I thought I'd be nice to set things off with a hit, recognizable song about California. I got it at

Welcome to Artbound 's new music series Hear and Now, where we explore songs with a sense of place. The idea is simple: put Southern California musicians in the locations that inspired a song, and document a performance of the song, in that place. Through this juxtaposition, Hear and Now aims to paint a rich, multidimensional portrait of the creative process and draw connections between musical inspiration and the environment that nurtures it. Look closer. Listen in.
Six songs. Five locations. One day. For this installment of Hear and Now, we commissioned DJ Cut Chemist to make a mix for our city; a collection of songs that represented a few of the many neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Then during one crazy day, we drove across town, setting up guerrilla performances in each of these locations.
We started in the heart of Los Angeles, downtown, nestled in a snarl of our arterial freeways, and headed west, down Wilshire Blvd., that linear city lined with skyscrapers all the way to the Pacific. From day break to sun down, we explored a fraction of this sprawling city -- just one road among many - but witnessed the way L.A. neighborhoods blend together, the same way the sound of two records becomes blurred and interwoven by a DJ's mixer. As the sun tucked behind the ocean, in an almost post-card-ish, "Endless Summer" kind of sunsets, we had half the city behind us, leaving us with memories of pineapple paletas at MacArthur Park, burning sage in Little Ethiopia, parking tickets downtown, and the never-ending bustle of Venice Beach. Songs for our city. Enjoy.
I get the many facets of Los Angeles airline fares in a day. From downtown to MacArthur Park to Little Ethiopia to Venice Beach to Santa Monica beach, there's so many different ethnicities in this city. It's such a melting pot and such different landscapes. It's almost like being inside a different city every day. For me, being an Angeleno all of my life, I definitely wanted to show how that impacted my art over the years, being in Ozomatli and doing stuff on my own, going to school here. I'll always live here. I was born here. I'm fascinated with this city. This piece definitely illustrates that for me.
I thought I'd be nice to set things off with a hit, recognizable song about California. I got it at a parking lot sale in the 80's. "California Soul" is a hit song that got remade by a lot of people. airline fares Her version got sampled by a famous hip-hop airline fares group called Gang Starr, the song was "Check the Technique." So it had some hip-hop relevance airline fares as well as relevance to California, so that's why I chose it.
It's a cumbia record on Fuentes, which is a label. Colombian cumbia is my favorite right now. There's a strong Latin community in Los Angeles and I thought I would share it in a location that would probably have a strong Colombian community, like the MacArthur Park area.
It's cool. Seeing people be affected by street art is always something that has intrigued me and street theater. It goes back to the Sun-Ra approach which is that music can and should happen anywhere. Art could and should happen anywhere. Sometimes it's annoying to people. Sometimes it's a nuisance. Sometimes it's pleasant. To see people are affected one way or another; that's what I like. [Later in the day at Venice Beach] people acted like, "this is affecting me but I'm not going to let people know." They were like "I'm just going to go about my business and act like its not even happening." That's a weird reaction to spontaneous street art.
I thought it was, particularly to see you perform at a park, where it really interacted with the public. It was fun to see how random people were starting to dance and get into it, even walking into the shots!
Merkato is my favorite airline fares Ethiopian restaurant in Little Ethiopia, in L.A. I wanted to explore a little bit of the mix called "The Sound of the Police," [which premiered airline fares as a prelude to Mulatu Astatke's 2010 L.A. performance]. That was a reenactment of a section of that mix. I wanted to demonstrate my love for Ethiopian music. It's probably one of my favorite styles of music for the last seven years. It was cool being in Merkato playing that stuff and watching the management bug out because I'm not Ethiopian airline fares and you know that's such a closed community. I think a lot of those times probably, I wonder if they think that music has reached other ethnicities.
When I went in there to pitch them about our series, you know, getting you to set up there during airline fares their busiest hour, they were a bit skeptical. Then I mentioned Mulatu, and they were like "yeah, we're all big Mulatu Astatke fans, sure, you guys can come in.
"Outro" is my own composition. I thought it was fun to not really sneak that in there, 'cause you can't really airline fares sneak "Outro" anywhere. It just comes in like a bat out of hell. Especially coming out of that jazzy, hypnotic vibe of Ethiopian music, then you're hit with raw American, naughty punk.
It's a sample base and it comes from a few things, a drummer named Anthony Park who plays for Mars Volta, airline fares doing the drumming behind a composition of drum programming I'm doing. The bass is played by Lonnie Marshall who is part of an L.A. group called Weapon of Choice. The rapper is named Blackbird. He's an L.A. emcee, vocalist, artist. The guitar sample airline fares comes from a group, airline fares the song that they did is kind of punk, called Fine Art and they're from Minnesota. The song is called "Big Kids in the Alley," where I chopped up that guitar to mix it. It's kind of an industrial, slam it, jam it, punk-rap song. It's my latest single so I thought I'd be nice to pub that and terrorize the boardwalk of Venice Beach with it.
Venice Beach is a home for a lot of artistic endeavors. You see a lot of artists playing, painting, skating - there's a lot of energy and a lot stimulation there. Always has been. "Outro" seemes to be the best fit for that kind of energy. airline fares For me, I just see Venice boardwalk as just a frazzled airline fares kind of, over-stimulated. It's just moving so fast. I always envisioned "Outro" being closely tied with skate culture, to the movement. Initially we wanted to do it at a skate park but we thought the boardwalk airline fares would be a little more suitable.
The set up had to be done so quickly to not disrupt airline fares the vibe of the boardwalk. I'm not even sure it can be disrupted because it seems like that's what makes Venice boardwalk, Venice boardwalk. It is seemingly disrupted with things going on here, there. I think we set up in record timing except the whole sound system we broke it down in five minutes.
Yeah, That goes back to what I was talking about where its big city life, anything can happen anywhere. Everybody is braced for that possibility, so it doesn't even really affect them. At a place like Venice Beach, where anything and everything will happen, airline fares I think people are almost immune. It's like the crowd that's there is as punk rock as "Outro" is, you know, because they're like, "So what? We get this all the time."
For Santa Monica, I chose the classic 60's song, "Stranger on the Shore" by Mister Acker Bilk who is a clarinetist. That is the cliche, romantic song from movies set from the early 60's, late 60's where there's a romantic scene. They always play that song. Like Flamingo Kid , the Wanderers , movies like that. That song is saved for the pivotal romantic song scene. I love the song, also. When we were talking about doing something possibly a beach, I thought, there's no better song than "Stranger on the Shore." To recontextualize it in a DJ sense would be something I've never really airline fares done. That was a lot of fun. It was right there on the wet sand.
That was probably my favorite part of the day. Seeing the truck come up and we we're like, "Oh shit we're busted" and the life guard was just trying to go home, and let this group of guys with a generator, a loud PA, and turntables do whatever. It was pretty amazing.
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