Despite being an active international touring artist, Julianna Barwick is always in bed by 10 pm. Well, almost always. At 2:15 am on 25 May, she was onstage in Bakersfield, California, with her Boss RC-50 Loop Station, manipulating her ethereal vocals in the Moon Room at Lightning in a Bottle festival (LIB).

The longstanding California music festival introduced the Moon Room this year as a space for ambient, downtempo, and other more relaxing styles of electronic music. The thousands of colourful and crusty attendees can see hundreds of house, techno, drum ‘n’ bass, and dubstep artists performing across five days. The Moon Room is where they can go to take a break.

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It’s like the chillout rooms at the psy-trance raves Megan Perez-Carpenter attended in the early 00s. She is the senior producer of music and content at Do LaB (the promoter behind LIB), and in her offer email to Barwick, she explained that Barwick was her top choice to close out the weekend.

“It was so earnest and really sweet,” Barwick says. “Her words, saying that she curated the ambient corner of the festival, and it was her dream to have me close it out. I was like, ‘You know what? Why not?’ Why not do something weird that someone’s gonna really love?”

The Moon Room was a labour of love for Perez-Carpenter. She also books the festival’s primary stages, where major headliners such as Sara Landry, Mau P, and Chase & Status DJ’d throughout this latest sold-out edition. As with any large-scale festival, there are multiple factors she considers when booking those artists, not the least of which was ticket sales. But for the Moon Room, the only factor to consider was her vision for the stage.

Ahead of my chat with her, I look up every name on Spotify to get a sense of what I would hear there. Of the 16 artists on the list, I only found three or four of them (including Barwick) on streaming services. Perez-Carpenter didn’t book these artists based on monthly listeners, and she knew many of them personally before booking them.

Thugfucker had provided his minimalist psychedelic 4/4 music at LIB numerous times in the past. So, Perez-Carpenter asked him to play one of his Mellow Trip sets, which stem from mixes he curates when he’s making the trip to Burning Man. She knew about zz because of her radio programme, notes of moss, that’s been broadcast on SutroFM, All Day Play FM, and HYDEFM.

“It was very intentional. There were only three or four slots per night. I really wanted to choose the people that I felt passionate about. It was not about moving tickets at all,” Perez-Carpenter explains. “I’ve been booking these main stages for so long. It felt fun to do something creative and different, and also a little bit vulnerable. Do other people have the same taste as me? Are [they] going to like this? It was out of my comfort zone, and I love that.”

I chat with Perez-Carpenter on Thursday afternoon of the festival. The Moon Room only hosted a single set at that point. But even then, she speaks openly about all the excitement she’s been receiving about it. From the effusive reaction to the stage announcement on social media, to the enthusiasm from the artists she booked.

But out of all 16 acts, two of them especially inspired the whole concept: Barwick and the UK heartfelt dance artist, 1-800 GIRLS.

As Barwick mentioned, she was Perez-Carpenter’s number one choice to close out the festival at the Moon Room. Perez-Carpenter saw Barwick perform her swelling vocal loops and huge bass frequencies at Form Arcosanti in 2024, a boutique festival in the middle of the Arizona desert, and immediately knew she’d be perfect for the new LIB stage.

“Experiencing her set from knowing nothing about who she was as an artist, it just cracked me completely open. I was crying. It was such an emotional experience,” Perez-Carpenter says. “I asked her to close the Moon Room because [LIB] is such a big experience, and I really wanted to have a moment at the end where you can have that reflective time..”

When Barwick played her set (after taking a nap in her trailer for a few hours), she didn’t bring anyone to tears, but a member of the audience jumped on stage as she summoned titanic bass from her Nord Electro 4D during the closing track, Inspirit. In all her years performing, that had never happened before.

“That guy was having the time of his life,” Barwick says. “I’m really ripping the bass. It shakes the rafters. It shakes every electrical thing. I was really going for it.”

When 1-800 GIRLS played his set at Moon Room, summer camp was at its peak. It was Saturday at 10:30 pm, right when the night really kicks off. Plus, he had already spent the previous day at the festival, clearing 35,000 steps as he wandered the grounds and got a feel for what he was going to play.

Perez-Carpenter wanted 1-800 GIRLS, real name Jake Stewart, at the Moon Room because of his Monday night radio show on SWU FM, where he explores softer ambient sounds.

“I always take that opportunity to play the stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily play out in my sets on the weekend,” Stewart explains.

The Moon Room was the first place he ever played ambient music for a live audience, but when I was lying there during his set, inches from the front subwoofer, it was clear he was well-versed in the style. Like Barwick, it was an opportunity for experimentation. He was playing drone, classical music, and anything else that provided respite for a supine audience.

Stewart only had CDJs onstage, but the nature of the music clashed with the natural DJ instinct to focus on concrete elements such as BPM:

“Piecing it together was the most difficult part. In terms of BPM, ambient songs can be anything from like 60 to 110, but there’s no real beat to it,” Stewart says. Without tempo as a standard guideline, the set became about mood, texture, and timbre. “Moving through organic into more electronic stuff was a transition I felt throughout the set. Doing 15 to 20 minutes of more spaced-out strings and pianos into arpeggiated ambient.”

Reverb and echo effects took on a new importance, adding the spacious quality to more refined tracks while carrying different textures between transitions. He also did loop manipulations to sustain moments that he felt fit the environment.

“I listen to a lot of music, and sometimes I don’t necessarily like the drop. Sometimes, the melodic part of the song speaks more to me,” Stewart says. “There were certain songs that were really pretty at the beginning. I’d find something else in key, loop that, build the suspension, and then bring it back.”

Stewart didn’t get anyone jumping on stage as he was DJing, but at one point, he looked out to see what he described as a shaman helping members of the crowd with breathing exercises. While the music at the Moon Room was intended to be softer than the majority of the programming, for Perez-Carpenter, it was less about being strictly ambient than providing a safe space for people to do what they needed to do in the moment.

“The 2am to 4 am slot is going to be a little different each night. It’s less ambient and more downtempo, sexy, sensual, R&B, dub. It might get a little energetic in those hours,” Perez-Carpenter says. “I just made sure that people can move their bodies if they want, but this isn’t a dancefloor-oriented space. I hope people feel the music and want to move and do whatever they need to do.”

Personally, at a moment where I needed a break from Sara Landry’s gut-bursting hard techno, I went to the Moon Room, wrapped my pashmina around my face, and performed acupressure on my head. Even though the space wasn’t sonically isolated, and some raging beats still managed to sneak in, the music was perfect. After a few minutes, I was fully energised to do more festival-ing.

Now, in hindsight, Perez-Carpenter is considering how she can use production to create that extra layer of immersion away from the rest of the festival: “It’s a creative challenge to create an ambient space amidst the noise of the rest of the festival but we are creative folks and we are excited to keep developing the concept.”

But overall, the feedback she’s received has only grown from the enthusiasm she received leading up to the festival:

“Every time I stopped by, the Moon Room was full of people, pretty astounding if you consider that it operated mostly during headliner sets! I saw people enjoying the calmer space, cuddle puddles, rave naps, spontaneous group movement, and even a dancing crab made an appearance. It became a touchstone throughout the week as a place to drop in and get grounded amidst the chaos of the festival.”

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