Coachella 2008-
Fire in the Sky

If Coachella were no more than two stages and three hangars of Last Great American Rockshow, even the most ear-callused fan might call it too much hassle in the heat. Indeed, not for even the Risen Elvis would I without trepidation roll my hillbilly ass out to a vast, featureless plain where the women are required by law to wear clothes and the climate is only slightly milder than Lower East Gehenna. The dance crowd is at home anywhere, but rockers, the gentry along with the commonalty, are a snotty, carb-loving subculture given to hormones and chemical self-expression and we’d doubtless behave even worse than we smell but for the calming influence of art.

This subject calm extends not merely to cult-adoration objects like the Big Round Cubitron – returning this year as a quadrangle with the same billion points of parti-colored light – but also to the ad valorem giddiness that comes out of being turned loose in an upended toybox of weird structures, dancing girls and giant whirligigs. As rules everywhere grow heavier and more irksome, extreme measures are required to create the illusion of suspension from them. The art at this year’s Coachella, much of it still secret and being assembled at the Empire Polo Field as this goes to press, hints at the

Brobdingnagian scale and utopian surrealism associated with Burning Man. This aesthetic, product of the grueling weeklong art-campout in the bleak desert north of Reno, is all about your astonished participation.

Veteran promoter Phil Blaine is Coachella’s curator – and suitably cagey about giving away secrets. “There’s not necessarily more art this year, but in terms of height and pounds, this year is different,” Blaine admits from his Wilshire Boulevard office. “We have fewer pieces, but everything we have is way bigger than before, with more of a profile and things that can be seen from a distance. That’s what’s gonna define the year.”

Eager for specifics, I snatch a length of elegant bamboo from the promoter’s desk. “That is for Bamboo DNA, which will be 300 feet long by 60 feet tall by 50 feet wide,” says Blaine. “One of three different types harvested in Bolivia by a guy named Gerard Minakawa. He’s a bamboo expert who teaches at Rhode Island School of Design. After the festival, the pieces will be recycled into other projects.” Christopher Janney’s Sonic Forest promises 16-foot tall aluminum trees with banks of lights, speakers and photo-sensors producing a startling disorientation with which patrons may interact.

“Continuing with the organic theme, not that there’s any theme at all,” Blaine drawls, “we’re bringing back the Steampunk Treehouse” – a three-story-tall hunk of metal and wood emitting the occasional burst of steam that was a sensation at last year’s Burning Man. The curator produces sketches of Michael Christian’s new sculptures that look like towering, walking houseplants. “They’ll sway, giving the appearance of motion,” he notes. “We’ll also be having sentient robots, like last year, roaming the crowd. You want to think there’s someone inside it, then you realize there couldn’t be. There’ll also be graphics on the mainstage screen in-between the acts. A data artist named Aaron Koblin dreamed it up, part of a convergence between art and science that’s always intrigued me.

“There are 16 pieces in all, many surprises and unannounced performances,” Blaine wraps up with calculated vagueness. “Situational art pieces and happenings pertaining to surprise appearances I’m not going to talk about. They’ll be scattered throughout the grounds, though I try to put the more psychedelic things down near Sahara Tent, because people go there at night. We’ve gone at the art this year with a view to bringing up the height and the profile of the event.”

Needless to say, Blaine’s ambitions are a bonanza for that part of the L.A. art community specializing in monstrous installations, like Sid Klinge and his giant twin Tesla coils. If any moment of Coachella 2007 defined the event for me, it was Björk’s Friday night pop symphonics

accompanied by thunderous sizzles and explosions from these horror-movie monoliths. I track Klinge to his mad-scientist’s workshop at Umlat Haus, a sprawling mishigas in the Brewery where the coils lie crated like giraffes in coffins. “I’ve always been fascinated by electricity,” Klinge says, smiling amid a sprawl of costumes and equipment, including remote-controlled propane tanks and parts of three jet engines. “I went to film school, then majored in music. I’ve been a film editor and actor, had a lot of different special effects jobs in film and TV, but I’ve always loved the beauty and energy of electricity. I set out to learn every last thing I could about it. Years of research and trial and error and every last piece I designed and built.”

Klinge is handsome and eccentric, a bit like Peter Cushing in all those old Frankenstein movies. “The generator’s immense. It’s a 175kv generator, the 814

entire generator.” Klinge’s eyes begin to glitter: “You can’t use it for anything else, and that’s big enough to power the mainstage. I’ve had it running well in excess of 100,000 watts continuously. They’re 16 feet tall, spaced 50 feet apart, and that fence is there for a reason. Jumping it would be a very bad idea. There’s no chance of it hitting anyone outside the fence. The whole area around the coil is literally in excess of a thousand volts.

“I regard this as performance,” Klinge beams, moved to lyricism by the beauty of what he controls. “It’s in the kinetic art category. It’s sculptural, and the only thing visibly moving is something ethereal like arc plasma reaching to the sky, like fingers that divide and divide again.”

Across town in a Silver Lake garage, the experimental architectural team of Ball-Nogus is loading out for the Polo Grounds. Their Coachella-bound masterpiece is Copper Droopscape, a 100-foot-long hanging net roof knitted from a helix of “metallic-coated plastic reinforced with yarn for strength,” as Benjamin Ball describes it. “It also reflects like copper-tinted mirrored sunglasses. It’s a brand new material, used as reflectors in satellites that will filter sunlight and change the color of the sun, projecting it onto the grass. It will also engage the wind so the whole thing will move.”

“It’ll be like instant suntan for pasty indie rockers,” adds partner Gaston Nogus, eying me sardonically. “We’re taking the earth color of copper and putting it into the sky.”

“At night,” Ball adds, “we’ll have a special lighting ring and the whole thing’ll be a social condenser.”

This year, radical art collective the Do Lab is getting an entire acre to put on their fourth year of interactive water-vaudeville. Operating out of a 90-year old warehouse on Bay Street downtown, the troupe is as famous at Burning Man for its gigantic mobile flower sculptures as it is locally notorious for the underground’s cleverest, most-ornate themed parties. The latter include a still-infamous soiree crashed by the LAPD, who were initially thought to be simply victims of uncool taste in costumes.

The Lab’s customary irreality is a bit more solemn as I approach the building, with Radiohead’s Kid A keening from speakers and huge scriptures of stems and petals bulging into the street. The Lab’s array of sexbomb dancers go though their dainty, sweaty paces in a performance space inside, but the interview takes place in an office deep in the upstairs labyrinth. The whole place looks like an old-timey B-movie studio presided over by cheery gremlins instead of dyspeptic suits, with the chief pranksters being brothers Jesse and Josh Flemming and impish blonde Dream Rockwell.

“Our goal is to make sure that everybody in our area is wet 12 hours a day,” grins Jesse. “We’ve gone to eight or nine Coachellas and it’s very hot, unbearable even, unless you can get wet.”

“When we started performing there four years ago, we couldn’t fill misters fast enough,” adds Josh, “so we started to use hoses from kiddie pools. Now we’ll use six thousand gallons a day.”

“This is between the watershow and all the huge contraptions we’re going to have throwing water around,” Dream injects, “plus waterslides, a pool performers will be performing in and high-pressure water-sprayers people can play with.”

The idea is to create an outrageously wet oasis in the middle of the Indio Inferno: a mock-rainforest ringed by the Lab’s traditionally outsized flowers and leaves. “Lots of artists do straight lines, but we’re into curves, sexiness,” notes Jesse. “No one’s satisfied with being part of a crowd and standing around staring anymore. We’re trying to create the show around people. The ideal is three-dimensional entertainment with the audience supplying the fourth dimension. Our village is designed to put people in the center of it. Make them dance, get them wet, give them props.”