As many of you know, the Sidewalk Hustle team spent the Easter long weekend dancing away under the delightful California sun at Coachella. To make this excellent adventure all possible, we teamed up with audio brand JBL and headed down for weekend two of the infamous music festival, known as the official kickoff of the summer music festival season. Having attended the Coachella Music & Arts Festival in 2011, we were pumped to be back in the desert to soak up some sun and dance away to some amazing music.
With three days of incredible and diverse music to experience we approached each day at the festival with eagerness and anticipation. Coachella is well-known for more than just music, seamlessly incorporating art installations and technology throughout the Empire Polo Grounds, making the festival a true sensory journey for everyone. Upon entering the grounds you are immediately face-to-face with the iconic ferris wheel, then pass by a giant metal robot holding a daisy that it occasionally and mechanically sniffs, a larger than life mobile astronaut with a video screen face, and a living wall of fresh plants elegantly curved into a structure providing shade, before arriving at the JBL Dark Tent, a haven of perfectly blended music and the latest in audio technology.
With a giant Dance Dance Revolution platform in the centre of the well air-conditioned tent, an interactive video booth with over a hundred alternating LED coloured JBL Pulse speakers as the backdrop, tantalizingly inviting festival goers to record their best moves and upload them to Twitter and Facebook (check out our moves below!). The platform had the longest line up all weekend long, and we understood why once we got a chance to try it out. Blending elements of vintage 70′s game Simon with DDR, while capturing the participants playing from overheard with a 360° selfie. Dopeness.
Because we all know #Selfies eat up your batteries,, JBL was one step ahead of the game, quite literally, with their Recharge bar, safely manned by JBL staff ready to check your phone to power back up on a JBL Charge using a USB cable that illuminated as it juiced up every kind of phone from Apple to Android technology. Incase we felt like we were missing out on the festivities inside the tent we headed over to the Dare To Listen wall, lined with over twenty pairs of JBL’s unreleased award winning E30-Series headphones to listen in on a live stream of each stage.
Over on the other side of the Dark Room, was a social charging centre with outlets for those who brought their own cables, as well as plenty of cool bean bag chairs to give your tired dancing feet a break and try out JBL’s nifty Tweet Music technology. It took us a moment to figure out how it worked, but basically using the iPad we sent a tweet with the hashtag #JBLTweetMusic and a mathematical equation translated our message into music, tweeted back at us to hear on the JBL E30-Series Headphones.
We were really impressed by JBL‘s set up in the tent, and coincidentally found ourselves there often throughout the weekend experiencing JBL’s new technology while staying cool between sets. Take a look at some photos of the tent below.
In case you missed your chance to check out the JBL Dark Room at the festival, we’ve got a JBL Pulse system to give away to one lucky winner! Enter below!
For our day to day coverage of the festival click here!
JBL Dark Room:
JBL Tweet Music:
JBL Pulse Wall:
