Alkaline: Tormenta at Spanky's Wine Bar
Burner Podcast
Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline The Soundtrack to Your Burn Session A071: Tormenta at Spanky’s Wine Bar Recorded live at Spanky’s Wine Bar, Black Rock City 2025 Based in Berlin, Germany, Shirin — aka Tormenta — is a regular in the European burn scene, including NoWhere in Spain. In 2025, she made her first trip to Black Rock City, where her playa initiation came complete with storms, mud, and cancelled gigs. Fittingly, tormenta means “storm” in Spanish. This set was recorded at the iconic Spanky’s Wine Bar in BRC 2025: music for pleasure, self-determination, and moving like you...
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Alkaline: DJ Priscilla on El Pulpo Magnifico
Burner Podcast
Based in the Bay Area of California, Priscilla Hernandez (aka DJ Priscilla) is a pillar of the burner community. She is a resident DJ with the Heavy Petting Zoo, a Burning Man camp and mutant vehicle dedicated to building a community of creative dancers and free spirits. In addition to DJing great sets around Burning Man and Regional events, Priscilla hosts a mini camp within the Illumination Village theme camp where she holds daily ‘Learn to DJ’ classes on playa during Burning Man to help aspiring DJs learn the art of mixing. This session was recorded on the El Pulpo mutant vehicle...
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Alkaline A069: Black Velveteen on the ¡AXOLOTL!
Burner Podcast
Born on the South Side of Chicago and based in Seattle, Chris Offutt (aka Black Velveteen) is a pillar of the Pacific Northwest creative community and the founder of the Sage Rites record label. Her musical foundation, built on a childhood range of Motown to Mozart, manifested in a career navigating the cultural textures of San Francisco and Seattle, including her 2011 London-based radio show Progressions in House. This session, recorded at sunrise on ¡AXOLOTL! Art Car, Burning Man 2024. Black Velveteen first appeared on Burner Podcast with the closing set for Episode 88 (Post Burning...
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Burner Podcast: From Earth With Love
Burner Podcast
Ben Haldeman is backing up our collective memories across the stars Published [3/31/26] Ben Haldeman is an engineer, explorer, and the visionary founder of LifeShip — designing pyramids filled with DNA archives and cultural time capsules to send to the Moon and beyond. A former early employee at Planet Labs, Ben left to follow a calling that crystallized during a vision quest through the forests of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In this conversation, Arash and Ben look past technical specifications to explore the existential heart of why we document ourselves as a...
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Alkaline A068: Shamiran (Camp YOUniversal)
Burner Podcast
Alkaline A068: Shamiran (Camp YOUniversal) 📅 [3/18/26] The Soundtrack to Your Burn In this session, we welcome a true sonic ambassador of the global community. Born in Iran and based in Los Angeles, Shamiran is an artist, musician, and sonic selector who has become a mainstay at Camp YOUniversal, known for their Persian Tea House (designed by the legendary Gregg Fleishman). A community activator and human rights activist to the bones, Shamiran can usually be found on playa with the sound and production team for Distrikt and coordinating Woman Life Freedom events in the default world. If she...
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Alkaline: Piccaya (Afrikaburn 2025 / Bubbles & Bass)
Burner Podcast
Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline A067: Piccaya at Afrikaburn 2025 Welcome to the all new, all different (but mostly the same same) Burner Podcast Presents Alkaline — the soundtrack to your burn. Our new season opener welcomes back Piccaya, last featured in episode 90 of Burner Podcast, this time sharing one of his many sets from Afrikaburn 2025. Piccaya is a sonic traveler and storyteller based between Brussels and Barcelona, known for deep, organic, tribal-infused soundscapes that bridge the spiritual and the dancefloor. This mix captures a warm, glowy, hip-shaking journey recorded Friday...
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Don’t Go to Burning Man
Burner Podcast
A Post-Burning Man 2025 chat with 20-year veteran & camp lead Rand Pate The dust has barely settled, and Arash is still shaking it out of his hair—and maybe out of his brain. In this post-Burning Man 2025 debrief, he sits with Rand Pate, a 20-year veteran and long-time camp lead of Bubble Lounge, to unpack what might have been the roughest year on record. From hurricane-force whiteouts and shattered shade structures to an unexpected birth, a tragic homicide, and the most international population in playa history, 2025 pushed the community to its edge. They talk about the evolution of...
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Roadtrip to Burning Man 2025
Burner Podcast
Roadtrip to Burning Man 2025 The Annual Pre-Playa Planner™ It’s that time again, kids! The Pre-Playa Planner is the yearly tradition where Arash delegates all the actual research to his way-more-responsible guests. This year’s dialed-in crew to help you mentally prepare for your adventures ahead: Esquire, founder of Saffron aka Sara Barnett, repping Art Support Services (A.S.S.) Shamiran, artist, musician, sonic selector and Camp YOUniversal mainstay The crew breaks down some of the 2025 art projects we're excited to see, rituals we’re bringing back, new surprises we're...
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Welcome Home
Burner Podcast
And on his seventh Burn, Tyler Williams truly came Home For his first six Burns, musician and professional Las Vegas community builder Tyler Williams attended Burning Man the millionaire way — flying in late, partying big, and heading out before the Temple burn. After the tragic death of his friend and boss, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, Tyler returned to the playa — this time sober and with a deeper sense of intention. In this interview memoir, Tyler shares his story of growing up in the church, landing in Las Vegas with his band, and eventually working alongside Tony during the Downtown...
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Talk to Tony
Burner Podcast
Anthony Bondi refuses to let Las Vegas’s arts history disappear For over two decades, Anthony Bondi has been a living archive of Las Vegas’ arts and counterculture movements. From his large-scale tactile installations at Burning Man to his massive independent archive, Las Vegas Arts in Print Media, 1990–2015, Tony has tirelessly documented the ephemeral and forgotten corners of creative expression in Sin City. In this conversation, Tony and Arash explore the nature of cultural memory and the role of artists and storytellers. Tony guides Arash through an experiential journey into the...
info_outlineBurner Podcast Presents: Alkaline
The Soundtrack to Your Burn
Session A071: Tormenta at Spanky’s Wine Bar
Recorded live at Spanky’s Wine Bar, Black Rock City 2025
Based in Berlin, Germany, Shirin — aka Tormenta — is a regular in the European burn scene, including NoWhere in Spain. In 2025, she made her first trip to Black Rock City, where her playa initiation came complete with storms, mud, and cancelled gigs. Fittingly, tormenta means “storm” in Spanish.
This set was recorded at the iconic Spanky’s Wine Bar in BRC 2025: music for pleasure, self-determination, and moving like you mean it — “a little cheeky and a little filthy,” with Tormenta’s signature bouncy-dark sound.
Full set: soundcloud.com/tormenta_music/tormenta-at-spankys
Follow: instagram.com/tormenta.music/
NoWhere, Spain Burning Man regional - goingnowhere.org | instagram.com/going_nowhere_burn
Spanky’s Wine Bar - spankys.org | instagram.com/spankysswinebar
Alkaline’s 2026 season is Produced by Burner Podcast Music Director Chris Huber, aka M.I.A.
Executive producers Navjeet Sarna and Amber Rose
Standard Boilerplate
A show for those who burn the other 350 days of the year.
Burner Podcast celebrates over a decade in production and is listed among the top 5% of podcasts in the world by ListenNotes. An independent gift to the Burning Man community, we are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Burner Podcast episodes feature audio memoirs, roundtables, and deep-dive conversations for and about those who identify as burners.
Explore 160+ episodes at: burnerpodcast.com
Follow us for wildly irregular updates: instagram.com/burnerpodcast | facebook.com/burnerpodcast
The Burner Podcast RSS feed is home to the flagship show itself, as well as other Burner Podcast Presents spinoffs including Burner Podcast Presents : Alkaline, a show featuring DJ mixes as the sonic documentation of the global Burner community — the soundtrack to your burn.
About the Host & Founder
Ārash Afshar is an Iranian-American writer, photographer, and cultural architect. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through philosophical memoirs, documentary portraiture, and recorded conversations. Learn more at yesterdayiwasclever.com.