Arts & Life

Subtract on the Pier brings house music to Belmont Shore

Modern-day flappers wearing yoga pants and feathers jived alongside their neon-laced male counterparts on the dance floor; but just as important as the thudding house music was the sense of an underground community.

Pulsing bass and soothing, ambient melodies shook the end of Belmont Pier on Sunday with the second Subtract on the Pier, a live DJ event.

Its lineup featured fairly new and emerging Los Angeles-based, deep-tech DJ’s such as Brandon Ernst and Anton Tumas as well as a yoga session from Galactivation Yoga before the show.

The elements of both the live deep-tech house music and experimental yoga played strongly into the scene’s vibrant burner culture, which is based strongly around the ideas and movement behind the famous Burning Man event.

“It’s very underground, spiritual music,” Sean Micheals, an attendee from Cypress, said. “A lot of people come here and they dress how they want and they act how they want; you know, there’s freedom of religion.”

Subtract on the Pier is relatively new to the music circuit in comparison to more renowned events such as the award-winning Desert Rose Music Festival and Burning Man, which has brought a one week-long temporary metropolis to Black Rock City since 1986, according to their respective websites.

Opening artist of the evening, Brandon Ernst, stated that it was his first attendance at Burning Man that brought him into the culture and motivated him to become a DJ.

He said that he was first invited to the festival through friends he met at an Ayahuasca Sacred Plant Medicine Ceremony, a gathering where participants ingested the broth of an Amazonian psychedelic vine to provoke spiritual awakening.

“I basically went to Burning Man and found home,” said Ernst. “Burning Man helped to transform my life and connect me to people and give me purpose to spin music and give back to the world.”

The ocean-view of Subtract on the Pier fits into the integral role of natural scenery in the burner culture. Burning Man and the Desert Rose Music Festival have grown closely associated with their location, adopting desert themes strongly influencing the garb and aesthetic of the culture.

The integration of yoga into the event ties in well with the music’s strong spiritual emphasis. Christa Everest, or as her pupils and peers call her, Christa Galactica, is a long-time practitioner of yoga and active teacher of what she calls “galactivated” yoga.

“Yoga is about unification with your divine,” Everest said. “The physical part of yoga is just one branch on that tree, but the tree is about connecting to the bigger picture; the actual [burning ceremony] is like a physical expression of what the bigger picture looks like as a society.”

Along with self-ascribed burners, the event attracted many other electronic music loving communities.

“Burners, hippies, ravers, spiritual and religious people come to enjoy the music,” Micheals said. “I would say that house music is universal.”

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