And if you are curious about my LED outfit, you can read more about it on my led peacock engineer medium post and if you'd like to read all my festivals or dreamstate, or clubbing posts, please click on the links higher on the page to get taken to those categories.
π
2025-11-21 01:01
in Clubbing, Dreamstate, Festivals
Just like last years, delighted to be back: Dreamstate Socal is still an event I look forward to, all year.
This is our third year at Queen Mary, you can read the first QM report for Queen Mary vs NOS where DS used to be before that. It is true that I still prefer NOS for a variety of technical reasons (from later curfew, shorter distances between stages, no bridge or underpass tunnel, megastructures that allow more kick ass lasers, and a few more...), but honestly DS like it is run, is still going to be (and was) lots of fun, regardless of where it's run. For the record, it's already been confirmed to be at Queen Mary for next year, so we can put that discussion to rest :)
10 Years!
If you like this report, and want to see others/future ones, you can go on these pages:
Let's go through the grounds again, starting with Passport for Insomniac subscribers:
cotton candy :)
if you pay enough, you get to come visit too :)
The Insomniac team still made those magical places:
the ring!
Of course, the water is always nice:
And then, there is the boat, it does look quite pretty from the outside. Unfortunately inside, especially behind the scenes, is literally falling apart. I didn't want to break the magic with pictures there, but honestly it's not looking great.
Generally, my thought this year on the venue:
the layout and footprint looked almost identical to last year
thankfully we mostly avoided the rain this year, but it's still 3 years in a row with rain and mud
It looked full with some choke points with this year's crowds, it wasn't unbearable, but I'd say it was close to the limit
Void was still felt too far even if it's half a perception issue, to the point that I only really went twice, too far for stage hopping.
Sequence was lovely but it felt like a 15mn walk from dream, it's really far end to end. NOS felt more compact while offering bigger and better stages. Not being able to reasonably stage hop between sequence and dream was unfortunate. This did benefit Vision though as it was in the middle :)
barely any lasers at dream, maybe a safety/logistical issue with the location, but disappointing for sets, especially Gareth. What is Gareth without real lasers? :)
but apart from limited lasers, the dream stage was beautiful
Weather
It was reasonably cold this year, but thankfully we barely avoided the rain this year. Obviously this location is much more subject to and affected by rain than NOS. It did rain a good amount just before the event, which sucked for the setup crews, but thankfully attendees were spared. They did a good job getting rid of most of the muddy mess with a better floor they installed:
People say a little rain has never killed anyone, and it does make the lasers look nice (that part is true), but they also forget how the first year at QM, we had a deluge of rain during the boat party that would have simply cancelled the event had it been a few hours earlier. That also made for a muddy mess the next day. So yeah, this honestly makes me nervous every year compared to San Bernardino that is a lot more dry, but I guess for now we just need to keep hoping to remain lucky :) (DS has already been confirmed to remain at QM next year).
The Queen Mary Boat After Parties
The boat had 3 rooms this year again, I think they may have been moved so that 2 of them were on the top floor which was convenient for stage hopping, but they were also the farthest you could be from bathrooms that were all the way down outside the boat, with no working elevator. It was a serious amount of steps to go up and down, and sadly the one working elevator was guarded by someone who made sure no one would get on it without an ADA wristband, and let's be honest, I didn't see many people with ADA wristbands on the boat, it was not ADA friendly in my opinion. So I was not impressed with that person denying the elevator to someone whose legs/knees were hurting but didn't have the ADA wristband. Her answer was to go down a lot of stairs and back up to somewhere not close to try and get an ADA wristband in the middle of the night :-/
I know (from having seen it) that parts of that boat are falling apart, the internal elevators are non functioning and virtually all bathrooms were non functioning too, which is why they were closed. This cruiseship is on its last legs indeed. The corridors with cabins were ok enough, as long as you were not hoping to sleep before 06:00, because the bass was shaking everything (unless you're a burning man veteran that can sleep next to speakers :) ).
People
Like every year, it was fun to see friends and nice costumes:
Pictures with friends:
Finally got to meet Federica/the_roving_raver
Marc from led2rave4
Pystrancemom who gave me lovely kandi, thank you
And the obligatory pictures with DJs :)
Superstrings
Roman Messer
Billy Gillies
My man, Fadi!
Neptune Project
Will Atkinson
Trancewax
John 00 Fleming, OMG his set was so good again
Ferry!
David Forbes, amused to see me yet more more time this year :)
We also organized and took some Trancefamily pictures:
Anyway, let's go through the 2 days of festival:
Day 1
Last year, DS started surprisingly early, 13:00, which was announced late and definitely a surprise. This year it went back to 16:00. I'm fine with anything (even if I want 3 days, haha), but hope the start time gets announced as early as possible so that people can get the right flights (both last year and this year, I had to do a difficult last minute plane change after an unexpected start time was announced).
I did start at Sequence to see Kristina Sky
then went to check out dream
This lovely b2b was quite early in the day
happy my friend Asteroid got a slot to play at Vision before Darren Tate
TFSF's Jonny Atom at Boom box
We also got all the superstrings :)
Anyway, back to dream for Giuseppe Ottaviani, beautiful stage like I said:
And vision:
And dream :)
for this epic PvD b2b Aly & Fila
Of course 01:00 was not the real end, next was the boat party. The lineup was great again, but I had a hard time enjoying the cramped and hot rooms (they did add fans, but it was still not very comfortable):
Asteroid again
FactorB and Neptune Project
One more chance to see superstrings
Day 1 Summary Video:
Day 2: and yes Tiesto Played Trance ;)
Day 2 also started at 16:00 which was no problem to manage:
TFSF's Khromata
Thanks to winter, it got dark quickly, just one hour later:
Trancewax
nice sunset
Many stages, many DJs, let's skip to the end, Dream got packed at the end when many went there to see Tiesto:
So, what happened? ;)
Honestly I just wanted to be happy, and it's just been 20 years since I got to see Tiesto play trance at Tiesto in Concert in LA:
Yes, I was there in 2005
I got the official T-shirt
and I was wearing it for Tiesto's set this DS :)
And yes, I saw him before that even, this was 2004 in New York:
Some people didn't like the first 15 minutes, I did. Some didn't like the rest which was more old school trance he used to play, because it was "the same thing" or "nothing new". I was "Hell, Tiesto is playing real trance, at Dreamstate! Can't we be very happy about that?" ... I was :)
Here's the full set:
So there you go, I had a great time, I was happy! :) But seriously if you're not happy enough with Tiesto, I was not happy with him leaving us for close to 20 years for commercial stuff that I sure don't care for. If he comes back, we have to welcome him back and the people he will bring to trance with him, that's a good thing!
The rest of the night was spent on the boat to finish the fun until we were exhausted:
Day 2 Summary Video:
Aftermath and Conclusion: Should this not be 3 days and with a bit more sleep?
Yes, I'm lazy, I kept the same headline as last year, but it's still fitting :)
DJS and music:
they were somewhat different from previous years, while keeping some favorites, not a bad thing
Some DJs were not able to come because the US has made it fairly expensive for them to get work visas and they can apparently take more than 6 months to be done unless you pay another "go faster" fee on top which is a few thousand dollars more. Sad :-//
And yet, great to see some new DJs like Roman Messer or Asteroid, both I knew from Europe but not everyone gets to go there.
Speaking of visas, I don't even want to know how much it cost to get all of superstrings :)
Queen Mary looks pretty from the outside, but inside:
It's hot as hell, to the point I had to remove my entire outfit to remove layers. They added a few fans, but still uncomfortably hot and humid.
The 3 stages were 4 very tall floors apart with only a single working elevator (the other ones have been broken for a long time and are part of the ship that is falling apart). I already explained above that having staff denying use of the one working elevator that was pretty much unused to people who could really have benefited from it, was poor.
The rooms on top of being too hot and cramped, were not big enough for everyone: on the 2nd day at 04;00, you couldn't get in Grand ballroom without waiting in line long enough for people to get out :-//
I mentioned the boat falling apart behind the scenes: if you get to see behind the curtain (I did), there are so many things that are very broken and left unfixed, we're talking broken walls, barely safe stuff. It's not meant to be guest facing, but not inspiring. So I guess my advice is don't look behind the curtain :)
Last year, DS started surprisingly early, 13:00, which was announced late and definitely a surprise. This year it went back to 16:00. I'm fine with anything (even if I want 3 days, haha), but hope the start time gets announced as early as possible so that people can get the right flights (both last year and this year, I had to do a difficult last minute plane change after an unexpected start time was announced).
From last year, it was similar:
still two days but enough DJs for 3 days, easily.
art was was still 5th stage and passport had its secret 6th stage.
Even moving back the start time from 13:00 to 16:00, it was still a lot of hours, although I'd have preferred more of them outside the boat.
And for anyone asking, Jeff Ryan from Insomniac has confirmed that DS will be at Queen Mary again next year, so he's saving us the time to talk about NOS vs QM :)
Should you go? Would I go Back?
I think I don't need to write a long essay to say "hell yes"
It's still the best night trance festival in the world production wise
Yes, too many DJs all at once in not enough hours, but well, better than the opposite problem :)
Where else do you get all those lovely costumes and nicely decorated LED totems? (for the flags in the smack middle of the crowd, blocking the view, maybe we can do without those, though :) ).
The insomniac crew continues to run a well oiled machine and did a great job this year again.
eyes are drawn with math, they aren't sprites or animated gifs
So, I already built a 64x64 Matrix the hard way in 2018, including early uses of the ESP32 FastLED parallel output code that was still being written in 2018 when I built it. Building the matrix from scratch with 64 strips laid out one by one, was a pain, it took close to a week just to build. Code-wise, it took a little while, but I had a sweet running 110fps 16 parallel channel output setup, it was lovely.
professional wiring work, haha
yeah, that's why I wanted to use a nice expander board this time around
not counting that I had to add level shifters to get full 110fps speed from 3.3V output to 5V pixels
but eh, it did work and it survived 2 burning mans until the playa ate the pixels from the inside
I was honestly quite sad about my 4096 pixel array that took so much effort having been eaten by the corrosive playa, so when I saw pieces of pre-made matrices at a more reasonable price, I I kind of impulse bought 6 bunches 10x60 pre-made strips of much better quality just before the Trump tariffs came in. It was still $500 just in LEDs tough, but that's actually a good price for that many high quality pixels. I however figured I'd try using pixxelblaze with it because progress and not writing my own code for everything (although it was already written, haha). I also hoped to use the PB expander board to help with wiring.
I also was curious to try out the library of 2D patterns available with pixelblaze. In the end I found around 40 2D patterns that looked decent enough. Is 40 a lot? It's not bad, but when using my own Framebuffer::GFX in C++, I've easily gathered over 200 demos that are overall better due to more speed and obviously a lot faster (almost unlimited speed limited by the LEDs themselves).
I figured I'd live with the limitations of Pixelblaze and the limited amount of demos compared to C++ framebuffers, But things didn't really work out as planned. Namely:
I found out the hard way how slow the interpreted code actually was when scaled to 3600 pixels (most demos ran at 2 to 10fps tops, the 2fps ones are painful to watch)
I thought the port expander would allow me to drive 3600 LEDs at high speed, but due to the 2Mbit/s bus limitation, it's actually only about 2x faster than asingle neopixel bus, or barely 20fps raw speed. I still thought about using it until realized that most demos didn't really go faster than 10fps anyway, so why bother (for comparison, my 4096 array did 110fps with 16 channel parallel output on the same ESP32 chip).
Wizard recommended I use multiple PBs to spread the compute load, sure I could use 2, or 3, or 6 to run the 6 strings of 600 pixels, but after many hours of even trying to figure out how to use master/slave output as it was not officially documented, and pulling my hair on how on earth the coordinate mapping works across devices, I did eventually got it working just to realize that the devices weren't time synced, so the demos ran at slightly different speeds and the display was now out of sync, so it wasted a day of my time trying just to give up in the end.
Here are pictures of the build
all 6 sub matrices connected, turns out single power was good enough even if the matrix power wire was a bit thin and ran a bit hot
my 300W 12V power supply was definitely overkill, note the small step down converter to power the 5V PB from 12V
power was good
I tried to split the output in two by using a spare PB pico I had laying around
coordinate mapping was a huge pain due to lack of docs
with 2 devices, without magic in the code, a single PB would not know to display the left or right half
sadly the lack of sync was a showstopper
more 'this is not working' :-/
In the end, I gave up and went with a single 3600 pixel output, and make peace with patterns that ran as slow as 3 to 5fps:
I used a 110V power cord to re-inject 12V power in the middle, not fully required but nicer on wires
sadly my setup didn't come with the right plug to connect to the output and backfeed power from the other side, so I made my own from spare connectors
it worked without the power backfeed, but it was better with it
now came the job of connecting 60*5=300 knots between the sub-sections with twisty ties
didn't take too long, time for install
wee!
for a display that doesn't have a framebuffer and things are drawn with math, not bad
and it looks cool from inside the house too :)
Do you want the same demos without spending all the time it took me to download them one by one?
Marc's Favorite Pixelblaze 2D demos pbb config you can directly install
The magic file above will install everything you need all at once, you'll just have to re-set Wifi, change the name and resolution.
If anyone is interested, here are the demos I settled on, the ones prefixed with '_' were downloaded from https://electromage.com/patterns :
I'm not much of a day party person, and even less of a beach party guy, but I was in Vegas while Tiesto was playing at LIV at Fontainebleau, so why not? :)
After walking through the night club, the pool was outside:
