How to Start a Beloved Burning Man Theme Camp by Accident

This year’s edition of Burning Man marked a milestone year for our little, old sound camp, Disco Lips. Here’s how we got there.

Burning Man is home to no shortage of iconic theme camps. Despite declining ticket sales, the annual culture and arts gathering remains as surreal as ever in 2024. From the glitz and glamor of Ashram Galactica to the unbridled hedonism of the Orgy Dome, it’s hard to imagine how such carefully curated spaces ever take shape in Nevada‘s barren Black Rock Desert.

But this year’s edition of the event has given me a clearer understanding of that sequence of events. I had the privilege of haphazardly watching my home on the playa, Disco Lips, evolve into a destination sound camp.

For the uninitiated, Burning Man is unique to other festivals in that its attendees provide most of its art and entertainment themselves. Participation is one of the event’s ten guiding principles. Early Burning Man figure John Law once told me he considers it the first one as it dates back to the world-famous desert gathering’s San Francisco Cacophony Society roots.

What sets Burning Man apart is the variety of attractions offered by camps. The playa isn’t all dancefloors and DJs; they only account for a small fraction. There’s a camp for panel talks on psychedelics. There’s a camp that serves ramen noodles. There are even camps that will fix your bike for you. And the event is decommodified (in theory), so they all do it for free.

But my camp, Disco Lips, is mostly a straightforward sound camp. It started even simpler than that in 2013 — a far, far cry from the millionaire-funded party playgrounds most people imagine when they think of that thing in the desert.

Photo Credit: Thomas Weaver

“It started with a group of people who were tired of chasing each other all over the playa and wanted to camp together,” Kenton Schawe told me during our drive back to Denver, where we and most campmates live. Kenton has DJed under the name Nutmeg since the ‘90s. He’s a well-known fixture of our local nightlife scene and a Burner since 2002, with 18 of the annual events under his belt.

Kenton and present-day camp leads Diana Merkel and Preston Douglas planned to secure a spot for about 12 people in open camping, the designated area for Burners who don’t belong to a Burning Man Project-recognized theme camp. “Well, my late buddy Doug aka Trip had a little camp, and he applied for placement but didn’t get it,” Nutmeg recounted. “And then, all of a sudden, about three weeks before the Burn, [Center Camp sector placer] Machine calls him and says, ‘Hey, I got a spot for you. If you put together your camp, we got a spot right by Center Camp.”

This ragtag crew called the camp they accidentally started together Boogie Boutique. Over the next few years, it briefly became the home base for Alan Endorfun’s Discopella art car. Present-day camp leads Jeff Merkel, Christy Libertore, and Dustin Goodwin (who performed this year as BigRedMachine) also joined the fold during this time.

Boogie Boutique group photo taken during the 2013 edition of Burning Man.

Kenton told me that he never had plans to become a leader. The playa simply thrust him into the role, and it became a calling of sorts. Slowly but surely, the camp became more purposeful and focused. A turning point came in 2017 when Dustin and Kenton decided to reform Boogie Boutique under the name Swig-N-Swing. Their new concept was a Wild West-themed bar with a modest sound system, a couch on a swing, a fairly robust kitchen, and, of course, house and techno DJ programming.

The 2018 edition of Burning Man was my first time living with Swig-N-Swing and my first Burn in general. The camp may have still been working out a lot of its kinks, but its members were far more put together than me. I was still in the dirt-poor phase of my writing career, so I arrived on the playa far less prepared than your typical Burgin.

Had I ended up with almost any other camp, my first Burn would have been disastrous — but Nutmeg and the others ensured I had the time of my life. More importantly, they saw potential in me that I didn’t yet see in myself.

Before our camp had anything else, it had good people, and I can now see that this is the most crucial foundation of any Burning Man camp. After spreading my wings and spending time with other groups of Burners during the renegade years when COVID-19 prevented the big event from taking place, I realized that the wrong people create nightmare scenarios on the Playa.

Photo Credit: Keiki-Lani Knudsen (@imkeiki) and Burning Man

Burning Man’s return in 2022 marked our camp’s final year as Swig-N-Swing. The Western theme simply didn’t fit us. We’re ravers, not cowboys, and we hadn’t figured out how to get strangers interested in visiting our camp. After some soul-searching, we invested in a Danley Sound Labs system and reintroduced ourselves as Disco Lips at the 2023 event.

The name and speakers weren’t all that was new. Ahead of that year’s edition, Burning Man’s Placement team encouraged us to incorporate more interactive elements than music alone. We came up with Snark Tank, a game show I somehow ended up planning and hosting in which contestants won prizes for pitching ideas for playa art and theme camps (but not before I ruthlessly berated them with the help of a panel of judges).

Placement is run by crusty, old-school burners, so our snark was right up their alley. They put us at the 9:00 portal in 2023. We were stumbling distance from the Esplanade and a row of wooden spires leading to the Man — both major traffic arteries.

To our surprise, though, the location didn’t bring more pairs of feet to our dancefloor. Our camp layout looked great on paper, but in practice, our big, new sign blocked the DJ booth from sight and dissuaded people from walking in and off the street.

Fortunately, one important person did enter our camp last year. Nick Franklin is an engineer with a rare combination of analytical and creative talents. His first Burn with Disco Lips inspired him so much that he reimagined our layout and concocted an ingenious array of art installations that elevated our dancefloor to new heights.

This year, Disco Lips’ massive Danley sound system was flanked on either side by a few of what Nick calls Spheramids. He invented them himself and built them with the help of our campmates back in Denver.

An inside look at one of Nick Franklin’s Spheramids.

Each Spheramid consisted of a three-sided pyramid made out of infinity mirrors with a disco ball inside. A look through one of its triangular panes revealed not one shimmering sphere but an infinite kaleidoscopic universe full of them. Nick managed to add a layer of conceptual depth to the mirror facets that already make disco balls so dazzling.

This year also saw more Burning Man virgins join our camp than any other edition. Roughly a third of our campmates had never visited the playa before, but given the event’s recent history, we were excited to have them.

As Zapper, a longtime burner, pointed out in his widely publicized Burning Man predictions, 2024 virgins were a rare and rough breed. They decided to show up on the Playa for the first time despite the media circuses around 2022’s extreme heat and 2023’s unprecedented flash flood.

By and large, our virgins lived up to Zapper’s prediction. Accounting for roughly one-third of our campmates, most of them worked as hard (or harder) than some of our veterans, and they evidently had fun doing it.

Speaking of longtime Burners, a handful also camped with us for the first time this year. Seeing Kenton’s weary eyes light up when they told him that Disco Lips was the best-run camp they had ever joined was more satisfying than any art I encountered on Playa.

To be fair, though, I didn’t see too much as I was somewhat camp locked this year. Luckily, two amazing sound camps neighbored us on either side of our plot in the deepest trenches of the rave ghetto on 10:00 and B: Astral Lab and Casbah.

Only a few of my campmates share my sentiments about the former camp. They primarily played psytrance at 160 BPM or higher, and the Goa-born genre’s long and illustrious history at Burning Man didn’t earn it many points among Disco Lips members.

My campmates’ complaints about the psytrance brought out the prankster in me. I marched into Astral Lab and approached their leads. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” I said. “Some people in my camp are bothered by the high BPMs of your music. I would like to humbly request that you turn them up even higher.”

“Sure thing,” one of them said with a smirk and a salute gesture. “We can definitely do that. I’ll have the DJ get on it right away.”

I figured they were joking, but those lunatics actually followed through. The DJ raised the tempo so high that Astral Lab’s speakers machine-gunned out a completely unlistenable auditory hellscape that ruined Disco Lips’ family dinner that evening. I cackled as my campmates squirmed.

Disco Lips camp lead Kenton Schawe, aka Nutmeg, during our 2024 family meeting. Photo Credit: Sarah Bagwell Betts

Besides, the fancier camps I visited weren’t exactly my scene. One that I’ll be nice enough not to name was what some Burners (myself included) would call a plug-and-play or turnkey camp. That means that most of its members pay exorbitant fees to enjoy a nice, cushy, comfortable playa vacation. Meanwhile, a small handful of them slave away at the participation part.

I learned this when I strolled into the camp with a new friend one morning and started questioning people who had no way of knowing I was a journalist. After we walked past several rows of identical hexayurts made of reflective foam board, the friend introduced me to a couple of runway models who happily confessed that they paid thousands for their dwellings, “very nice” showers, and meals.

In contrast, Disco Lips members each pay a paltry few hundred dollars across the board. It covers the box truck we use to transport things from Denver to the Playa, the shipping containers we store in Reno, our production elements, and other odds and ends. The dozen rugged dust warriors who stay on Playa for two weeks to build and tear down the camp aren’t exempt from camp fees, either.

We do have a primitive shower and nightly meals, but paying members build the shower themselves, and each one is required to help cook one of our family dinners. Everyone handles their own living arrangements because we believe surviving in a harsh desert is part of what makes Burning Man such an enriching experience. I find that the wealthy Burners who cheat themselves out of it are the poor ones in the context of the Playa.

Photo Credit: Keiki-Lani Knudsen (@imkeiki) and Burning Man

Photo Credit: Keiki-Lani Knudsen (@imkeiki) and Burning Man

Aside from my duties as miscommunications lead, our music gave me a great reason to stick around at Disco Lips. Our event production lead, Lora Kato, knows her way around good dance music. She curated a lineup of DJs who consistently delivered it.

Chunshow got the week started with proper, tasteful Chicago house. Soluna flew in from Puerto Rico to play big room tech house bangers, and Roxanne Roll wove her way into a hypnotic groove that brought me to ecstatic bliss. N2N dropped bass house banger after banger with heavy emphasis on remixes. Hailing from the UK, Yo Speed delivered a dose of breakbeat that forced my feet to work overtime before James Patrick brought the proverbial house down with mind-bending jungle and drum and bass.

Between the music, the Spheramids, and the beautiful souls at the heart of it all, Disco Lips amassed bigger crowds than we’d ever drawn in previous years. We had worked toward curating this exact environment for so long. All of our camp’s key players couldn’t help but embrace one another at the realization that we’d finally arrived.

“Coming back from my truck, people were telling me there was this crackin’ party at our place,” Kenton said. “I was figuring it was probably just gonna be one of the better crowds we’ve had, but to walk out and see it completely blowing up, art cars parked in front, a sea of bicycles on each side of the street, and the camp so packed you could hardly move — that was almost a tear shedding moment.”

Photo Credit: Thomas Weaver

Kenton continued: “We’ve been waiting a lot of years for that kind of an event. To be able to look at each other and understand how important it was, well, I enjoyed it, and then I had to go back to my truck and do a shot of whiskey.”

It’s easy to overlook all the hard work poured into a project when its collaborators make the end result look easy. From boots on the ground to our final matter out-of-place (MOOP) sweep at the end of the 2024 edition of Burning Man, Disco Lips had fun, rolled with the punches, and made a statement that reverberated throughout the playa’s picturesque scales.

But it wouldn’t have been possible if not for more than a decade of grueling trial and error, of falling in the dust over and over until we figured out that the path forward was smacking us in the face. That’s the beautiful thing about the Black Rock Desert. It will change you if you let it.

Burners at the early stages of an art project or theme camp would do well to stay the course, have faith that they’ll reach their destination, and be good people. This applies beyond Burning Man. These are the key ingredients needed to create unforgettable moments whether you’re on or off the Playa.

Photo Credit: Keiki-Lani Knudsen (@imkeiki) and Burning Man

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