Coachella Tickets: Coachella Festival Features Interesting Installation Art And Sculptures Each Year

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (commonly known as Coachella or Coachella Festival) is a three-day (formerly a one or two-day) annual music and arts festival, organized by Goldenvoice (a subsidiary of AEG Live) and held at the Empire Polo Fields in Indio, California, in the Inland Empire's Coachella Valley.

The event features many genres of music including alternative rock, hip hop, and electronic music as well as large sculptural art. The event has several stages/tents set-up throughout the grounds, each playing live music continuously. The main stages are: Coachella Stage, Outdoor Theatre, Gobi Tent, Mojave Tent, and the Sahara Tent (2006 also saw the addition of a smaller Oasis Dome).

The Coachella Music Festival has a desert setting (the city of Indio is a part of the Colorado Desert), with daytime temperatures frequently rising to over 100 F (38 C). The festival enjoys little cloud cover or shade. The temperature drops drastically after sunset.

On the evening of November 5, 1993 the rock band Pearl Jam performed before almost 25,000 fans who stood and sat through the night on the lawns of Indio's historic and previously rock-festival free Empire Polo Club.Although band management had chosen this untested and under-developed site as part of the boycott of Ticketmaster and the Southern California auditoriums it controlled, the event established the new venue's suitability for large-scale rock events.

Such suitability was not a given: the grounds, essen
tially one vast irrigated desert lawn, sit in one of America's hottest and driest spots, and the region's lightly populated towns, while having a history as resorts, are several hours' drive from regional population centers (San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix).

Six years later, on October 9 and 10, 1999 (a mere three months after the disastrous Woodstock 99 festival) the first actual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (usually abbreviated simply as "Coachella Fest") was held. Due to Woodstock 99's fires and riots, Coachella promoters weren't allowed to offer on site camping, a ban that continued until the 2002 festival.

About 25,000 people attended the two-day inaugural event, supporting headlining acts Beck, The Chemical Brothers, Tool, Morrissey, and Rage Against the Machine. Other acts included Jurassic 5, DJ Shadow, and Underworld. Originally, promoters had hoped to make the event three days and even considered the UK band Massive Attack to be the third day headliner - but those plans never came to fruition. The event went smoothly, with the biggest complaint being the blistering heat. It is reported, however, that the event failed to generate any profit, which nearly put an end to the festival.

The 2009 event was hosted a week earlier than normal. The new dates were April 17, 18 and 19 with the third annual edition of the country-music Stagecoach Festival, to start the week after.

The event featured notable performances such as Paul McCartney, The Cure, The Killers, My Bloody Valentine, Morrissey, Franz Ferdinand, M.I.A., Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and rare appearances from artists Leonard Cohen and Throbbing Gristle.
Each year, the festival also features interesting installation art and sculptures.

Most of the pieces are interactive, and provide entertainment and eye candy for attendees walking throughout the Polo grounds. Some of the works were initially created for the Burning Man festival.

In contrast to the largely non-repeating roster of musical artists represented at the festival, a few of the visual artists, such as Hotshot the Robot, Robochrist Industries, the Tesla Coil (Cauac), Cyclecide, and The Do LaB, along side avant-garde performance troupe Lucent Dossier Experience, have appeared during several consecutive years at Coachella. Another installation to the art of Coachella includes the limited edition posters produced by poster artist Emek. Emek started designing posters for the festival in 2007 and has continued to do so each year since.

The Coachella festival tries to reduce its carbon footprint on the environment every year which involves not just employees but also attendees. The festival highly promotes carpooling for its attendees which include rewards for people who participate. For attendees who choose to carpool with four or more people in one car and have the word "carpoolchella" displayed somewhere on their car they have a chance to be selected by a secret spotter for a chance to win VIP tickets/pass for Life for everyone in the car.

In 2007 Coachella teamed up with Global Inheritance to start a 10 for 1 recycling program, in which anyone who brings ten empty water bottles will be given a fresh new water bottle for free. In 2009 the festival introduced refillable water bottles for attendees to purchase for ten dollars in which purchasers would get free refills at a number of refill stations inside the festival and within the campgrounds.