Jan Blomqvist played Burning Man through a dust storm, and the whole set is up

Jan Blomqvist played a live set at Burning Man this year while a dust storm took the desert down to almost nothing. He sang all of it in goggles and a scarf. Maxa, the art car he played on, filmed it, and the film went up on Friday.

It runs 92 minutes. Press play, then keep reading.

What happened out there

Jan tells it himself in the note under the video. There was a real question about whether to play at all. He'd flown halfway around the world for this burn and didn't want to go home without one performance worth remembering. So they set up and waited to see who'd come.

People came. Some of them, he says, spent hours finding the car with close to zero visibility.

You can see what they walked into in the first frame. Maxa is the Mexican art car with the deer's head. Its towers are throwing flame into a sky the same colour as the ground. The crowd is in hats, masks and goggles, hands up. Past the speakers there's nothing. When the drone goes up you get the car, a tall red sculpture beside it, bikes dropped on the ground, and white in every direction.

Singing into that wind was hard, he writes, and he kept the original recording anyway. His reason for going ahead is one line: "Sometimes you just have to see things through."

He also suggests you place a bet on whether the goggles ever come off. Watch to the end.

What's in the set

This is a concert, not a DJ set. 1001Tracklists has 19 tracks logged, and 15 of them carry his name.

It opens with Left Unsaid. His remix of RY X's All I Have comes in the first half. Destination Lost, the one he made with Rodriguez Jr., lands past the middle, and More comes near the end. Three tracks are still unidentified, including the last one.

Two guests are credited: Beobê, who shares the credit on Disappear Again, and Marvin Jam. The audio was mastered by Felix Lehmann, who is also the keys player in Jan's band.

Who Jan Blomqvist is

A singer from Germany who writes club records and then stands up and sings them. He moved to Berlin in 2002. He told the Recording Academy in 2019 that gigs were hard to get at first. Berlin was all minimal techno then, and the clubs told him nobody wanted piano. A few years on they wanted piano and vocals, and it worked.

He plays two ways. Alone, with one synthesizer. Or with a band: real drums, six synthesizers, slower tempos and more room for the voice. His label's bio puts him at up to 100 shows a year and close to a thousand in all, with three trips to Coachella. Since autumn 2024 the band is back, with his childhood friend Christian Dammann on drums and Lehmann on keys.

Burning Man runs through all of it. His 2016 live set on Robot Heart and Mayan Warrior is still up on Robot Heart's SoundCloud. His 2018 album, Disconnected, came out of his time there, and when he started his own label in 2024 he gave it the same name. He played Mayan Warrior in 2024. This year it was Maxa, and the weather.

What he sounds like

Teardrop, with Elderbrook, is the one the app pins to his page. The other two are in the film. That remix of More is the version he plays in the dust, and Destination Lost is in there in its original form.

The count

We hold 17 bookings for Jan Blomqvist. That puts him 1,066th of the 9,371 artists in our all-time index.

This set isn't one of the 17, and it never will be. Burning Man has no official lineup. The camps and the art cars book their own music, so there's no poster for us to count. A film that drew 140,000 views in a day and a half is invisible to a count like ours, and we'd rather say so.

The 17 undersell him for a second reason. Our catalog leans hard North American, and he's based in Berlin. The four most recent dates on his page are all there: UNTOLD in Cluj-Napoca in 2025 and again this August, DGTL Amsterdam in April, and the next one.

Where to catch him

One date, and it's close.

• BEONIX — Limassol, Cyprus, September 25 to 27

It's three nights in an old winery on the waterfront, with 68 names on the bill. Röyksopp, Adam Beyer and Pan-Pot are on it with him.

That's the only date we hold for him right now. If Cyprus by Friday isn't happening, follow him in the app and we'll tell you the day one lands nearer you. Until then you've got 92 minutes of him in the dust.

Counts are from the lineups in our own catalog on 19 September 2026. The story of the set, the credits and the quote are from Maxa's and Jan Blomqvist's own notes under the video; the view count was read off YouTube the same day. The tracklist is 1001Tracklists'. Biography is from his 2019 interview with the Recording Academy and his label's artist page. Previews and artwork are Apple Music's.

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — the artist pages and the lineups this post is built from.

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