After being championed by Mayor Eric Garcetti this spring, the inaugural Made In America music festival took over Grand Park and surrounding streets this Labor Day weekend, attracting some 34,000 people on Saturday and 37,000 people on Sunday to downtown L.A. With entrances on Temple and 2nd Streets, the Marilyn main stage was situated facing […]
As the production mastermind behind The xx, Jamie Smith, better known as Jamie xx, has expanded his production skills beyond simply the band in the last few years. He has remixed songs from Adele, Holly Miranda, and Radiohead, to name a few, as well as 2011’s “We’re New Here,” a remix album featuring re-worked tracks […]
U.K. artist Kevin Martin has been involved in a multitude of projects over the last 2 1/2 decades, including GOD, Ice, and King Midas Sound. Under the moniker The Bug, he has released three albums that fuse dancehall, grime and hip-hop into a dubstep-reggae sound. Now based in Berlin, he is set to release his […]
The audience simmered with excitement just before show time at the heavily anticipated, one-off Death From Above 1979 show at the Troubadour on Thursday night. A Steadicam operator tightened the stabilization rig of his camera on stage right. An assistant ran cable. Attendants lined the back staircase. Hooting and hollering peppered the landscape as the […]
Through a shroud of darkness and smoke, Tahliah Barnett strode on stage at the El Rey on Tuesday night in a hip white Princess Jasmine-esque jumpsuit, focused and poised like an artist beyond her years, and the crowd reacted with applause and enthusiasm. A former backup dancer from the U.K., she became known as Twigs […]
The Baltimore duo Silk Rhodes, composed of vocalist Sasha Desree and producer Michael Collins, recently signed to Stones Throw Records, who just released their debut 7-inch this week. Its single “Pains” is a dusty slow-burner, a nuanced mellow groove with a lumbering bass line, orchestral swells and some vintage ’70s guitar twang. The B-side, “Face […]
Buena Park artist Gabriel Brenner began making music in late 2013 under the name Pastel, drawing influence from the Polynesian rhythms, classic soul singers, and the ’90s R&B of his childhood – and the result is some soulful “Alt&B,” full of brooding melodies and bustling production, and lyrics about more than heartbreak and relationships, also […]
Shines, neé Los Angeles-based artist Jafar Jahanshahi, just released his self-titled debut EP, a six-track experimental project, on the Brooklyn/L.A. label Color Station. With an uncle in the hardcore punk band the Vandals, and a family of Bohemian musicians, the L.A.-reared Jahanshahi’s influences are diverse, and so is his work, often genre-hopping and morphing within […]
The dynamic duo of Ishmael Butler, aka Palaceer Lazaro, and Tendai Maraire brought their avant-garde rap project Shabazz Palaces to the Roxy on Wednesday night, a day after the release of their sophomore album “Lese Majesty” on Sub Pop. The diverse audience was much fuller and more engaged than Palaces’ tragically sparse show at the […]
The Seattle-based experimental hip-hop group Shabazz Palaces, led by Palacer Lazaro, neé Ismael Butler, formerly Butterfly of the jazz-rap Digable Planets, released a pair of seven-track EPs in 2009 before signing to Sub Pop Records. After their 2011 debut album “Black Up,” they’re back with sophomore effort “Lese Majesty,” out next week, and it’s one […]
