Everything in Gemma Castro‘s new “Quiero Saber de Ti”—the idea, the lyrics, the music, the production and the video—was made as a counterattack against confinement both physical and psychic as she quarantined in her abuela‘s “strict Catholic house” in Guadalajara. Castro’s almost dubby production always sets her songs at a distance—there’s always a feeling of loss and lostness somewhere deep within, and an extra sense of gravity from words left unsaid or sounds unheard. She’s always created her own space, and in some ways quarantine just gave her more possibilities to work with. Her video and song both are about erasing blank spaces with an explosion of self, and about responding to nothingness with your own personal everythingness. (Slight warning: if you still have a job to go to and that job even more hideously oppressive and uptight than most jobs, you may want to save this for later.) Says Castro:

“‘Quiero Saber de Ti’ is for the hopeless romantic left alone in their bedrooms during quarantine. It is for feeling yourself wherever you are and not being afraid of your sexuality. It is about outgrowing cultural stigmas and unlocking yourself. You are never too much.”

“Quiero Saber de Ti” is available today from Castro, and you can listen to her similarly illuminating show “Primera Generación” on dublab here.

This smoldering new track from Spain’s Mohama Saz—out Dec. 11 on L.A.’s iconoclastic Mock label—is a slow-motion spin through several waves of psychedelia and the musical heritage of at several subcontinental cultural regions. Described to us as “Mediterranean Psychedelia,” “Quemar Las Naves” is swimming in the east-meets-west-meets-analog-high-tech sound familiar to fans of Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers and those awesome-but-legally-iffy comps of rare 45s from Turkey, Lebanon, Africa and beyond. There’s a particular mindscape where an endless desert meets a bottomless sea, and where the music is all about negative space and hypnotic rhythm, and that’s where “Quemar Las Naves” walks the tideline at sunset, since light and dark meet here as well. This is the title track from their fourth full-length and U.S. debut, and if people are ever allowed to traverse landscapes as well as mindscapes, maybe we’ll see them in L.A. one day. Pre-order here!

What we wouldn’t give to attend a safe, live concert right now.
The sheer euphoria of connection that only live music can bring. And boy, do we need it more than ever.

One day we will. It will happen. Although not possible right now, our music community is trying it’s best to come together. Echo Park Rising had a great lineup of local bands this past weekend. Photographer Bailey McDaniel caught the Sunday lineup with Chase Petra, Slaughterhouse, Mod Pods, Fart Bart, Skullcrack, and Trap Girl.

While there may not have been a physical audience this year, eleven local bands played for a camera crew at American Barbershop, presented by Bands in a Barbershop and the 6660’s.

You can check out the virtual Echo Park Rising for yourself on September 26th by tuning into www.bandsinabarbershop.com. Whether it’s live streaming or drive in shows, we help the community stay together, somehow. It might not be the connection we desire or need, but let’s stay connected.

Exotica is a bizarre and sometimes uncomfortably … complicated genre-slash-phenomenon, but the sensation of being somewhere else is more than welcome right now, and nobody makes a living room seem like a distant lagoon more than L.A.’s Healing Gems. They make songs that sound like Moon Gas meets Ennio Morricone with happily saturated production dripping with cinematic effects and unpredictable instrumentation, often soundtracking deadpan lyrics about ancient curses, legendary ruins and dreams so real they override waking life. There’s a pulp-y spaghetti western-style affection for misadventure here, too—songs by and for the mysterious strangers at the end of the bar, and for the last dance before last call.

A week from today Healing Gems take a step into another new world when they release Fiesta Pack: their long-awaited vinyl debut, collecting three digital EPs each more lush than the last. “Tijuana Mushroom” is a new version of a song from their 2017 debut—a cheerfully bleak song about how the desert and interpersonal disappointment will persist til the end of time, delivered with lots of “la-la-la”s and the lightfooted agility of proto-exotica standard “Brazil.” Fiesta Pack (mastered by Mikey Young of Total Control) is out a week from today on mango-flavored vinyl on L.A.’s Mock label and you can pre-order—or RSVP?—a copy here.

You already know Ten-Headed Skeleton even if you don’t think you know Ten-Headed Skeleton—that’s the recent alias-slash-identity-reinvention of L.A.’s Michael Nhat, the ferociously independent outsider artist/rapper/producer/and probably more, with recent musical output including the “Suffocate On Honey” 7″ and his earlier full-length Evil Doing. But City of Reptiles is everything Skeleton can do happening at once. It’s the first installment of a black-and-white arthouse horror comedy trilogy, written and directed and produced and scored by the Skeleton with a cast of local musicians and notables. (Including: Henry Mark, Walt Gorecki, Barrie Rose, a Halloween Swim Team reunion!)

Those of you up on your old school conspiracy theories will have already realized the reference to the age old legend (or is it?!) of a lost city of lizard people and their treasure buried deep beneath downtown L.A.. (And those of you who are just finding out? Maybe you’ll tread a bit more carefully from now on.) Reptiles is presented in super-crisp black-and-white—a reversal of noir’s murky aesthetic where things seen or unseen in the clear light of day seem even more uncertain—and follows Skeleton et al through skyscraper canyons and surface streets that run all the way to the horizon in search of the truth about the legend of the lizard people.

In contrast to these almost elegant scenes of the city: the smash-cut dialogue and Burroughs-style cut-up of a plot, where abject flashes of surrealism are delivered point-blank and straight-faced and the best jokes happen when nobody cracks a smile. The MacGuffin here is a swathe of disembodied human skin that flutters through the fringes of the film and occasionally smacking somebody in the face—proof of … something, if you can catch it. Skeleton cautions us that this isn’t exactly a Judd Apatow production—instead it lands closer to the most esoteric moments on Key & Peele or Kids In The Hall. Highly recommended for your quarantine watching pleasure.

Says Skeleton: “I’m a huge horror fan, but in the history of my catalog, I didn’t see a better genre for my first film than comedy. I’ve been writing comedy since 1997. I always wanted to make films. I was coerced into music. Music was and still is a hobby to me. I went to school for film but my friends who had studios convinced me I’m that really good basketball player in the sports movie that won’t play, then at the end says fuck it and joins. That’s why I put film on hold for music in my 20s and 30s. In 2001, I told myself, ‘I’m only doing music until I’m 40.’ And now that I’m at that point, I’m simply following a plan I set up in 2001.”

Sometimes listening to a song is like walking in on someone in the bathroom. It feels too intimate—something for an audience of one. That’s the energy of every song on Yung Student Loans‘ new album, I Stay Lonely (A True Romance), but never more present than on “GMSIL (Get My Life),” a slow-burn somber-trap jam for hard hearts.

Loans is serving production for your nerve in this video: glitzy RED-camera lookin shots that pull back to reveal a production team making it all happen. The emperor has no clothes, but like, in a cheeky way. His lyrics are curious: he’s spilling his guts, but thinks it’s falling on deaf ears. Which begs the question, whoms’t is he really trying to convince? This plays out in a series of shots of him talking to a woman who won’t look up from her texts, her non-response barely phasing him. But then: ‘I’m not answering calls, I’m not answering texts / I keep dipping and dodging, hanging out with my old shit.’ Hypocrite trap anthem!

Cannot stress enough how gorgeous this video is, and how despondent Loans sounds on the track, the takeaway being not everything that glitters is whole. Ain’t that America.

—Tolliver

Jesse Schuster is the kind of musician who moves in every direction at once—he performs, he produces, he makes sure the video is treated just as reverently as the song and when he finds both inspiration and the opportunity, he turns a genre inside out with his project Safe Jazz.

His new single “Good Vibes” is like jazz in schematic—instruments and melodies bisected and disconnected to expose their inner mechanisms and space and clarity enough to see how everything fits together. (And of course sample snippets to remind you what we’re building here: good vibes!) Schuster’s previous L.A. RECORD premiere “Sweet, Juicy and Delicious Strawberries” was awash in its own atmosphere, but “Good Vibes” is a little more light than lush, just like both titles would suggest.

Like L.A.’s new wave of jazz reassemblers (Sams Gendel and Wilkes, and many others) he’s mixing/remixing the experimental and the fundamental. It’s agile and casual at once, a feeling Schuster sought out and amplified after a spin through no-budget slice-of-life YouTube clips and a summer spent in a slo-mo pivot from commercial to conceptual creation. As he explains:

“‘Good Vibes’ starts about two summers ago. I had was still pretty new to L.A. and had just released my first Safe Jazz record Joy, Etc. which I made with some friends from Minneapolis where I’m from. One of the main sounds of that record was sampling old jazz recordings. But that summer I had started to make money on the side composing advertising jingles, which got me thinking I should probably try making some licensable beats for Safe Jazz, but that meant ditching the samples. So I tried faking jazz.

Half the things I would sample would be people’s home videos on YouTube—I love the beauty of the nonchalance so at the time I was making recordings of everything around me. Our friend Jeremy—Velvet Negroni—was crashing on our couch writing his record for 4AD with my roommate Elliott producing. The dialogue that plays throughout ‘Good Vibes’ is from a conversation we had at breakfast one day about spicy foods. Originally I thought the beat could be for him but he thought it was annoying, so I shelved the song!

Months later I was listening to Against All Logic’s first record which starts out with these apocalyptic atmospheric horn sounds, so I had my friend Connor McElwain—who produces a ton of hip hop as Waine—over to try ideas on the trumpet. We spent most of the afternoon fucking around on this house song, but as an afterthought we tried throwing some noodles at ‘Good Vibes.’ It changed everything—he just brought this classiness and pride; and I chopped and smeared his ideas together and it become the centerpiece to the song.”

“Good Vibes”—available here—is the first single from Sigh, which is due out this summer as the debut release on Schuster’s new Pop Can Records label. (“We drink pop in Minnesota,” he explains.) Besides Safe Jazz, Pop Can will be releasing a record by label partner Pat Morrissey’s Ill Peach and an album of protest songs by L.A.-area musicians due out closer to November’s election.

There’s no magic in getting by. You get up, put on the slippers, scramble the eggs, wash the body, call the parents, kiss the cat. You take one step, and then the next. Then Abracadabra—another sunrise. Jerry Paper’s latest album is first an achievement of sound. What an absolutely gorgeous set of recordings—agile grooves and intrepid chord choices in an adventurous funk/retro-pop oeurve, punctuated by sanguine lyrics delivered in a matter-of-factly mellifluous baritone. Focusing on the feeling the record gives you, however, brings even more pleasure. These songs are melancholy—they’re searching for something and they’re sweet. They’re songs no one else could make in a language that begins when the needle drops and ends when the music stops—when you remember the way things are and the way things were and will never be again. But for those fleeting minutes when the record was on, there was magic, and you got by. Now take your pants off in the bubble bath. Jerry Paper’s Abracadabra is out now on Stones Throw. This interview by Tolliver.

I saw an interview where you said you only enjoy ten minutes of the entire recording process. I’m just wondering if that’s changed at all.

Jerry Paper: That definitely changed! I think that was my younger self with this immediacy where it’s just like, ’I have to get it out, I have to get it out!’ I like many different parts of the process. There are definitely some excruciating parts. The actual recording of this record was … really great in a lot of ways. Working with Jake Viator at Stones Throw’s studio was excellent. I had access to a nicer studio than I’ve ever had access to. That definitely influenced my sound in the sense that I used their equipment to record things. Literal sound.

Wolf’s not in the studio like, ‘We need a new snare!’? Smoking a stogie?

Jerry Paper: [laughs] He’ll walk in the studio and be like, ‘Cool, sounds good.’ They don’t have any creative input, which is really cool. I like that. I feel like a lot of labels have suggestions, so I like that they just kind of let me do my thing. I have a lot of friends who are dealing with labels and the labels are always sending like … suggestions for songs. I’ve never gotten an email from Stones Throw with suggestions about the music. But I also felt it was just a very new process working in the studio by myself. Or just me and an engineer. There were just a lot of emotional and psychological things that came up: my own inadequacy, my self-doubt, all those kinds of things. That gets really intense. Especially with this last record, I just changed the words that I used when I thought about it. Like ‘I’m gonna work on music’—I changed that to ‘I’m gonna play music.’ Which is like a super-simple thing, but it made a huge difference for me, and made a huge difference in how I approached the music. I was just like, ‘If I’m not having fun when I’m writing a song, then it’s not good.’ Because I’m never gonna be able to listen to this music. Listening to the music is for other people, so this is how I derive my fulfillment from it. Everyone else can make their meaning from whatever I did. I never get to have the experience that other people have with it. For me I will always hear flaws, I will always zero in on the things I wish I’d done differently. I just started to refocus what’s fulfilling and what feels good and what’s fun about it. So now I have fun when I’m making it. And I feel like I have more fun with lyrics now, too.

In what way? Are they more abstract?

Jerry Paper: I feel like they’re less abstract—or less direct. I have a lot of fun with details and with kind of creating an image in my mind and then only sharing a part of the image. Because I can’t write a full story, but I’ll write a story in mind and then I’ll pick out the details that I find to be interesting, and put them together into a song. So then everyone else probably makes a different story in their mind. To me it means a very specific thing … but also it doesn’t matter what it means to me. So much of music enjoyment—especially lyric enjoyment—is projection. I don’t know for sure—I might be correct about this lyric, but I’m pretty sure I’m wrong about this lyric, but I never want to learn the right one, because I love it so much—but do you know the Prince song ‘Ballad of Dorothy Parker?’

I don’t know the words.

Jerry Paper: There’s one line where I think he says ‘I took another bubble bath with my pants on.’ That is the lyric to me. I never wanna know what it is if that’s not it. But like … it means so much to me. I feel like people probably have that sort of experience with all music.

There’s a very clear image you get of this person. Prince could’ve spent an entire album talking about ‘he likes to go to the Texaco, and he drinks Coca Cola.’ He could’ve done this whole thing. But really—the bubble bath got me. That’s it.

Jerry Paper: Yeah [laughs].

The opening lyric on ‘Memorial Highway’ is one of my favorites ever.

Jerry Paper: I had that lyric kicking around my head for years, and I’ve tried to write that song for years and it never came out the way I wanted it to. I was touring more and it finally sunk in what the memorial highway was. I always liked the idea of the memorial highway. I feel like it’s always for someone you don’t know. It’s almost never a recognizable name. You’re definitely not remembered—you’re just a name on a thing. But I dunno … doing a lot of touring, driving across country, bird shit and bug smashed windshields looking out into the world … It all came together for me and I was finally able to write this song that had been brewing in me for years. Production-wise I just wanted to make a groovy little sound, play a little Rhodes. I got this guy Logan Hone, who’s an amazing musician, to play flute on it. That song is very special to me. I’m very happy that’s gonna be out in the world. Logan played with me live for a little bit, but it’s too complicated to have that many people in the band for me right now. I really try to pay everyone as well as I can, and the more people the less I could do that.

It’s obviously really shitty that your tour is cancelled. Where were you looking forward to going most?

Jerry Paper: We were going to do a lot. I dunno, I like most places. I have a pretty good time most places.

You know what place sucks? Seattle.

Jerry Paper: It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge, but that being said … the shows that I’ve played there, the people are incredibly cool. It’s one of the few places where people will bring their 7-year-old daughter who loves my music. I love that shit. That’s fun. It wasn’t just all like, cool people. It was a real grab bag of people. Which is legit. I will say, I am biased towards any city that has really good Vietnamese food. So it’s not so bad in my book. Really good Vietnamese food there.

‘Puppeteer’ is my favorite song on this fantastic album. I actually hadn’t checked out the video till this morning. And then I saw you’d worked with [director] Steve Smith before. What can you tell me about the production of that video?

Jerry Paper: Oh, the production of that video? That video took a week to make [laughs]. He’s working on another video for me right now that’s taken like a couple months. It’s really intense CGI. Basically Stones Throw emailed us like, ‘Hey, can you give us an image so we can post the song on YouTube?’ Initially Steve was like, ‘What?’ Like, ‘I dunno.’ We’re stuck inside, so he was just like, ‘Actually it might be fun to make like, a really shitty-looking video for like, a week. do the best we can and that’s it.’

You met Steve through Jay Weingarten, right? Jay’s one of my favorite comics.

Jerry Paper: I’d been working with Cole Kush—we’d been friends for years—and when I was moving to L.A. he was like, ‘You should meet my friend Jay Weingarten.’ Jay lived around the corner from Steve, and I was like, ‘Well, let’s get dinner.’ He invited Steve, and we’ve been friends since.

Some of your art is at least adjacent to the comedy community—are you ever gonna get up and do a Hot 5?

Jerry Paper: I attempted to do comedy once, and it was a failure. It was a show I did with Jay and Steve. We did something called ‘Jay Date’ at Cinefamily a few years ago. Of course … cancelled. I was supposed to do something more than just sit on stage and laugh and that’s all I did. I think I just like to laugh so much that I can’t keep a straight face.

You talked about feelings of inadequacy coming up when you’re recording. I’ve struggled with that in quarantine—feeling like I have to keep proving myself. But my perception is that this has actually been relaxing for you.

Jerry Paper: Umm—no. [laughs] I wouldn’t call it relaxing. I could talk for hours about what this experience has been like for me just cuz it’s been so many things. In certain ways it’s been really freeing. I’m only just starting to understand this about myself, but I have so much … It’s interesting, because this does not translate to the stage. On stage I feel extremely free. There are many areas in my life where I feel very free, and there are many areas of my life where I don’t feel very free, and I feel very much trapped by expectations—expectations from within myself and from society as a whole. I feel like I’m kind of looking at that under a microscope right now as I have almost no social interactions, and I start to see my free self and I start to see how I want to take that out with me into the world. So that has actually been a super intense process that I’m only right in the middle of. Being onstage is such an outlet for this free side of myself—where I can dress however I want, move however I want. I don’t know why. I just feel so not judged when I’m onstage the way I do when I’m in the real world. But I’m starting to see how I need that outlet for myself in my life, and that has been super intense. I mean there’s been many days of non-stop sobbing, there’s been like … all sorts of shit. Maybe one of the biggest things that’s coming out of this—extremely related to this idea of wanting to be free in my normal life, and feeling a loss for what I get out of live performance—is I’m starting to realize how much dancing means to me, and how important and how fulfilling it is to fully let go and just lose yourself in music. For me, dancing is the fullest way for me to lose myself in music. Sitting and listening doesn’t give me the kind of deep fulfillment as kind of fucking moving and letting loose and fully engaging with the music and the rhythm. I just feel like I’m having a revelation about dance right now. So.

I didn’t even realize that was like, an option to do at my house, y’know? To dance. I like to go to Motown On Mondays and stuff like that—I like to dance in front of people. But I haven’t danced at all in my house.

Jerry Paper: Oh my God, you find the perfect ratio of drunk and high and good music—just stand in front of your stereo and just fucking like, go. It’s like the most fun. I don’t know why, it sounds so ridiculous. I feel so alive. And that is a really wonderful thing. I don’t do it every night, but maybe a few nights a week, I’ll spend a half hour to an hour of listening to music and dancing, and it feels amazing. Give it a try.

How are your cats dealing with quarantine?

Jerry Paper: Um … pretty good. This guy seems real happy.

He really does. Are they indoor or outdoor cats?

Jerry Paper: Indoor. I feel like I’d be freaking out more if they were indoor/outdoor cuz they’d just be like, getting pet by random people and coming in my house.

I didn’t even think about that. I’ve been taking in a lot of content right now, people putting out music videos and stuff like that. Have you seen anything that’s really excited you? Beat battles?

Jerry Paper: Have you heard of the show ‘Dress Up Gang?’ Steve edited the show. I guess TBS ordered a full season of it a few years ago. Then they made the whole season and TBS said ‘We don’t wanna put this out.’ And they just put it on streaming services a week ago. So I’ve been watching that—it’s extremely good.

Have you felt any pressure to stay in people’s faces? To make content constantly?

Jerry Paper: Yeah. I’ve been trying to use social media more, which is something that I usually avoid, because it usually makes me very sad. I find it to be deeply unfulfilling. I guess my appetite for pleasure is simpler now, so it’s kind of working for me. I obviously can’t put out more music cuz I spent a couple years making an album and it’s coming out and I’m just hoping people listen to it. I’ve definitely been trying to work on those Eternal TV shows and … I don’t know. I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself.

I have friends who feel like they have to constantly be going live, doing this and that. It’s already stressful enough out here. I’m a musician, too. And I’ve done nothing. I’ve done no lives. I’ve just talked to other musicians like this.

Jerry Paper: I mean—that’s pretty good.

Because people are always talking about Tik Tok, I figured I’d check and see if there was a Jerry Paper Tik Tok. Sadly there wasn’t.

Jerry Paper: No.

If you wanna see teens who are really fucking with Jerry Paper, you gotta get on Tik Tok, I’m telling you. There’s this girl on there who recreates your album cover with the egg … she like, freezes or some shit. It’s cool. Do you ever feel pressure to get on shit like Tik Tok or follow trends that pop up in the music industry?

Jerry Paper: I think that my personal struggles with social media have been intense enough that I don’t want to add another service. That’s kind of why I don’t wanna get on Tik Tok. But also I feel like I always resist the new social media thing for a couple years till it establishes dominance and then I’m ‘OK, I guess I’ll get one.’ Like I feel like I didn’t have an Instagram for a while.

You know what was really sick? Vine. Vine was good. Vine had some truly weird shit on there. Maybe go back to the graveyard and find that one. What you do strikes me a little bit like drag, because you’re putting on a bit of a persona as a means of navigating the world. Have you ever gotten into drag shows or anything like that?

Jerry Paper: Y’know, I’ve never been. I want to! They seem SO fun.

Whaaat? You know there’s a whole primer you can check out with RuPaul’s Drag Race. You have all the time in the world right now.

Jerry Paper: I know. I’m not that good at watching TV, that’s my problem. Like most of my TV watching I do with my wife. It’s hard for me to watch things by myself. Recently the only thing I’ve watched by myself is Star Trek.

Ok, word. But like which Star Trek?

Jerry Paper: I am halfway through Season 7 of Deep Space Nine right now.

I never did Deep Space Nine. I was a TNG person—I’ve seen all of it. With my mom.

Jerry Paper: I watched all of TNG over the last year. I did that and then all of my real Trek head friends told me that Deep Space Nine is the best one. So I was like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a shot.’ And like, the first couple seasons … most of the episodes are bad. But by season 7 it’s one of the best shows. It’s amazing. So good. It’s secretly the best one. Everyone I know who is a deep sci-fi head is like, ‘Deep Space Nine is incredible cuz it has more long-running story arcs.’ Next Gen is monster of the week, it’s like boom-boom-boom. [Deep Space Nine] is like … you really get into the characters. There’s an arc that basically goes across the last four seasons that is so good! You should give it a shot.

JERRY PAPER’S ABRACADABRA IS OUT NOW ON STONES THROW. VISIT JERRY PAPER AT JERRYPAPER.GURU.

As Lionmilk, Moki Kawaguchi creates lush and flowing jazz compositions juxtaposed against gritty textures and raw rap beats. He first made waves as a member of the L.A. beat scene’s progressive jazz combo the Breathing Effect, but now with his solo work Kawaguchi is sketching his own musical world. In Los Angeles, hip-hop and jazz often exist side by side but Kawaguchi melds them into one. He’s inverting the hip-hop tradition of sampling jazz by playing licks and beats by hand and spinning them into collages of his own creation. Kawaguchi sat down with L.A. RECORD to discuss his journey through music from student to teacher, and his recent release Visions in Paraíso for Leaving Records. His This Too Shall Pass album is available now. This interview by Joe Rihn.

Could you tell me a bit about your early experiences with music and how first you first got interested as a musician and as a listener?

Moki Kawaguchi: I started off classical. My mother wanted my brother and I to play music and just to be musically inclined because she always liked music and never learned. And my dad kind of knew trombone a little bit—he knew one J.J. Johnson song he liked to play all the time. My mom was just very adamant about me practicing all the time and playing piano, but I didn’t really like it because of how limiting classical music is. I did it because I had to do it. I was also going through some family shit at that time, and it just felt like music was really helping me not think about that dark shit. I was like, ‘At least doing this will keep me busy from all that shit.’ But then at some point in my youth, I decided I wanted to be a musician because it was a way to get my feelings out. I really wanted to pursue music—like composition and writing music. When I was a young kid—like 12 or something—I liked listening to TV show themes and all kinds of music. Plus my dad listened to a lot of funk and jazz, soul and Brazilian music. I was listening to a lot of Gorillaz and punk music and metal music. Just like … anything. And I really wanted to write music, but I didn’t know how to do it in a more improvisational way. I just knew how to play notes—you know like, write out notes. I was doing it that way for a minute. Then I found out that my high school had a really good jazz program, so I started learning how to play jazz music on my own.

What school was that?

Moki Kawaguchi: LACHSA. [Los Angeles County High School for the Arts] I went in for classical music, but they had a really good jazz program. I made it in after a lot of learning shit on my own. It was really competitive. Their program is like the equivalent of a college program. When I went to college, I already knew a lot of the shit they were teaching. That was interesting because I wasn’t really thinking about college or anything—I just wanted to learn. The teachers at LACHSA were really informative. They taught me a lot. They were really adamant too, and really strict. It helped in all those ways.

In high school when you started playing jazz, were you already listening to jazz and other older forms of music?

Moki Kawaguchi: Oh yeah, I loved that shit.

But it sounds like you had pretty wide-ranging tastes too.

Moki Kawaguchi: Yeah, I was really into hip-hop music. Snoop Dogg and all the West Coast shit. I always heard West Coast music on the radio. I remember my mom would drive us around and I just always heard a lot of good music on 94.7 The Wave and 93 KDAY. 

Do you feel your music still has that L.A. influence?

Moki Kawaguchi: Definitely. It’s never going to go away. This is my home. I used to live in New York for five years— I was at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. When I was out there I felt like I was always repping L.A.

When did you start making your own recordings?

Moki Kawaguchi: High school. My high school had a computer that had Logic, so I used to fuck around on that. And my brother had a computer with Logic, too. 

Is that how you learned how to produce? You self-produced your latest record, right?

Moki Kawaguchi: All the stuff I’ve released I did on my own. I learned a lot from watching my brother make stuff—just fucking around really. And YouTube videos and asking friends. I see production as a whole ‘nother piece of paper, you know? It’s like an orchestra piece. You can write everything out, but everything is just by itself—drums or this and that. It usually comes with an image or feeling, and I’m like, ‘How can I express this emotion? How can I express this image that I have in my head?’ I would see like … a giant waterfall. Or a vast ocean. How could I make that? Ableton has so many things I could use. I’ve listened to a bunch of music that inspired me. But when you’re creating something that’s you, it’s coming from a different angle. I come at it very emotionally. I was using music as a way to heal myself for a while. 

It seems like there’s a renewed interest in jazz and music that is maybe adjacent to jazz here in L.A. Why do you think jazz has that kind of longevity?

Moki Kawaguchi: I think it’s the fact that jazz is so broad. It has influence in all of popular music. The idea of improvisation really widens the spectrum of what’s possible. What is jazz? Jazz is funk. Jazz is hip-hop. Jazz is soul music. It’s stemming into all those things. It’s just making a full circle, really. 

Do you consider yourself part of that tradition?

Moki Kawaguchi: I think so. For a while, I was very motivated to be a jazz pianist and pursue a career just playing jazz music. But then, it didn’t grow fond to me … in the sense that the established jazz world is not somewhere I want to be. I’m more open to different kinds of things, and some people aren’t.

You were putting on a night, right? 

Moki Kawaguchi: Yeah—‘OTS,’ for ‘On The Spot.’ The whole concept is improvisation. And not in the sense of a jam—it’s not really like that. It’s very much like free-flowing composition. Like with my band, we exercise a lot of freedom with each other. And when we play at OTS, we’re making everything on the spot. So we’ll have a concept … like tonight we’re all feeling a little anxious. Then we’ll play some kind of anxious piece. It’s like a 45-minute long piece mixed with other tracks that I made or we made together. And that’s the other thing. When artists come to play, I ask them to do a set that they’ve never tried before. Don’t do your usual set—do something out of the box. And it’s usually been very cool.

You play with a band live, but your releases as Lionmilk are pretty much solo records. Are you filling in the parts that would come from other band members with samples?

Moki Kawaguchi: It’s mostly me playing. But whenever I make music, I don’t think of it as just me. I feel like all of the instruments in a piece are different musicians. 

That’s interesting—to me as a listener, it has a very sampled vibe. The different parts just seem to fit together that way. 

Moki Kawaguchi: People think it’s samples, but nope! I mean, there are some songs that have samples, but it’s mostly just talking. Not so much the harmonic stuff. 

Let’s talk about Visions in Paraíso. Can you tell me about the title?

Moki Kawaguchi: Visions in Paraíso—so on this album I’m remembering a time when I was kind of in paradise. I went to Brazil and felt very at home there. I took all these photos—that’s what became the cover. My friend Tommy Sugimoto did a collage of all the pictures I took. It was a time when I was very open to a lot of experiences, and any kind of musical thing. I was just soaking up anything. It just felt like a moment when I was very… cuz Depths of Madness is about a time when I was very paranoid and kind of like … fucked in the head. I went a little off in my head. But this time was a very open time, which the music reflects. I realized I’ve always been surrounded by some kind of Brazilian music. My father used to listen to a lot of samba and a lot of Latin music on the radio, and I was always listening to bossa nova music. And then when I went to Brazil and I heard all that music, it just made sense.

When you have an idea for a track how does it usually start?

Moki Kawaguchi: An emotion. It just comes, I guess. I’ll just be walking around and I’ll be feeling some way. And then maybe a drum rhythm will start in my head and I’ll record that. If I still feel like that, I keep on making it and it becomes something. 

Is your latest album based on that improvisational approach?

Moki Kawaguchi: Definitely. I think most of how I approach music is improvisation. I don’t really brood on a lot of things … I do brood. [laughs] But most of the song chunks are improvised, usually. In the moment I feel this way so I express it. 

I like the immediacy of it. It just dives right in…

Moki Kawaguchi: That was the concept of this album, I think. It wasn’t supposed to be so … thick. I wanted this album to be fun.

Do you feel that being a music teacher and spending time around music in that way impacts how you go about making music?

Moki Kawaguchi: Yeah—it’s always interesting to see how my students think and how they put together things. And how I have a relationship with how they work. So it’s always interesting to me to see what the students do and how they think, and how they like things and don’t like things. Sometimes the less you know about something, the more it sounds amazing because you don’t know what it is. So yeah­­—it makes me happy when I see that.

VISIT LIONMILK AT LIONMILK.BANDCAMP.COM.

L.A.’s Harmless (Nacho Cano) has a lot of raw experience finding creativity within adversity—within agony, really, as he painstakingly put together January’s Condiciones EP in the aftermath of an especially brutal car accident. (“I started recording many of the songs while I couldn’t use my legs. I waited to record most of the vocals because I had lost my front teeth,” he told Remezcla.) His latest “Notice Me” (like so many new songs) is an invention born from the tension of quarantine and the sudden solitude that demands its own kind of relearning. The pain here thankfully isn’t nearly as literal, but “Notice Me” is still a response to realizing the future you thought you’d have has been indefinitely postponed. Says Cano:

“[‘Notice Me’] was inspired by getting engaged and then being stuck in quarantine. I wanted to write a song about the general feeling of longing, as well as finding the right person to love. After listening to ‘Death of a Salesman,’ I was also moved to write a song about a Casanova finally falling in love with someone that doesn’t notice them. I think I had a lot of those feelings before I found my future-wife. I just didnt have a chance to elaborate on them until I had nothing else to do but sit with them.”

“Notice Me” is missing the AOR-y midnight-in-the-city saxophone (by Dan Gonzáles Hernandez) that gave Condiciones‘ melancholy its sharpest edge, but otherwise it fits exactly against EP closer “Para Poder Lloar.” Plenty of people love to talk about California’s beaches, but “Notice Me” is California’s early morning: grey turning to pink and blue as light dissolves the night. Behind that crystalline synth and Cano’s understated vocals is the same emptiness that must’ve first inspired the song—the silence that comes after asking if anyone else is out there and lasts until there’s an answer. “Notice Me” is out now, and you can visit Harmless here.