“If Coachella and Burning Man had a kid, that kid would be Lightning in a Bottle.”

For those who have been to the first two festivals mentioned above, Lightning in a Bottle co-founder Jesse Flemming’s description of his four day party in the Santa Barbara-adjacent woods makes perfect sense.

However, should you have no reference point for either, please allow me to elaborate.

If a tatted-up, crooked visor, camo-cargo shorts and wife-beater wearing LA-club kid got dragged from LAX to an afterparty somewhere in Echo Park and managed to seduce a girl wearing a billowy, seven-layer, trinket-laden homemade dress and an aqua-colored bandanna covering her is-it-braids-or-dreads? hairdo…

Their child would grow up with a penchant for sustainable living and skull-shattering, filthy-ass, electro-crunk basslines.  Their child would eat a bag of mushrooms, frolic in the woods for a while with a hula-hoop and a pair of stilts, and then come back and set the CDJ’s on fire.  Their child would be Lightning in a Bottle.

Get it now?

Anyone who has stumbled into The Do Lab area at Coachella knows that these people know how to throw a party.  Even within the precise, manicured, and (compared to LIB) somewhat sterile setting of Coachella, The Do Lab injects the air with their free-spirited beat-mongering.

Give them a few acres of campground and three days to put on their own event, though, and you get a full taste of Jesse and Josh Flemming’s party-throwing edict, which was born nine years ago as an illegal mountain rave/birthday party with all of 100 people in attendance.

“When we first started throwing this party, we had four sets of Christmas lights and a few China balls,” said Jesse Flemming during an interview onsite at this year’s festival.

“It’s taken on a wild growth of its own,” he said, remarking that it now shatters any expectations or notions of what he and his brother thought it might become.  Attendance doubled from last year alone, crossing the 6,000 mark this time around.

Both Flemming and Do Lab Music Director Arin Ingraham, who was also present for the interview, are quick to clarify that LIB is an “arts and music” festival, in contrast to Coachella, which bills itself as a “music and arts” one.

While the distinction is backed by the sheer amount of art presence at the show — from arts and crafts on sale, to miscellaneous artists engaged in various stages of painting, to one installation sculpted entirely out of trash — three stages playing music for three days straight doesn’t exactly make the tunes an afterthought.

“When I’m figuring out the lineup, I feel like I’m making a mixtape for a friend,” said Ingraham, whom Flemming calls his “ear to the ground” in the music scene.  Being a longtime festival-vet herself, Ingraham tries to envision the mood at each stage of the event and structure lineups accordingly, from the high-energy startup on Friday to the mellowed-out exhaustion of a Sunday morning.

This year is the first year where some top-shelf international DJ talent graced the LIB stages.  British breakbeat phenoms The Stanton Warriors dropped by on Friday to tear shit up, representing the biggest lineup coup to Flemming and Ingraham (“there isn’t an artist in The Do Lab network who doesn’t drop a Stanton Warriors track,” Flemming said).

Adam Freeland, who built a relationship with The Do Lab through Coachella, played on Sunday.  Bassnectar  has been getting a lot of run in Europe lately as one of the hotter US exports but has been a longtime friend of The Do Lab and spun on Sunday as well.

SoCal favorites Marques Wyatt and Kazell also made appearances, alongside Om’s J-Boogie, vaudeville troupe (and longtime Do Lab collaborator) Lucent Dossier, and the inimitably quirky Yard Dogs Roadshow.

Probably the hottest ticket affiliated with The Do Lab at the moment, however, is the dirty gangster electro crunk hip-hop madness that is The Glitch Mob.  I heard people mentioning them in the same sentence as The Stanton Warriors and Bassnectar as must-sees for the weekend.  They drew a huge crowd Saturday night and dropped DNA-altering bass for over an hour and a half.  If you haven’t heard their remixes of Lupe Fiasco’s “I Gotcha” or Blackstar’s  “Bright as the Stars” that they unleash in their sets, do yourself a favor and track them down.

All in all, it was a unique experience for me.  Never have I been somewhere, much less a music festival in Southern California, and felt so absurdly out-of-place in jeans and a hoodie.  Eventually I got used to the purple faux-fur and fishnet wearing folks cruising around on their segways (retrofitted with three foot tall incandescent seahorses, no less) staring at me like I was a freak.  But not before a few hours feeling self-conscious that the Guess logo on my glasses was visible.

And if you just can’t go to a festival like Coachella without weeping giant, faux-fur adorned tears at the landfill worth of plastic bottles and waste strewn about, LIB has you covered as well.  Free water (just bring a container), everything is printed on recycled material with water or soy-based ink, and they even go so far as to sift through EVERY garbage bag to ensure no recycling opportunity was missed.  Not to mention the many, many sustainable living workshops offered throughout each day.

Any event that perennially succeeds at capturing the essence of the underground so well is bound to have growing pains, though.  When asked how to keep expanding at the rate they are without losing their edge to the inevitable influx of casual party-goers outside LIB’s core vibe, Flemming and Ingraham both appear a bit stumped.

“That keeps me up at night, “ Flemming finally admitted.  “The last thing I would want is to have it overrun with non-like-minded people,” he mused, touching on what he calls the inherent respect everyone at LIB has for each other and their surroundings.

“If 80 percent of the people who come to Lightning in a Bottle understand the power of the vibe here…if they come away with that amazing energy, hope and love that defines this show, then the other 20 percent will have no choice but to follow their lead,” he said,  satisfied with his response.

Although the Burning Man gene may be the dominant one in terms of which parent of Lightning in a Bottle passed more along to their offspring, the attendance spike this year indicates that people who are simply looking for the next big SoCal party are catching on.

Perhaps most telling of how LIB is taking on a life of its own this year is Flemming’s reaction when we both climb a ladder to a perch overlooking the main crowd at the Treehouse Stage during The Glitch Mob’s set.

“Holy shit!” was repeated a few times, if I remember correctly.  The crowd for one performance was about two to three thousand deep - last year’s entire attendance count.

“We’re just doing our thing,” Flemming told me.  “I’m surprised that people give a shit.”

Offer people a way to jettison their everyday lives for a blissful, eco-friendly romp through the woods set to an endless supply of beats, and word is bound to spread.  Someday soon, Lightning in a Bottle just may be the parent of its own offshoot.

My, how quickly they grow up!

For more info on the sustainable living aspect of LIB, check out our in depth piece here.