Self-initiated · Flagship · Oakland, 2023 to now
Anti Lands.A festival Oakland didn’t have.
Anti Lands is a free, all-local music festival among the redwoods on a hill at Lake Merritt. We started it in 2023 with about 25 people. In 2026, 850-plus RSVP’d.
Snapshot
- What
- A free, all-local music festival
- Where
- Among the redwoods on a hill at Lake Merritt, Oakland
- When
- Every August since 2023. Fourth edition: Aug 15, 2026
- Crew
- The same crew behind 100% BEEF
- Funding
- Crew-funded. No sponsors, no ticket sales
- My role
- Lighting, promotion, design, content, outreach, setup and teardown
Free,and on purpose.
Outside Lands had become expensive and packed. Oakland had no music festival at Lake Merritt at all, let alone a free one.
So we built the local alternative. No ticket, no crush, no overselling. It’s free as a nod to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and it’s designed for people who know how to share space with strangers.
The lineup has one rule: Bay Area artists only. Born here or living here, from first sets to big names.
A crew,not a client.
Anti Lands is run by the same crew as 100% BEEF. I’m not one of the DJs. I work on what brings people up the hill and what they experience when they get there. We fund it together.
Lighting
Sourcing every fixture and rental, designing the rig, programming DMX.
Promotion
The biggest lift. Instagram and video ads, flyers, stories shared across a network, cross-promotion with other producers.
Street outreach
Flyering by hand and talking to people at the lake.
Design and content
Visual design, social video, and finding photographers and videographers.
Operations
Setup and teardown, alongside the whole crew.
25 peopleto 850 RSVPs.
RSVPs are the cleanest number we have. Headcount at a free, open, outdoor event is an estimate, so I keep the two apart.
| Year | Edition | RSVPs | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 1st | Not recorded | ~25–30 |
| 2024 | 2nd | ~120 | ~45–50 |
| 2025 | 3rd | ~300 | Roughly double 2024 |
| 2026 | 4th | ~850–900 | 500+ (estimated) |
The number I care about most isn’t in the table. Many people come back every year whom the crew had never met, like a woman in her fifties who had been there every year before any of us knew her name.
Lighting design
Light the trees,not a club.
From day one, the brief I gave myself was to draw eyes to the redwoods without turning the hill into a nightclub. Each year added one layer.
2023
- Rig
- A few PAR cans uplighting the redwoods.
- Air
- No atmosphere
- Intent
- Warm tree glow. Noticeable, never loud.
2024
Pending Rig details still being confirmed.
2025
- Rig
- Two moving beam heads by the stage, bought by me.
- Air
- Fog, first year
- Intent
- Motion and beams around the DJ.
2026
- Rig
- Four moving beam heads, two floor LED matrices, ten PAR cans, all on DMX.
- Air
- Haze
- Intent
- Beams through the canopy, strobe hits, restrained tree uplight.
Why the fog mattered
Moving heads only pay off in the air. Without fog or haze, the beams are invisible. Adding fog in 2025 and haze in 2026 is what made the moving lights worth owning, and it let me keep the tree uplight soft while the beams did the loud work above it.
A DMX call worth explaining
The two floor LED matrices were first quoted as needing 604 channels in pixel mode, across two universes. I pushed back. DMX is a broadcast protocol, so two identical fixtures can share a start address and mirror the same pixel content on 302 channels.
That left a real choice: mirrored pixels on one address, or fully independent matrices across two universes. Which patch ran on the night is still being confirmed, so I’m not claiming either here.
Built bya network.
- Borrowed light. An event-producer friend lends the ten PAR cans free most years.
- Shared reach. Cross-promotion with other producers, and friends posting to their stories.
- Word of mouth. Still the engine. Flyers and conversations at the lake feed it.
- Who pays. I fund the ads and the rest of the lighting. The crew covers permits, insurance, gas and the generator.
The campaign
Footage setsthe rhythm.
These are two of the animated pieces that ran as ads and social posts. The type has to stay readable in every frame, and each palette comes from the footage underneath it.
I let the sunlit leaves set the palette, then built the type to hold its own as the light moved beneath it.
For the second piece, I traded sunlit green for an iridescent shimmer. The same approach, with a different mood.
Phonesdown.
There aren’t many photos of Anti Lands, and that’s the culture working. We want people dancing, not filming. Everyone on the crew is busy with safety, the DJs, wristbands and cleanup.
Media to come
- Pending Hero photo from the hill
- Pending Three event photographs
- Pending Render / lighting visualization, labeled as a render and shown only beside a real site photo
Not everything lives on a screen.This one lives on a hill.
Anti Lands taught me to design a whole night: the light, the reach, the room people make for each other. I want to build more interactive spaces like it.