Connections between cities and music. Cities and Music. Music and Cities. The closest you’re going to get to a Los Angeles native musician is a local musician. Yet, most, if not all local musicians are transplants from other places.

Including us.

Tuesday was a day of outer musical exploration. Surf City has a main street with a weekly block party every Tuesday. The street is lined with fruit vendors, dessert
shops and 40-50% off surf, skate and Rec gear. Where the perpendicular streets meet with Main St. there is a PA system, drum set and multiple amplifiers (or some minimalist variation of this set up). The grid there makes for four simultaneous musical acts from the late afternoon until around 10 O’Clock that play for people as they walk by. Eli, Kory and I were watching a band play, Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones, when Kory recognized two of his friends; Hannah and Cindy. Hannah and Cindy are in a group called, “Hippie Heidi” and they played outside the surf museum at the end of Main St. where they promote a show every Tuesday night. We introduced ourselves and did that thing where you network with people. They offered us a spot in the next week’s line up.

We had two songs.

Fortunately I had been producing like a mad man and already had enough skeletons to begin preparing a concept for this performance. However, I didn’t do much work all weekend: I partied. This seems unproductive but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

So, Wednesday we went into the Hollywood Hills to pick up a friend of Eli’s: Jack. Jack just returned from filming a promotional tour across American college campuses for a Social Media Application called Yik-Yak. If you wonder where all the social media junkies and juggernauts live, hang-out and network: it’s in Los Angeles. They defend their culture rationally but the sheer economic existence of it is maddening: seventeen and eighteen year old kids making tens of thousands of dollars to tweet, to vine, to…be connected. To be liked.

It was on this day that Eli and I toured melrose ave. Everything in the fashion district sounds like traffic. A ghost town of rubber tread drones sans skateboard clicks and sidewalk cracks. No one is walking. It’s too dry. Occasionally an employee is huddled adjacent a shaded wall puffing away insecurity. “Get out of here with your floral suit and bugati and your watering can and your patch of maintained grass and stained glass furniture. People are starving out here!”

He doesn’t say it, he thinks it. You can see his children in his face; the sullen crest of his crashing expression. The gravity of materialism pulls at the faces of these people. Some can afford to pick them up and some cannot. Some work for others mouths and some mouths here only work for themselves. You can’t hear them, though. The bleached streets manufacture goods in silence. This is art. This is avant-garde, Mon Amie. This is the shadow beneath the Hollywood Sign: advertisements plastered across windows of buses and buildings with pinholes for the impoverished eyes to peek out at you between models breasts and reflect sunset blvd like stars in an eery night.

I would paint it if not for the darkness of my own soul that I’d expose.

That night a group of us crashed an expensive hotel where we were invited to party with has-been pop stars and ‘want-to-be’ Egyptian fashion forward adolescents. These people adorn so many falsities it only justifies to speak of them with countless adjectives. We drank their bud-light and ran a muk. We stole three crystal wine glasses.

Back at the surf shack I Dj’d a three hour set from a graveyard catalogue of music whilst sipping tequila out of my free goblet. I haven’t taken to the 1’s and 2’s since I started producing heavily. I played out a few times in downtown Olympia last year but the crowds there are partially apathetic to any music that requires you to dance. Population density affects crowd mentality. If the musicians in LA are not native than something could simply be said of the vastness and density of niche or conformist groups here and what that means for frequency. If frequency is a set amount of times a particular energetic motion occurs over a period of time than a larger frequency implies more energy and vice versa. More energy is more momentum; the more momentum you have the larger object of still energy you can set into motion. With a higher frequency of people existing in a space of time the energy within that space and time is going to be of an equal frequency when these people gather to support something. Low population = low involvement. High population = high involvement. I’m realizing that this is something observable on a personal level. Each person I meet has a much higher resonating momentum than people I have experienced enjoying Olympia. When meeting people vibrating at higher frequencies I feel myself being pulled higher and higher. I can see artistic success in their eyes and genius between the teeth of their smile. Everything you dream of is just within reach here. Vibrate a little faster. Surround yourself with the kinetic energy of those moving in a positive direction and watch as your wings catch the Los Angeles thermal into the sky.

The pot weather is pretty good here, too.

Thankfully because Eli and I took 48 hours after our eventful weekend to write, arrange and rehearse a seven song performance for Cinco De Mayo. We’ll post photos, videos and other miscellaneous content in next weeks post. I recovered my HardDrive from Keaton’s Studio and have attached the song temporarily coined, “Cloud 9” which we wrote, composed and produced during our first week in Los Angeles and performed on May 5th. Next week I will include some more of the finished instrumentals we performed.