Nico Stojan - Robot Heart - Burning Man 2025

Description

Nico’s set from the journey to the Man, and as the Man began to burn. To accompany it, we asked his dear friend Gordon to share a memory that captures the spirit of who Nico was, and why Burning Man meant so much to him. We hope you’ll take a few moments to read Gordon’s words, then press play. In Gordon’s words: Kamikaze Copilot Forest fires choked the West, and the air was so thick with smoke that most people wouldn’t have stepped outside for an hour, let alone volunteered to live in it for more than a week. But there we were. Burning Man was officially canceled, but the Renegade Burn was on: unforgiving, radically self-reliant, and we were all in. It wasn’t Nico’s first Burn, but coming from Europe made the self-reliance harder. I’d taken our dear friend Phillip Forever Jung to his first Burn in 2012, so Nico knew he was in good hands. We were seasoned enough to believe we could handle almost anything. We had a truck, our fully loaded trailer, the Prowler. We were all in. There was no turning back. We drove onto the playa at night, which wasn’t the plan and is never ideal, but there we were, and almost immediately got pulled over by a police K-9 unit. The officer asked me to step out because my tags appeared expired. I calmly and eloquently navigated a moment steeped in gravity, at the very brink of consequence. Nico, meanwhile, noticed the dog being held inside the police car. “Oh, canine!” he said to the officer, delighted. “What kind of dog is it?” Coming from Europe, Nico had no idea what “K-9” printed on a police car really meant, or that his innocent question might prompt the officer to bring the dog out. And somehow, we emerged unscathed. Nico looked at the same scene and found something delightful. That was Nico. The smoke pressed down on the desert. Heat, dust, and exhaustion slowly battered us. Then the air-conditioning in the Prowler died. But we had our overkill-level air purifier, and we handled it. Nico never surrendered to misery. He filled the generator, helped keep our strange little desert vessel alive, and turned adversity into part of the adventure. That was Nico’s beautiful contradiction: somehow both tender and resilient, a delicate flower with roots strong enough to endure the harshest ground. He had one of the most refined sensibilities of anyone I have ever known. He pursued the finest expression of even the smallest things: exceptional food, beautiful music, remarkable people, thoughtful fashion, the highest-quality supplements, and better ways to care for himself and everyone around him. He understood that life is shaped by thousands of small choices, and he approached each one as though it mattered, because to him, it did. Some nights, we celebrated birthdays with friends over steak, lobster, and extraordinary wine. Other nights, we opened sardines and mussels inside the Prowler. Nico treated both occasions with equal care. In his hands, a tin of “fishees” became an event. He approached music the same way. Thousands of performances had not made him careless. He meticulously prepared inside the Prowler before DJing. Every set still mattered. After seven days, the smoke, heat, dust, and exhaustion had thoroughly beaten us up. Nico wrote on the wall of the Prowler: “Kamikaze Co-pilot.” Two words that captured the whole experience and something essential about Nico. He was a co-pilot to so many of us and was in it with all of us: laughing through the turbulence, refusing to abandon the adventure, and bringing his artistry, curiosity, and care to everyone lucky enough to share in his life That was why Burning Man made sense to Nico. The finest things in life—friendships, food, music, love, family, unforgettable nights—may sometimes find us by chance, but they do not flourish on their own. They must be noticed, cultivated, and sometimes wrestled from chaos. Nico never waited for the good time. He created it My kamikaze co-pilot. That is how I will always remember him.