10 Year Challenge / That Time I Painted Skrillex’s Spaceship

What were you doing 10 years ago?

This question has been trending on social media lately, but it focuses a little too much on “What did you look like 10 years ago?” 

Looks don’t offer much of a narrative as far as I’m concerned, so I’ll tell you a little story about something I did 10 years ago.

It all started at Ultra Music Festival in March 2012 – three days of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) – in Miami, Florida. That year, the festival hosted an impressive list of artists from New Order and Kraftwerk to Avicii and Skrillex. For the 165,000 attendees, it was a night – or several nights – to remember. 

On this tour, Skrillex debuted a new set piece – a DJ booth designed by Michael Christian that looked like a crashed spaceship. It had the works: flashing lights on the inside, smoke billowing from its engines, and a lift allowing him to take flight during the climax of his set. The lead tour carpenter and set electrician for the project was none other than my older sister.

After the party was over, the audience blinked in the daylight, the artists jet-setted off to their next festival appearance, and the crew packed up their gear, loading equipment onto semi-trucks bound for another city and another show. 

Unfortunately for the spaceship, the road trip up the coast from Florida did a number on its exterior paint job. By the time the spaceship arrived in New Jersey for its next appearance at Bamboozle Fest, the paint had been scraped off on a few sides and it was looking a little worse for wear.

“Can you fix it?” the tour managers back in California asked my sister. “A full retouching of the paint is going to take longer than we have,” she said, “I’ll need someone who can finish the painting while I adjust the lights.” The tour managers thought for a second and asked, “Do you know anyone in New York?”

Here’s a thing about the opposing sides of our country. On the West Coast, you reach out to colleagues or recruit a new worker based on their resume. On the East Coast, you hire your family members. So, it wasn’t unheard of for my sister to answer: “I have a sister in New York;” nor was it out of the ordinary for her managers to respond with: “Okay, great. Give her a call.”

It was, however, very out of the ordinary for me to answer a call asking me to paint Skrillex’s spaceship.

10 years ago, I was a 9-5 office girl working as a receptionist for a law firm in a New York City high-rise. 

“Why the hell not?” I thought, “I’ll do it.” 

A couple days later, I boarded a train for the Black Walnut scene shop in Upstate New York where the crashed spaceship sat awaiting its facelift. Upon my arrival, my sister handed me a brand new pair of gloves and we got to work restoring the spacecraft back to its original glory. 

While she reworked the lighting fixtures, I focused on making the shipwrecked ship look wrecked – but in a good way. Over the spaceship’s charcoal-black exterior, I mixed orange and brown paints until I found the right shade of rust, smudging it on with a piece of torn cloth to give the edges a distressed texture. We outfitted a staircase with glow-in-the-dark tape for Skrillex to use while climbing onto his ship deck, and I spray painted Skrillex’s logo on each set cart that would be used on tour.

After two days, we had his ship back in fully functioning, faux-distressed order – flashing lights and all. 

I never got to watch our spaceship live in action, but 10 years later, I still smile whenever I see a picture or a video from the Mothership tour of 2012. 

And that’s the story of the time I painted Skrillex’s spaceship.

The End.