He went to school for airplane mechanics and made a move to East Palo Alto in 2012 to live with a girl he met on a Coachella message board. (“I ran into Mark Zuckerberg once, and he wouldn’t let me pet his dog,” he quips.) He was working at a startup that made oil-less generators, and immersed himself in live music and festival culture.
While volunteering at Sonoma County’s psych-rock staple, Huichica Festival, in 2015, Rodell found himself backstage talking to — of all people — Dead Kennedys frontman and SF political jester Jello Biafra.
“We were talking about how Bernie [Sanders] just lost the primary, and Jello was like, ‘I can’t talk about this stuff ’cause the Green Party will be all up on me,’” Rodell recalls. “So he changes the subject and was like, ‘Look at all this lighting stuff!’”
Biafra was referencing the spinning platters adorned with oils, dyes and inks that Mad Alchemy Light Show’s Lance Gordon began making in the ’70s and revived in the late aughts after a decades-long hiatus.
Gordon was inspired by the likes of Ham, McKay and Brotherhood of Light, artists who helped cement the live legacies of the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Allman Brothers Band. These acts were seen as truly psychedelic performers. Today, Mad Alchemy is, by all accounts, the modern day benchmark for psychedelic light shows.
Intrigued, Rodell got Gordon’s card, followed up and was soon working with him as an assistant. He broke up with the girl and dove deeper into his work with Mad Alchemy, including a yearly stint at Desert Daze festival in Joshua Tree, which has grown into the nation’s premier psych music fest. (He’s worked Desert Daze seven times, creating visuals for over 100 artists in the process.) Rodell gleaned much from Gordon, but the pair had a falling out in 2018. They briefly came back together during the pandemic in 2020, and Rodell set off on his own for good in 2021.
“Mad Alchemy is only liquids — it’s beautiful — but I want to do all types of visuals. I’m not trying to copy his stuff,” Rodell says. “I like cam footage and repurposing the footage of the band into art, and it’s mostly improv. The more I have to put thought into something or worry about it, I find myself not having as much fun.”
He learns new techniques online, watching YouTube videos, staying active on forums, always looking for new modes to add to his arsenal. Over the years, he’s worked with bands from all over the world, in all edges of psychedelia, pushing the envelope of the complete experience. Australia’s Surprise Chef, Afro-soul collective Budos Band, New Zealand psych-folk singer Aldous Harding, LA dreamy indie outfit The Marías, Bronx funk legends ESG, Zamrock pioneers Witch, local luminary Shannon Shaw, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and so forth.
Trippy visuals for a new generation
Fast forward to a recent Friday night at The Chapel in San Francisco’s Mission District, and Rodell is erecting scaffolding to mount his enormous, 65-pound projector to do visuals for SF shoegaze band LSD and the Search For God, along with Jjuujjuu and Chokecherry. Jjuujjuu is bringing Rodell to Coachella with them later that weekend. Bandleader Phil Pirrone — who also happens to have founded the Desert Daze festival — knows exactly why Rodell is the artist he wants to accompany the band on music’s biggest stage at Coachella.
“Our show is less about us and more about you,” Pirrone says. “He helps facilitate that. For our kind of band, and for Zach as the kind of projection artist he is, it always feels like it completes the intention of it to be an out-of-body experience.”
