Look up into the dark skies of Coachella next weekend and the first thing you’ll see below the nearly full moon, within the shadowy frame of the Santa Rosa Mountains, will be strings of glowing balloons floating 500 to 700 feet above the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

Artist Robert Bose has been getting FAA permits and hiring workers to string his balloon chains high above the polo lawns for most of this decade, creating an iconic Coachella image that makes you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Like the neon-colored Ferris wheel jutting into the sky like a giant, hallucinogenic landmark, the Bose balloons are a visual staple of Coachella. But, they'll be joined this year by many new looks revitalizing the music and arts festival that has revolutionized the concert business over the past 18 years.

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Goldenvoice, the company that launched Coachella in 1999 and then became a semi-independent company under the auspices of AEG Live in Los Angeles, has added 20 acres in the last couple years by purchasing properties around Alex Haagen III’s Empire Polo Club. It received a permit from the city of Indio to allow 25,000 more fans onto the festival grounds, so the sold-out, two-weekend event will draw almost 125,000 people a day from around the world, counting workers, performers and their guests.

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With the additional space, Goldenvoice president and CEO Paul Tollett hopes to ease some of the overcrowding of the past few years even with more people on the field. But he's also activating new tents and structures to continue Coachella’s steady evolution, as Tollett, art curator Paul Clemente and food curator Nic Adler revealed last week in an exclusive Desert Sun interview in a house on the festival grounds.

Coachella’s performance tents are all named after deserts. There’s the giant Sahara for top EDM artists, the Yuma for emerging DJs, and the Mojave and Gobi tents for indie artists in different stages of development, including some that are being nurtured to play the bigger Outdoor and Coachella stages at future Coachella fests.

360° sensory experience

They're adding a giant wood-floor building named after the world’s largest desert, the icy Antarctica.

“We built a custom, 120-foot diameter dome,” said Clemente. “It’s 60-feet tall. It’s going to seat about 500 people and we have a 10-minute show that’s going to be running a lot. It’s an air-conditioned dome, so people will go in there, lay back and have an incredible A/V experience.”

The Antarctic will be located south of the Ferris wheel on the border of camping lot 8, making it accessible to campers late at night. A live action narrative video with natural photography and computer-generated imagery will be projected on the surface of the dome with music amplified on what Clemente calls a one-of-a-kind sound system. The design and content is being produced by Obscura Digital of San Francisco, who gained fame for their projections on the Empire State Building during the November election. Visitors will get a 360 immersive experience, but it won’t be virtual reality.

“We specifically wanted this to be a communal experience for everybody and not have people just be inside of a headset,” said Clemente. “The screen, given the size of the dome and the surface area of that hemisphere – from what I understand – is much larger than the largest IMAX screen on the planet. So, it’s going to be pretty spectacular.”

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Food stations with neighborhood feel

Goldenvoice also is creating a little neighborhood for many of its food stations and merchandise shops. They’re building a boardwalk in the Terrace, just east of the Ferris wheel, in which many of the fine cuisine vendors that were positioned in the VIP area last year will be placed in semi-permanent stalls. The boardwalk will have a mid-century modern look with decks, a record store and 1950s supermarket-type facades with blade-like signs advertising each vendor.

The price range for the food on the boardwalk will generally be $7 to $15, but Adler said the vendors will feature high end chefs stepping out of their comfort zones.

“The big chefs are now coming to try out new concepts,” said Adler, in his fourth year as the Coachella food curator. “That was always a goal of mine – to get these chefs that might be used to their four walls and confined space to bring us new ideas and try them out. So, someone like Ricardo Zarate (owner of Rosaliné restaurant on Melrose), who is a very well-known chef – Peruvian – he’s doing a concept called Mamacita and it’s Peruvian burritos. He’s not known to do that. He’s known to be doing fine dining Peruvian food.”

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Coachella has generated a lot of attention the past couple years for its high-priced Outstanding in the Field dinner prepared by top chefs from around the country. They’re presenting that $225-a-person dinner during prime times for watching some of the more popular bands, at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. daily.

But Adler wanted to create a new tier to make fine dining a general admission experience, too. He said chefs have discovered that many of their customers are people who like a variety of food experiences.

“We really try to do these tiers,” said Adler. “Maybe one day all you’ll want is a spicy pie and regular street tacos. Then the next day that same person has dinner with friends in Outstanding in the Field. People are interacting with the food differently day-to-day. Friday they don’t eat as much. They come in a little later, they’re excited for the show. On Saturday, we see people going for a little bit more of that experience.”

That all-access experience is likely to include more presentation by the chefs.

“What’s happened with food is, it’s become accessible, whether it’s through a phone or Instagram,” Adler said. “Six years ago, there were these restaurants for people that liked gourmet food and that was untouchable. Now, they have access to it and not all of it has to be expensive. Like this guy Alvin (Cailan) from Eggslut. It’s one of the highest-end restaurants in L.A. He’s doing raclette, which is this large wheel of Swiss cheese. They cut those in half and they have this crazy type of electric heating source. They hold the cheese over this heat source until it starts to bubble on a wheel. Then they take a large knife and have tater tots or potatoes and they scrape the cheese, oozing off, right onto the potatoes. So, there’s a visual to it. And we know people are going to take pictures of the food. It’s definitely known in the chef community that the way to get their food out is for people to take pictures of it and tell other people.”

Adler thinks this will be the year food takes its place as an equal component with music and art.

“This is the first year that, the morning of the poster (unveiling), I had phone calls and texts from chefs,” said Adler. “So, it seems like we’ve turned a corner with the food program. Integrating food, it takes a little bit of time - to foster this chef community.”

Finally, a tent for the rockers

Tollett also is adding a tent for a kind of music that Goldenvoice has always promoted, even though it has never ascended to the pop heights of EDM, hip-hop or classic rock. A new Sonora tent – near the Ferris wheel and the Antarctica – will feature punk, indie and garage rock by mostly emerging bands, including Spanish-language artists.

Rene Contreras, promoter of an event called Viva Pomona, has book acts including some established bands, such as TSOL and Guided By Voices, and some interesting up-and-comers, such as Show Me the Body, Caveman, Los Blenders and Diamanté Electrico.

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“He’s in his early 20s,” Tollett said of Contreras. “He just started going to shows at maybe 14 at the Glass House (a Goldenvoice nightclub in Pomona) and started promoting shows right after that. He’s always hanging around these different bands – a lot of them are from Mexico, singing in Spanish. I thought, ‘If you want those kind of artists, maybe it shouldn’t be me who books it. Maybe it should be somebody who is friends with all of them.’

“I love the direction he’s on. Rarely would I tell someone, here’s the keys, book anything you want. But, knowing Rene, that’s what I was able to do.”

Tollett, 51, isn’t ready to stop programming youth-oriented music. In fact, Coachella's lineup is so noticeably youth-oriented, some media pundits have wondered if he’s saving the older acts for a second Desert Trip festival in the fall.

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Tollett won’t discuss whether there will or won’t be another Desert Trip, but he does acknowledge that this Coachella lineup seems to skew younger.

“I don’t know if it’s a concerted effort, but there’s a lot of newer stuff this year for sure,” he said. Cutting edge. It’s a pretty fun lineup. A lot of hip-hop this year. It’s what a lot of people are listening to right now.”

The lineup also features the big-sounding, 19-year-old indie-pop singer Grace Mitchell and numerous acts Tollett has nurtured over the years, such as Grouplove, Future Islands and Local Natives.

“So many of them that started off smaller here and we just had so much fun with them, we’ve promoted a lot of their shows in L.A. and Southern California,” said Tollett. “Two Door Cinema Club, Father John Misty, Empire in the Sun, Dillon Francis. Even xx. A lot of them started in a tent early in the day. When I’m doing the scheduling and someone thinks ‘We’re playing too early’ their first time in, we’re thinking, ‘It’s probably not going to be your last time here. So, it’s OK. Hit this one right now.'”

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The bill also includes some older bands that can’t be easily categorized. King Sunnyade of Nigeria had to withdraw from the festival because he had trouble traveling out of Africa, Tollett said, but 75-year-old funk master, George Clinton, who appeared on headliner Kendrick Lamar’s "To Pimp A Butterfuly" album and has since done other collaborations with the hip-hop star, was just added to the Heineken tent.

The lineup also includes such eclectic veterans as reggae pioneers Toots and the Maytals, Oscar-winning composer-pianist Hans Zimmer, and trad jazz legends, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

“We have a home for you if you can’t be categorized,” Tollett joked. “We’ve got a spot for you.”

Coachella started as an alternative fest for artists that didn’t fit neatly into radio formats and, even though it has grown from a niche to an all-encompassing destination festival, Tollett said Coachella’s programming will never be influenced by other events, including the 10 festivals Goldenvoice produces across the country, from Panorama in New York to Desert Trip.

“Coachella will never change its booking based on what other festivals we may or may not be doing,” he said. “Coachella needs to be what it is. If other things pop up, competitors or us, Coachella is not going to change based on that. Coachella may change based on what it wants to book in general, but it’s not necessarily because of the other festivals that we do.”