Andrew Lojero brings underground parties to your ears with 'From L.A. with Love'
The klieg lights blast a hole in L.A.'s soul. There are so many poseurs, cameras, and facades, it's sometimes hard to determine where the sets end and the real city begins. Like roaches, many denizens of culture scurry into the streets when location crews go home and the lights go out. It's a city where break-beat jazz wafts into the midnight mist and graffiti artists open aerosol windows to a different world. In many ways, this anti-Hollywood, if you will, is the concrete terrain of Andrew Lojero and his ArtDontSleep underground parties.
"What they do in Hollywood, there's a place for it," says 25-year-old Lojero, who grew up in Boyle Heights. "L.A.'s big enough to have that demographic and ours."
His demographic includes indie hip-hoppers, street-art fanatics, and young intellectuals who like to celebrate the city in unique places, such as under the First Street Bridge, where one ArtDontSleep party was recently held. Producers tapped out hip-hop beats on Akai samplers in a nearby basement while nu jazz bands performed in the open air up top, and graffiti artists gave birth to fresh installations. "I feel like each event that I do is really a dream," Lojero says.
He has tried to preserve this vision with ArtDontSleep Presents From L.A. with Love, a compilation of sounds found at the parties, live and via DJ. The disc unfolds as a truly sublime, elegant, and enchanting journey into the land of Southern California down-tempo music. The CD, which comes with a booklet of local artwork, is an understated tour de force, perhaps even ironically cinematic in its dreamy elevation of our cityscape.
From L.A. with Love starts with From Leaf to Feather's positively loungey "Night Sun," which is also the nickname of the 30-million-candlepower spotlights used by LAPD helicopters. The late DJ Dusk's voice lives on in a spoken word interlude called "Let Me Know." Nathan Yell's "Goodbye," driven by a bottomless bass kick and a commanding male voice, is harrowing. Exile's "In the Night 22," is psychedelically disorienting in its modern, sampladelic use of doo-wop, coming off like a digital rewind of Whittier Boulevard's cruising heyday. Carlos Nino and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's "Nag Champa" is propelled by strings and woodwind and is reminiscent of Bill Lee's scores for son Spike. All of the music, however, is thoroughly modern and mostly digitally produced, offering unique time stamps, stutters, and glitches that say ArtDontSleep is not an attempt to relive the Brass parties, King King events, or Project Blow'd showcases of L.A.'s past.
"I have a lot respect for Project Blow'd, and for those Unity Parties before that," Lojero, a sociology student at Cal State L.A., says. "But I feel like we filled a hole. My goal was to bring people together in an environment that elevates their interaction."
His fascination with the city's artistic underground started in 1999 when, as a teenager, he began taking photographs of graffiti art around the city, admiring some of the more prolific spray-can outlaws such as Mear One, who would later do installations for ArtDontSleep. Lojero grew up with strict, Christian parents. But by age 16, he went wild for rave parties, punk rock, and street art. Later, he helped organize parties for a gallery on Melrose, which led the way for his first ArtDontSleep events three years ago. Soon Dusk (who was hit by a car as he left a party last year) and Pablo Like Picasso joined him for hosting duties. In 2006, people from Milan Records came to a party and inquired about signing up some of the talent. Lojero instead sold them on a compilation that would capture ArtDontSleep's array of players, DJs, and visual artists.
"I tried to get what I felt was a good representation of Los Angeles," he says. "These people see my love and passion for the city, and they share that love and passion."
0 comments:
Post a Comment