A perfect moonwalk competes for attention here. That grand gesture is lost in the pandemonium unsettling the white powdered surface of this lat, featureless desert-scape. Featureless, that is, save for the thousand blinking souls shimmering inside an LED oasis, their form animated by what might be dubbed playa-step by anyone foolish enough to hazard classiication. It is about 3 AM, and I have landed amid an outlying carnival of revellers who have disembarked from illuminated bikes to tear a few holes in the night. No foreigners to a serious hoedown, and no strangers to trekking beyond boundaries, they have arrived in this corner of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, from San Francisco, all over California, the West Coast, North America, and from regions worldwide. Pilgrims all, we marvel at the unit before us. A sound-art car loved as ‘the Mog’ and sporting the label ‘RIPE’, this Mutant Vehicle is rumoured to be ‘the largest off-road sound system in the world’. 1 A vinyl-spinning headphones-jacked DJ takes command under an orange plexiglass dome. The pièce de résistance of our hosts, the Space Cowboys, the Mog has long been at the forefront of mobile sound experiments in these here parts. Adopting an FM transmitter, the crew simulcast their live DJ performances from multiple collaborating sound art vehicles in the vicinity. Tonight, I am in the midst of such a mobilization. All around the Mog, a mutant motorcade has appeared out of the night like a rag-tag colonial leet rallying to its battlestar. CHAPTER TEN Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning Man Graham St John 1 http://www.spacecowboys.org/pages/about (accessed 12 October 2012). 9781501309311_txt_rev.indd 219 9/28/16 2:34 PM