest conclusion about Lightning in a Bottle is that it’s … difficult to define. That’s also what I liked most about it. I know it’s my literal job to clarify travel experiences for others, but LiB was just so wiley that I struggle to encapsulate it. It was wooly and chaotic in a way that I’ve always loved. One minute you might be watching a Diplo set that is at once awesome and something of a known entity and then suddenly you break off from the crowds and you’re at a puppet theater. Or a full 80s-era living room installed in the middle of a junkyard where people sit on couches and stare at old busted TVs (I can confirm that with so much stimulus, this activity was quite alluring).
- In the same vein, the whole vibe was antithetical to the increasingly predictable festival scene. Nothing was basic and, as a result, the flow of things was… sort of hard to figure out. At Coachella, you very clearly know what is paid for by the festival (free once you’ve entered) and what is part of the festival’s economy (food, drinks, merch, etc.). Besides those two elements, well, there’s really nothing else. But at LiB I had no idea what was supplied by the festival, what was created by fellow festival-goers, what was commerce-related, and what was free. And I quickly learned not to care. Did the festival pay for a man to walk around the grounds putting on ornate bubble shows or was he simply eager to share this talent? It didn’t matter. If something cost money, people would tell you. Otherwise, it was best to assume it was all just free, good old-fashioned fun. I remember one night walking along around 3:15 am and passing a glow light vendor with literally hundreds of people practicing glow lights around his booth. For a second, I thought “Wow, he’s a brilliant marketer to have all these people showing off his glow lights!” then I wondered if maybe they all had just purchased glow lights and gotten inspired to play with them right then and there. And finally, I realized that me thinking about all of this was needlessly cerebral, wasting time and energy — so instead I just sat back and admired the glowing chaos around me. That’s when I was able to actually savor how cool it looks when a hundred people play with glow lights next to each other.
- I guess this sort of ladders up to the other bits I’ve mentioned, but the Lightning in a Bottle emphasis on user experience was really high. I remember seeing a slackline and a cornhole next to the main stage and thinking, “I love that with Diplo and Sofi Tukker and Tobe Nwigwe, and so many others on the bill, someone was like ‘GUYS DON’T FORGET TO ADD SLACK LINES!'” The philosophy of LiB seems to be: “add anything that can offer one iota more enjoyment” and I love that. The very thought is intriguing and shows a tremendous amount of care for guests. I would love to join the subcommittee that’s given $3K or so and told “Add random fun stuff.” True to form, late one night I saw a woman race up to the slacklines on a bike, leap off said bike with incredible intention and dexterity, and slackline alone for a few minutes. At which point, I thought “It’s so cool that those slacklines were there!”
Okay, I suppose all of those ideas sort of meld together. But they also sort of emphasize LiB’s frenetic, maximalist nature — which somehow made room, amidst all the clowns and chaos, for self-improvement and personal development too. In the course of a few days, I attended yoga workshops, a “psychedelic state of the union” speech, and a “rose petal ceremony” that was 1) exactly what it sounds like, a very serious ceremony starring tens of thousands of rose petals, and 2) deeply emotionally affecting for reasons I can’t quite manage to articulate. (I had some substances coursing through my veins, but the fact remains that as people abandon religion in droves we’ll need ceremonies to share and this one was quite beautiful.)
In short, Lightning in a Bottle was a cosmic gumbo. At one point I saw a dominatrix play a folk music set that sort of blended airy guitar tunes seamlessly with BDSM. Later that night, I came upon six or seven people performing improv comedy with puppets (as if improv comedy needed another layer added to make it slightly less accessible to viewers) and even though the puppet show itself didn’t quite work, there was an energy present that I really loved. The puppeteers, who were playing to just a few people (and had been positioned against the night’s headlining acts) seemed to sense that they, too, were a necessary part of this festival which, as I mentioned, featured Diplo — one of the largest musical acts on earth.
That’s so cool to me — a creative tent with room for so much variety underneath. A festival that contains close to as many multitudes as its attendees. A place with endless expanses for renegades and outliers to roam. A place that’s so full-on and non-stop that your whole family sleeps in the aforementioned SUV (this wasn’t a drama — the car was deceptively roomy and smart enough to keep me from absolutely draining the battery).
“There’s been so many iterations of this, having evolved from some rave kids off in the woods, and it’s always evolving,” said DoLab/ LiB co-founder Dede Flemming when I spoke to him at the festival about its Grand Canyon-wide expanse of programming. “So there’s never a feeling of coasting — we’re always pushing to find new experiences and curate new moments.”
The thrill of discovery that Flemming has is palpable at Lightning in a Bottle. On the fest’s closing night, I saw Tobe Nwigwe absolutely crush in a set that felt the most like a Coachella headliner (with the only difference being that, having been to both, I can certainly say that LiB had vastly fewer cellphones waggling during performances — my takeaway being that people were there for the experience and not just to humble-brag about the experience via Instagram). It was my favorite standalone performance of the festival because Nwigwe and his crew just have such a spectacular flair for the dramatic (they will get top billing at Coachella soon) without too much reliance on tech. But as I walked away from that show, I came upon a blackjack table that was absolutely loaded with people — where the wager was nothing and the rewards were trinkets and pieces of ephemera from decades long past (like old Nintendo cartridges or warped editions of LOOK magazine).
I’ve never, in all my years of festival going, seen an event hit such a wide gamut of notes — from the spectacular to the random to the fantastical to the dramatic to the intentionally odd and on and on.
“You do, at times, see people not at their best,” Flemming said to me, when I asked about being the creator of so many people’s biggest, wildest, and weirdest experiences for the year. “There’s always those ‘it’s 3am, can someone help you back to your tent?’ moments. But for the most part, you see people online and on social media talking about ‘take me back to LiB.’ When they finally get here and you look at the joy they feel and you’re not jaded about it, and you let it really sink in — it’s this incredibly proud moment. Because you’re making one big art piece and the people are a vital part of that art.”
At four AM on the last night of the festival — after Nwigwe and the puppeteers — I saw a man in a Bane/ Goatse mask and a black leather cape crossing paths with a woman in a cream-colored kimono who I’d witnessed earlier in the weekend absolutely owning the role of high priestess at the aforementioned rose petal ceremony. The image was striking and represented the festival at its most hardcore and hippy at once. Between those poles, I had seen so many varieties of style and music and vibe and even (forgive me) energy.
But everything — all of it — managed to co-exist because the festival itself made room. Coachella can’t pull that off. Neither can most of the more “fully hippie” fests I’ve been to.
It struck me that while “LiB” is Lightning in a Bottle’s preferred acronym, those same letters are the beginning of a word that most accurately pinpoints what I witnessed over the course of my time there — liberation. What I saw was people at their most free. Free to be overly sexual or whimsical or ethereal. Free to be unique, truly unique, in myriad ways without facing judgment or scorn. As someone who feels that liberation in all its forms is one of the highest callings of humanity, I loved arriving at this conclusion.
And I’m so glad that, in our rapidly homogenizing world, places like this exist.
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