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Lichluch Baozen
an archive of a Tel Aviv live music night
lichluch-archive.pages.dev
An archive of "Lichluch Baozen", Leon Napoleon Feldman's monthly live night at OzenBar in Tel Aviv, 2008 to 2012: every night with its poster, lineup, credits and the videos shot there, and every band with the nights it played and what the original invitations said about it.
28 nights on the wall, 171 bands and artists, 73 videos from the nights, each one credited
The challenge
An indie live night is documented mostly by what it left behind: posters, invitation texts, videos scattered across YouTube, dead MySpace links. The posters share no visual language at all: yellow spray paint on black, red burlesque, a white periodic table, a Victorian engraving, with aspect ratios ranging from nearly panoramic to A4. An archive like this can easily turn into a stiff museum that kills a night whose whole spirit was crude and joyful.
What I did
- Pulled the material into one graph: 26 numbered nights, from September 29, 2008 to December 31, 2012, following Leon's own canonical list, plus two unnumbered nights with a tag: "Dirt in the Tent" at the 2011 Rothschild protest camp, and "Dirt in the Ass" from 2015 as an appendix. A night that was cancelled and never happened came off the wall. Every numbered night has a poster, and every tile on the wall carries an image.
- Built a band index at build time, with identity merging: an artist who appeared under different names gets one page. A band page shows all of its nights, who it shared the stage with, and what the original invitations said about it. I took the invitation texts off the night pages and spread them across the artist pages, where they actually tell you something.
- Ruled that every image and every video carries a credit, and enforced it in code. The build stops if a single credit is missing, or if a night has more than ten videos. 73 videos from the nights are on the site, each with the name of whoever shot it. A credit is a design component, not a decision left to whoever builds the page.
- Built it with no database: all content is JSON files in the repo, and the indexes and search are generated from them on every build. On top of that, a page for Leon, the man who curated the series, and a page for his closing rap from the last night.
- Took care of archive details: a dead MySpace link is marked as documentation, not as a link. The palette was sampled from the posters themselves, contrast was actually measured, and the site was tested at 375, 768 and 1440 pixels.
The decision that made the difference
The site is a wall, not a poster. Once I saw the posters share no single language, I decided the site's frame stays silent: a masonry wall that respects each poster's original ratio, no cropping to squares, no ornament and no decorative motion. Every movement on the site serves reading and navigation. The reason: any attempt to wrap posters this different in a design of my own would fight them and lose. The real common thread is physical, paper pasted on a bar wall, and everything follows from that.
What AI did, and what stayed with me
- Two AI agents worked on the design in parallel: one on palette and type, the other on screens, flows and motion. The app skeleton was built with an AI site builder, and the build scripts were written with AI too.
The judgment was mine: I was a production assistant on the series, and I decided the site stays quiet and hands the stage to the posters, that a missing credit stops the build, and that a night that never happened does not go on the wall. AI put the frame together fast. What goes into the archive, and how to honor a night I was part of, I decided.
Outcome
- 28 nights on the wall: 26 numbered and two tagged, each with its own page.
- 171 bands and artists, each with a page. 36 of them came back for more than one night.
- 73 videos from the nights, each credited to whoever shot it.
- From night 15 to the last night, and at the tent night, I was a production assistant on the series, and that appears in the credits block of those nights.