lightning in a bottle: an overview
Remember those magical days as a kid when your parents took you somewhere where your only job was to play and have fun? The playground. A birthday party. Disneyland. That burning rush of excitement you felt waking up knowing you had no school. No chores. No obligations. Just 10-12 hours of pure, uncut joy. That’s what it feels like to attend the music and arts festival, Lightning In A Bottle— a soul-expanding celebration of love and art that brings over 18,000 people together for 5 days of stacked music performances from various artists in the realms of house, pop, bass, dubstep, dnb, afro-fusion, and a sprinkle of folk. The 2024 headliners included Skrillex, Labrinth, James Blake, M.I.A., Lane 8, Fatboy Slim, and ISOxo with a '“sürprise set” from RÜFÜS DU SOL who pulled a packed crowd with such spectacular energy that the air surrounding us almost seemed to sparkle. The festival also offers a diverse array of interdisciplinary creative workshops in yoga, ecstatic dance, psychedelic painting, meditation, sound baths, clay sculpting, and community lectures about subjects ranging from climate change awareness to ancient cacao rituals to the secret life of worms.
I danced my heart out at L.I.B. for my second year in a row alongside a close group of friends—three of us veterans and two newbies. If you had asked me last year if I thought my experience could get any better, I would have said no—but this year proved otherwise. Golden memories from the year before were burned into my brain and camera roll. They lived there, rent free, all year long. I frequented them often. My friends and I told and retold our first year L.I.B. stories so much that our friends who didn’t even come with us quoted us as if they were there.
Coming back for a second year with the people I love who had never experienced Lightning in a Bottle felt like bringing a new boyfriend back to my hometown. Once I was back there, it was like I had never left, except now I knew how to lead. I knew where the stages were. I knew which food trucks to order from. I knew which VIP stages and bathrooms were best. And I was sooo close to remembering where all the festival entrances were in relation to our RV site (directional orientation is not my strong-suit). From Thursday to Monday, us veterans led our group through crowds of strangers flaunting sequins, swirls, body paint, groovy glasses, effervescent jewelry, colorful headscarves, and theatrical performers hovering over us on 3-foot stilts. Everywhere we went, we caught pungent whiffs of essential oils, palo santo, and aluminum-free deodorant that masked any cow smells that Bakersfield is known for. The artistic freedom at L.I.B. is palpable, and the energy is nothing short of awe-inspiring. People call it Burning Man Lite for a reason.
camping:
Lightning in a Bottle is a camping festival. If you’re going to go, you should camp or bring an RV. It makes for a more authentic and rewarding experience. This past year (2024) was the first year they offered hotel + shuttle packages which was met with some contempt from long-time festival veterans who believe the festival has become to saturated in the last few years. I don’t personally know anyone who took advantage of the hotel option, so I can’t attest to how that experience was. All I know is that a huge part of the magic for me was being able to check my watch at 3 am and feel at peace knowing I could safely walk back to camp.
Our first year in 2023, my friends and I tent-camped, and, I’m not going to lie, it was rough. We had never been to the festival before, and we didn’t bring nearly enough stuff to create a comfortable home base. We were literally rolling around in the dirt. We showed up with a pop-up tent (no stakes), two sleeping tents, two tapestries, a table, one lawn chair, a tarp, a blow up couch that we called our “pussy chair,” a shit-ton of alcohol, and that was it. That year, on Saturday afternoon, a mini tornado of dust blasted through our campsite and busted up the pop-up tent, leaving our campsite looking like my 6th grade bedroom after a sleepover. We might as well have slept on the daybeds inside the festival—it probably would have been more comfortable.
In 2024, we rented an RV, and it was better. Much better. Very worth it, in my opinion. If you’re not an expert camper and/or you aren’t attending with a giant group who can all pitch in for a more lavish camp set up, I’d swallow the splurge and get an RV.
location: buena vista lake— bakersfield, ca
Previously held at Lake San Antonio north of Paso Robles, I’d argue that Lightning in a Bottle has a leg-up on other festivals simply because they’ve always prioritized setting up beside a lake. In previous years, people told me that temperatures rose to north of 105 degrees during the day, making the lake, in my opinion, a vital necessity to the experience. I’m aware that some people are hesitant about swimming in Lake Buena Vista due to its close proximity to Bakersfield’s cattle-prone farmland which I can understand, but I’ve never had an issue. Despite rumors of flesh eating parasites or reported cases of valley fever, once I’m running around half naked in the boiling heat, climbing on wooden installations and taking shots of warm tequila I snuck in my bra, there’s no question I’m taking a dip.
festival stages and your job at each:
The festival is made up of six main stages: The Woogie, The Stacks, Lightning, Thunder, and The Junkyard, all of which hold their own magic. Below is a list of the stages and what I believe your job at each one when you arrive.
the woogie:
Job: Boogie and bounce to 126 bpm bangers blasted by house music icons under the DoLab’s classic rainbow-colored drapes.
2024 featured artists: Nora En Pure, Honey Dijon, Floating Points, Fatboy Slim, Shermanology, Justin Martin, Bob Moses, ANNA, Damian Lazarus.
the stacks:
Job: Climb to the top of one of the elevated wooden stacks, introduce yourself to a stranger and lock arms with them as you headbang to expertly contrived bass, riddim, and dubstep.
2024 featured artists: Ashez, G Space, Josh Teed, Luca Lush, MYTHM, Kaipora, Abelation, Redrum.
lightning stage:
Job: To finally see that one artist that you’ve been following since day one (but tickets always immediately sold out and you didn’t feel like paying the triple-count resale price) perform on this iconic stage whose grand structure, sprawling screens, and ever-spanning grassy lawn reminds you why you come to festivals in the first place.
2024 featured artists: Skrillex, M.I.A, Labrinth, James Blake, Bomba Estereo, Lane 8, Mura Masa, Qveen Herby, Overmono.
thunder stage:
Job: Stomp, grunt, sway, or jump to a wide array of genres including but not limited to bass, riddim, dnb, dubstep, glitch hop, tech house, and more. I’d argue this stage has the richest sound with drum beats so crisp and bass lines so deep that they seep into your bones and become a part of you.
2024 featured artists: Tipper, Clozee, Nia Archives, Barclay Crenshaw, Of The Trees, ISOxo, SKREAM, MACHINEDRUM, Tycho.
the junkyard:
Job: Praise whichever house music God is DJ-ing inside this exalted, fort-like DJ structure made of 100% recycled materials, and reflect on your environmental footprint as you dance surrounded by earth-conscious art installations.
Rule #1 of L.I.B: Always end your night at Junkyard.
2024 featured artists: RÜFÜS DU SOL, Armen Miran, Sacha Robotti, Jeremy Sole, Galen, Anton Tumas, Jo Jones.
grand artique:
Job: Allow your mind and ears to expand with the fusions of sound explored by artists of diverging genres– some that you never knew existed– who step onto this transformative stage. Depending on the time of day, you may walk in on a tantric dance party serenaded by a live folk band, you may see someone playing the didgeridoo with their feet, or you may find a 10-person strawberry-inspired circus act whose talent completely rewires your neural pathways (Strawberry Disco Circus is real - check them out, they’re awesome).
2024 featured artists: Danielle Ponder, Glass Beams, The Bones of J.R. Jones, La Lom, Ayla Nereo, Fleetmac Wood, La Doña, Strawberry Disco Circus, and more.
mixtape:
Okay this isn’t technically a ‘stage’ per say, its more of a den enclosure that makes you feel like you’re in your wacky grandpa’s living room.
Job: Nostalgia. That’s it. Listen and dance to music played strictly off cassette tapes mixed together by masters—hence the name ‘mixtape’ – who only play crowd-pleasing oldies that guarantee you’ll be singing along for hours. One of the newbies in my group went off on a solo mission to mixtape around 1am and came back to camp around 6am. She stayed there the whole time.
the vybez of L.I.B.
Witchy stew
Hippie sandwich.
Spirit squeeze.
Cuddle puddles.
Barefoot in the park.
Doof Doof.
Wook City.
Rainbow pupils.
Trade ring for smurf.
Get naked.
the vip experience:
We bought VIP tickets the past two years, and I don’t think that will change for me when I go back. It’s worth it. Now, I don’t consider myself a routinely boujee person, so my advocating for the upgrade is not based on some high-brow personal standard, it’s simply because the bonus features of VIP align with my personal priorities—one of them being air-conditioned bathrooms. I simply can’t deal with 5 days of porta potties.
Is the VIP experience absolutely necessary to have a fabulous time? Not necessarily. It just depends on what’s important to you.
VIP give your access to special rest areas with exclusive bars and food trucks, so you spend less time waiting in lines. There are couches and daybeds to lay on where you can always find a place to sit. Its a great place to take a breather, meet up with the group, eat, take a nap, make new friends, etc. As a VIP, you’re also admitted into Atlaswyld, a private beach club right on the lake with specialty cocktails and performances by DJs you won’t find playing anywhere else.
The VIP area at the Lightning Stage in particular made the extra cost of the ticket worth it for me. I stood at the very front, 20 feet away from headlining artists Aluna, Overmono, M.I.A., Mura Masa, and Skrillex at the biggest, most populated stage in the festival, and I still had room to dance. I could see the spit flying from their mouth when they spoke, and sometimes it even landed on me! I was in heaven.
If you can live without the features listed above, get GA. You will still have an incredible time, but if you’ve got a little extra cash to spend on VIP, it’s absolutely worth it.
lone raver at L.I.B—
Both years I’ve gone to Lighting in a Bottle, I’ve made an effort to break away from my group and spend some time alone, and both years, I’ve notice that it takes the first few days to feel comfortable with the idea of branching off. My survival brain is on high alert on Thursday and Friday as I adjust, but by Saturday, a familiar calm sets in and it starts to feel like this communal lakeside village is my home all year long.
I wake up on Saturday and walk the long half-mile path from my camp into the festival to get coffee while everyone else sleeps, feeling the hot sun suck any lasting moisture out of my dry, crispy skin. The mornings are my favorite time to wander around the festival grounds. Being there when it’s empty feels a little like walking on Mars. Remnants of the night before barely traceable apart from a few stragglers who surrendered sleeping at their campsites and instead curled up on a floor cushion under a shady tree. Kids splash around in the lake as their parents struggle to coat them in sunscreen. Girlies, guys, and gays flow in yoga tents, trying to sweat out last night’s indulgence of alcohol and molly.
As the music begins and our group starts to bop around to different stages, we inevitably reach a point where everyone wants to do different things– so we split up, and it pushes us out of our comfort zone. It’s daunting, the thought of showing up to a stage alone and dancing with strangers dressed like a walking acid-trip—but then you meet people. You branch out and make friends. And talk to people you may not have met if you were with your tribe. That’s what happened to me at RÜFÜS DU SOL’s surprise set on Sunday afternoon.
L.I.B. is notorious for their surprise sets. Skrillex played a surprise dubstep set this same year on Friday night at The Stacks—which I’m devastated to have missed. On Sunday, the lineup at The Junkyard listed a “sürprise set” at 7pm, the two dots above the ‘u” giving a pretty clear hint who was coming. We show up at 6:45pm, and the sprawling crowd is packed like spawning salmon in the riffle of an Alaskan river. The sun was low near the horizon, its reflection inching closer to its twin in the sky. My friends and I hold hands and snake our way toward the stage, but we didn’t get far before we hit a stand still. There was no more room to move up—if we had tried it would have been rude.
RÜFÜS started playing, and the crowd around us tightened even more, so much that I felt like I was inhaling a larger percentage of the crowd’s CO2 output than of oxygen. I stand in front of the rest of my friends and look back at them. They’re all in limbo, stuck in a jagged line. Ten minutes later, the crowd continues to get tighter, and I realize it’s going to be impossible to enjoy this set if we stay where we are. I turn my head back to my friends who are all looking around for an escape route.
“This is dumb. I’m going to go over by the lake and dip my toes in. I want a better view of the sunset while they play.” I announce. They all look at each other.
“We’re going to go get food. It’s too crowded.”
”You’re gonna leave? Really? It’s RÜFÜS!” They look around and nod. I think for a moment.
“Okay, I’ll meet up with you later.” I blow them a kiss as they begin to scoot out of the crowd.
And then I was alone.
I inch my way sideways, being as gentle as I can with people as I squeeze past. I’ve never said the phrase: “hi, babe, can I squeeze past?” so many times in a three-minute time span. Finally, space opens up and I scurry down to the lake. Everyone around is bathed in bright golden light, the sweat on their skin making them sparkle. If I could live endlessly in this time of day with this light and temperature, I think I’ll have reached my heaven.
Everything is perfect, except now I can’t really hear the music. The speakers are facing away from me now. There must be a more ideal spot in that crowd to plant myself, and now that I’m alone, I can move around as much as I need to until I find it.
I make my way back through the crowd until I find a spot that’s slightly elevated by an underground rock. The section of uneven ground loosens up the crowd around it, so it feels roomier. I also have a better view of the stage from here. It takes me a few minutes of settling in before I realize I’ve landed next to a really cute guy. Brown hair, kind eyes, and a big beaming smile wherever he looks. I pretend not to notice him at first and focus on the music.
The energy picks up and the crowd around me starts to dance, which makes me want to dance. It’s one of those moments where everyone there is looking around knowing they’re experiencing something mystically special. My friends aren’t here, but there isn’t one part of me that feels lonely. I throw my hands in the air and dance with every muscle in my body.
Pretty soon I can’t ignore the cute guy dancing next to me. I smile at him, and he asks me my name.
“I’m Natalie.”
“Natalie! I’m DJ.”
“You’re a DJ? That’s cool. What’s your name?
“My name is DJ.”
“Oh! Got it. Sorry, it’s loud.”
“But now that you mention it, I am also a DJ. But I’ve been retired for years.”
“I have so many questions.”
We laugh.
He goes on to tell me how he used to play regularly at festivals and around different cities. Now he works in tech.
DJ introduces me to his friends, all of whom are dancing like nobody’s business. I guess it’s true that you attract the energy you put out there. I like these guys.
I hang out with DJ the DJ and his group for the duration of RÜFÜS’s set. They all happily adopt me and are completely unshook by the fact that I’m alone. DJ and I continue to dance together until he puts his finger under my chin and tilts my head up toward him. Our lips touch and I wrap my arms around him. We make out as the sun officially set\s behind the lake and the clouds turn from orange to pink to purple. Man, am I glad I stayed. I felt free.
Near the end of their set, RÜFÜS plays a song called “Change It” by Touchtalk that I’ve eve heard before, and the lyrics cut through me.
If you don’t like something
Change it.
If you don’t like your job, quit.
If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV.
Life is simple.
The downbeat goes hard, and the rhythm feeds the words to the listener like a meditative mantra, and in this moment, these words bury themselves inside me to stay. You see, I’ve been working Iajob I hate for the last 6 months, I went through a break-up a few weeks prior, and just a few days ago, I had come back from a cathartic month-long trip to Europe with my mother, whose brother died suddenly on the day we left. Needless to say, life has not feel simple lately. As I stand there listening, my arms wrapped around this kind stranger, the sliding door to my heart feels like it flew open and tears begin to stream down my face. A voice in my head tells me I need to leave my job. Immediately. Life is too short. When DJ realizes I’m sobbing and starts to freak out, I key him into what I’m thinking, and he agrees. It’s settled. I’m quitting.
I look at my phone and see that my friends are headed to the Lightning Stage to see Aluna. I hug DJ and his friends goodbye. There’s reluctance in his voice when he asks me where I’m headed. They were going to see Bob Moses. I could tell he wanted me to come with them, but it was time to go back to my family and shake our asses to some tech-house.
I make my way across the festival to the stage’s VIP section. My reunion with the group is sweet. We spend the rest of the night as a unit, but I feel so grateful that I stayed and gave myself that experience. That was a new core memory. Making out with a super cute, super sweet guy next to a lake at sunset serenaded by RÜFÜS DU SOL? When’s that going to happen again? And plus I get to come back to my friends with a cup of steaming hot tea to spill, which is almost tops the experience itself.
DJ and I have stayed in touch, and he even came to visit me in LA a few weeks after L.I.B. (he lives in San Luis Obispo). Not only did we have an incredibly fun weekend fling, he also taught me how to DJ on proper Pioneer decks—which is something I had been wanting to learn for years. All I kept thinking about after that was that none of that would have happened if I hadn’t branched out on my own.
On my way home from the festival, a question percolated in my mind: Is it possible to feel this comfortable if I were to start going to see more music alone in LA? That’s when the idea for Lone Raver spawned. If I can make friends dressed in a ripped, skin-tight, prosciutto-colored bodysuit with sprouts sticking out of my head, why would I ever hesitate to attend any show alone in LA?
With all this said, if you ever venture into the magic world of Lightning in a Bottle, please make sure to set aside some time to explore the scene solo. You won’t regret it.
