Gather ‘round the moonlit path & be cast aglow with us for California Botanic Garden’s annual Luminaria Nights! This is a rare nighttime moment to explore the largest garden devoted to the preservation, cultivation, and communal education of California Native Plants so make sure to keep an eye out for those datura flowers soaking in the moonlight!
Follow your ears through winding paths, majestic oaks, stone snakes, and you’ll find us emanating the warmest of tones from within CBG’s Forest Pavilion. In previous years we’ve invited Celia Hollander, Maylee Todd, and for this year’s nighttime gathering we’ve invited our dear friend David Moses to provide a nearly three hour soundtrack of synth, flute, and EWI featuring artist-vocalist Lani Trock and flautist-naturalist Noah Klein. Amidst this open world environmental music there will hot tea, campfires, and two other musical stages to wander / wonder towards lit by peaceful meandering luminaria.
Keep an eye out in our December newsletters to receive a Living Earth discount code & we’ll see you under the moonlight 🌙
David Moses is a multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and educator based in East Los Angeles. His music practice explores the intersection of experimentation and intuition, moving fluidly through open-source music software (Monome Norns), field recordings, live resampling, electroacoustic processing, and generative composition techniques. Shaped by Los Angeles’s vibrant experimental community—where jazz, ambient, and exploratory music freely overlap—David has become a frequent collaborator within the city’s improvised music scene.
He performs solo and in various ad-hoc ensembles across Los Angeles and alongside his wife, artist Lani Trock, co-leads a community-oriented ensemble project Soft Future. Soft Future’s next performance will be at the Los Angeles Getty Museum in collaboration with musician and Ayurvedic practitioner Shelia Govinda.
Lani Trock is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers in harmonious world-building. In communion with her site-specific, immersive installations, she facilitates group expressions of improvisational sound and movement techniques. Through these public programs, she invites participants to co-create the new earth – an alternative cultural paradigm that seeks to shift away from a capitalist logic of scarcity, commodification, and competition, towards equitable abundance, collaboration, and mutual benefit.
Here lives the central mission of Trock’s practice: to make art that touches spirit, transforms consciousness, and manifests peace and equality on earth.
Noah Klein is a musician, organizer, and certified naturalist born and raised in the Los Angeles Basin. Music is how they (try to) make sense of the world, and move forth each day in the belief that our interdependent arts communities produce meaningful paradigmatic change.
They’ve performed extensively throughout North America & Europe, from the Getty to National Parks to MoMA to the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, have lived in legendary community arts spaces like The Silent Barn in Brooklyn, and currently co-steward this outdoor arts series (Living Earth), tour with Mutual Benefit, and host a seasonal show on dublab.
California Botanic Garden (CBG) is the largest botanic garden dedicated to California native plants, promoting botany, conservation and horticulture to inspire, inform and educate the public and scientific community about California's native flora.
Conservation of rare and endangered species is among the Garden's top priorities, achieved by growing plants in the Living Collection and maintaining an extensive seed bank with long-term storage and facilities for research on seeds.
One of the first botanic gardens to be accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Garden is a living museum with curated collections of more than 22,000 California native plants.
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