Fulfilling one’s “Promises of Adventure” from 1999, one place I’d like to visit and to attend involves seeing an ‘Astral Projection’ dj set performed in the existential-perceptual-wilderness of the Negev desert, southern Israel.
As a former long-term resident of the often bleak Nevada desert landscapes, it was a perpetual joy to explore the ancient remnants of the Great Inland Sea, the expansive sky-islands of the Great Basin Montane Forests, the ultra-hardened remote Salt Flats, as well as the more commonly experienced playa comprised of Alkali Flats in the Black Rock Desert (where Burning Man is held) - one of the largest flat stretches of land in our world - so expansive that it can be easily recognized from the International Space Station.
I’ve always been drawn to the remoteness, the endlessness, as well as an active expression of a functional-inhumanity which pervades every stretch of landscape in those uninhabited realms. I’ve nearly died in these deserts on several occasions over a period of decades, not from lack of preparedness, but simply because these are inhospitable extremes which the human body was never made to survive or endure. From the lesser-known snow storms of its lonely winters to the ripping sun-bleached dehydrated winds of summer, the desert has always felt like home.
The Negev Desert is home to the oldest discovered surface on Earth, at 1.8 million years… it calls to the soul, a yearning which may only temporarily satiate the need for more. I want to touch its ancient landscapes, to persist in nothingness, to lay face up and sleep through its endless night, never again returning alone to/or/from The Voids of death.