Hello Burners! So here we are going into year 8 in a row. Most large scale sound camps in the history of Burning Man have been sane enough to stop by now. Why do we keep doing it? That’s a complicated answer. Mostly, of course, it’s because we believe in the power and beauty of the community that becomes so tangible on the dance floor when it all comes together at Opulent Temple. Our own biases aside, it is special, and we can only assume you feel it too because we have had consistently amazing nights out there that don’t necessarily have anything to do with who is playing. (Though we do our best to make sure that’s always solid too.) As mentioned in the schedule intro, we think of dance as the expression of the soul through movement. Everyone has their own little signature form of movement that expresses what is inside them. Watching people share their expression with each other is golden. In the post modern world we don’t have enough opportunity to express our soul in community. In the shared movement to the universal response to a drum beat. It’s sacred dance, it’s church, it’s an invitation to touch a part of one’s inner world. We know that sounds a little too serious for some who just want to get funky. We have plenty of funk to our attitude as well, we just prefer it with a dash of consciousness. We did not even try to top last year’s line up. We weren’t even sure we were going out this year (some of us wanted to take a break, others did not). We started with our friends and returners who wanted to see us there and wanted to be a part of it. We have a policy that if you’ve played for us once, you need to play an OT benefit if you want to play for us again. So many of them (such as DJ Dan, Scumfrog, Donald Glaude, Elite Force, Dylan Rhymes, Ali B, JonH, etc) said yes there wasn’t much room to go after a lot of new blood. Since our camp has a ‘work to play’ ethos for the residents as well, we have a lot of camp dj’s who help build it and take it down to earn their right to play. Most of the names you might not recognize on the schedule are OT camp members or supporters who helped us get here in some way. So in that sense we’ve really kept it in the family this year, and that’s fine with us. There is already way too much redundancy among big camps with the same dj’s playing on different nights. In our case they’ve at least all earned a slot by participating in our effort. We said no to a lot of other major players this year because we’d rather take care of those helping take care of us. We are glad to add some kick ass drum n bass (Aphrodite), and Global Underground legend Seb Fontaine. You still won’t see a lot of dubstep at OT. We’ve seen that’s well represented at BM as is. (Though some of our residents will certainly drop some throughout the week). We’ve linked most names on the schedule so you can see who they are and where they came from. We have no rich backers who pay for our costs (this year at a relatively low $40k). We are entirely dependent on our fund raising parties and to a lesser extent camp members dues. To that end we did parties all over the place this year to make it happen including London, NYC, L.A., Portland, Boise, Tahoe, and Reno. We also did like 8 events in S.F. It’s a lot to generate and keep going on top of the camp production itself. We know you know camps like ours don’t get financial support from BM, but that’s old news by now. Point is – Thank you SO MUCH if you’ve come to one of our parties in one of these places. We couldn’t do it without you! We’re looking forward to our new view at 2:00 and B just to switch it up and see how it plays being off the corner for the first time in 5 years ! We hope to see you in the sweet spot, under the stars, and are always appreciative of your support and presence.