The Landscape of Los Angeles Makes Way For A Diverse Soundscape Of Rising Musicians  

Since the Gold Rush, California has symbolized the land of opportunity and possibilities.

For the music industry, Los Angeles is synonymous to major corporate labels and industry professionals who have the power to transform artists into the top Billboard 100,but Los Angeles is also home to many underrated musicians that fly under the radar of commercial radio.

Los Angeles county spans over four thousand miles worth of 114 neighborhoods. The diverse neighborhoods that make up the city’s conglomeration of people also gives birth to a uniqueness in musical sound. This uniqueness can be characterized under the umbrella term known as DIY (Do It Yourself) music. DIY musicians are the entrepreneurs of music who create, manage, and regulate their own art under no contracts. DIY is also not pigeonholed as belonging to one specific music genre. DIY musicians can be anything from electronic, punk, indie, rock, rap, alternative music, and more. 

To be a DIY musician in Los Angeles is like being a professional athlete where practice takes the form of playing as many live shows as one can. Essentially a DIY musician is a freelancer in an industry full of household names. Popular venues such as The Smell, The Bootleg Theater, The Echo, The Satellite, and more have served as formative spaces for many DIY musicians to develop their reputation and become accustomed to their neighborhood musical community.  But how does a self-made musician cross the threshold to the record labels that bring fame? And what kind of musical communities are formed throughout the geographically expansive Los Angeles county? 

Canoga Park- based band Hunny has had an exponential climb in their career since becoming a band in high school. All-Age DIY venues like the Cobalt Cafe and their 2015 residency shows at the Bootleg Theater helped grow their identity as a band. Before Hunny signed with Epitaph Records in 2019, Hunny spent most of their developing years making their name as one of the very few bands in the Valley. 

Before Hunny was officially formed in 2014, the members Jason Yager, Kevin Grimett, Joey Anderson, and Jake Goldstein belonged to other DIY bands such as Buffalo Blackfoot and Daydreamer. 26 year old guitarist Jake Goldstein recalls how before Hunny became a band the group used to play at the “hot chocolate” which was the garage belonging to Ray Libby from the band Bad Suns. Goldstein says “everyone would kind of hang out there. And it was like creating our own community for lack of.” 

24 year old keyboardist and vocalist Kevin Grimett recalls how the success of their friends’ bands such as Bad Suns and The Neighbourhood brought musical attention to their suburb. Grimett states “we were kind of like the leftovers of these two other bands that had success. And we were like, let's start a band.” Goldstein added how despite Hunny’s moderate climb towards gaining traction that Hunny’s chemistry created the group mentality of  “we were going to just make music regardless if anyone was there to hear it.” Currently Hunny has more than 1 million monthly Spotify listeners and has embarked on various tours. Hunny plans to use their time in quarantine to self-produce a potential EP to add onto their roster of three EPs and one debut album.

Areas such as downtown Los Angeles where the iconic DIY venue The Smell resides have always been an area that allows DIY musicians to play low budget live shows to an all-ages crowd. Popular acts such as Surf Curse, The Garden, Ty Segall, Best Coast, and Cherry Glazerr have played shows at The Smell.

Pablo Sotelo from Inner Wave recalls how his band was formed from watching shows at The Smell since he was in high school. Sotelo says, “We used to go to The Smell all the time trying to eventually be able to play there. So I’d see all these bands, some of them are still around and some have evolved to become other bands.” Inner Wave has evolved as a band for the past 7 years and honed their sound as a rising Latinx indie rock band. Sotelo describes how the current music scene in downtown Los Angeles has various pockets in style that fall under the trend of indie R&B music. 

Indie musician Rob Tilden, known as Boyo, has also played shows at The Smell during his formative years as a solo musician. Tilden describes the downtown music community as being an open environment where “everybody kind of just played in each other’s bands and had a similar DIY home recording aesthetic and you just made friends with people.” Boyo took a break from music when he went to college but found himself reconnecting with the music community. Tilden describes the community as evolutionary where everyone “ just kind of evolved and they still are evolving and doing their own thing.” 

The evolution of the  Los Angeles music community has also created a rise in artists collaborating with one another. Long Beach based, hyper pop rap musician Nick Beaty, known as Slater, describes the rise of his career since 2014, as slow, but rewarding for the art he creates. Slater is an example of a DIY musician who has cultivated his own genre, known as Vada Vada. This genre was created in collaboration with his high school friends Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, known as The Garden.

Beaty describes the Vada Vada sound as representative of his friendship and bonds that were made since childhood with the Shears. Beaty states how their self made genre allows him and The Garden to have their own sound but still have a collective sound. Beaty says, “ It started, like, just friends making videos online. And it slowly morphed into putting music and videos on there. Because there's quite a few of us involved with Vada Vada but I think we all kind of have our own sound with it.” 

Although Vada Vada has not become a record label, their YouTube channel has 41,000 subscribers and their Instagram account has 6,000 followers. Artists like Slater prove that DIY is an ever changing genre and that the possibility is limitless when it comes to defining one’s sonic identity in Los Angeles. 

While it is common to originate in Los Angeles and fall in love with the various musical neighborhoods that encompass the city, it is just as common to move to Los Angeles and bring DIY elements from one city and mesh it into LA’s inclusivity. Label owner and musician George Clanton made the move from Harrisonburg, Virginia to Brooklyn, New York to his studio home in Atwater Village in Los Angeles with the intention of creating a vaporwave community in Los Angeles.

Clanton’s label known as 100% Electronica is completely independent and has over 19 acts on its roster. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 100% Electronica hosted their own music festival, as ElectroniCON, which served as the first vaporwave music festival. Both ElectroniCON festivals hosted at Catch One in Los Angeles and Elsewhere in Brooklyn sold out. 

Through the success of managing his own label and hosting two sold out festivals, Clanton describes not giving up and making people care about vaporwave as the biggest challenge in his endeavors. Clanton says, “I wasn’t really considered a serious musician in indie music till I was 30 years old. And I’ve been trying since I was a teenager.” 

Clanton moved to Los Angeles in order to create his own music scene and audience for vaporwave music. While living in his hometown of Harrisonburg, Virgina, Clanton recollects how the music scene there was more oriented towards punk and metal music over his synth pop music. Then when Clanton moved to Brooklyn, New York around 2015, he felt that he had a “really mixed reception” to his music and felt like “an outsider” in the scene. Clanton chose to reside in Los Angeles because he believes there is opportunity for a vaporwave community to start in the city. Clanton states that he has “high hopes for the vaporwave community. I want to see it being taken more seriously.” 

Since Clanton’s spring tour with The Garden was postponed by COVID-19, he has focused his efforts in running a weekly Twitch show known as “The Big Stream” and creating new merchandise for his label and fan club. 

Los Angeles feels synonymous to the term “that’s show business baby” or “you either make it or break it” when it comes to pursuing a career in the arts. The musical expectation of becoming a commercial house name musician on streaming platforms or acquiring a platinum hit album does not derail the passion that drives most Los Angeles music artists. 

Music has shifted into an era that feeds off of the algorithm that streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Tik Tok promote and simultaneously enhance the exposure of musicians. Streaming platforms do not account for the primary income for musicians. The .0038 cent per play that Spotify gives to its artists is not how a lot of DIY LA musicians preserve their careers. It is the love of the art form and the feedback from supporters that fuels the evolutionary nature of DIY musicians. The do-it-yourself mantra is constantly changing with the city, and despite COVID-19, the fire for creating music has not wavered within the hearts of all of these artists.