A little more than an hour had passed since Caravan Palace launched into their set at The Novo on Monday night. The French group, a trio in the studio now six people strong on stage, had already pumped up the crowd with a near-seamless mix of older tunes, like their version of “Black Betty,” and material from last year’s album, Gangbusters Melody Club. The stage was now saturated in blue light that moved like a wave as singer Zoé Colotis talked the audience.
“Let’s get crazy for a while. Forget all your troubles, just spread good energy and craziness,” she told the crowd.
White lights burst from the strobes, pulsating with the beat that had just kicked the crowd in the pants. They pumped their hands in the air and jumped in unison. The floor vibrated. My phone started to shake as I tried to record video.
Michael Rother live at The Broad in Los Angeles for Intuition Festival on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (Pic: Liz O.)
When Michael Rother, who co-founded Nue! and Harmonia, played Intuition Festival at The Broad on Saturday night, I had a mini-revelation. This might have happened during a Harmonia song, but I can’t be sure since it was well past the point where everything Rother played on the stage outside of the museum converged into one giant piece of music in my head. I was dancing and, suddenly, something in the tone of the guitar made me think of New Order. It’s not as random a thought as you think.
e eye love by Corita Kent at Corita Art Center in Los Angeles (Photo: Liz O.)
Corita Kent was L.A.’s own pop art star. Back in the 1960s, when she was still a nun and known as Sister Mary Corita, she was named one of L.A. Times’ women of the year and landed on the cover of Newsweek. While she was creating serigraphs with social justice messages, she also taught at Immaculate Heart College and became head of the school’s renowned art department. Kent continued making art long after she left her religious order and moved to Boston. In fact, her best known work was the massively popular U.S. postal stamp that read “Love,” which was released in 1985, one year before her death.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, a new home for Kent’s legacy opened in the Arts District. A few days prior to that, I headed to the new Corita Art Center for a press preview. During my visit, and in the days that followed, I kept thinking about one specific piece. It’s called e eye love, which is part of a series called circus alphabet. In it, an eye is superimposed on a capital letter E. Underneath it is a snippet of a quote from the philosopher and writer Albert Camus, “should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” Kent made this piece in 1968, a tumultuous year in U.S. history. More than 55 years later, I’m looking at it in a gallery-like setting thinking, “Same.”
Inside Salt Box Records at Hello Stranger in Little Tokyo.
There’s some good news for L.A. crate diggers. Salt Box Records is back IRL. The record shop operated by modern funk musician and DJ XL Middleton recently reopened inside Little Tokyo venue Hello Stranger after focusing on Instagram drops and pop-up events for the past few years. The soft open was last week. I stopped by on Friday afternoon and left with some heat.
Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer ordering a ’90s coffee house cappuccino
There’s no shortage of irony in the news, but I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read a New York Times piece about how Starbucks wants to bring back the “third place.” A third place is not a corporate imitation of a coffee house that serves the same menu at every location. It is not a carefully cultivated vibe of Brand Safe Boredom that extends from its forgettable decor to the inoffensive playlists played at a volume that ensures you will never actually remember what you heard.
If you’re on the chattier social apps, then you’ve probably seen people describe the third places they wish they had, which, for some reason, always seem to sound like the public libraries they clearly don’t patronize. But, third places were a real thing. Once upon a time, people did have their own, local versions of the DoubleR or the Central Perk. Technically, they still exist. Underground, where I often guest DJ, happens every week. If you’re a regular there, it is a third place. Last year, I wrote a story about the pinball tournaments at Revenge Of. For pinball players, that absolutely falls into the category of “the third place.”
The whole concept of the third place, though, began its death spiral well before the pandemic. I suspect that there are multiple reasons for that, but let’s start with Corporate Coffee.
Near the end of CSS’ set at The Regent, singer Lovefoxx reminisced with the crowd about the band’s previous gigs in Los Angeles. There was their first show in the city, somewhere in the Fashion District. At least one person in the audience was there. There was some back and forth about a show where Lovefoxx lost her voice. As for this show, it was jam packed. But, Lovefoxx said to the crowd, the love for CSS in the room might not have been about the band itself.
“We were playing in the background of your life,” she said. “And I think that you’re all here because you just love your history and your songs. We’re just lucky to have been in the background on your MySpace page.”
Mary Ocher live at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles on Thursday, January 16, 2025 (Pic: Liz O.)
“It feels like the apocalypse,” Mary Ocher said on stage at 2220 Arts + Archives. “But,” the Berlin-based artist added, “it feels like the apocalypse everywhere.”
It’s Thursday night, one week and one day after the wildfires began, and we’re in a small, indie theater on Beverly Blvd., just outside of downtown Los Angeles. In all honesty, the city looks better than it did a week ago. Last week, the downtown sky was orange-gray, casting a haze over streets, still littered with the debris from the windstorms, that made everything look like a 1970s photograph. Even with a mask, it was hard to walk around those first few days without feeling ill. Headaches, sore throats, coughs— the sort of things you might expect when wildfires loom in the distance— came and went with open windows and errand runs.
Ride live at The Fonda on Thursday, December 19, 2024 (Pic: Liz O.)
Early on in Ride’s set at The Fonda on December 19, as the band played “Dreams Burn Down,” the spotlights danced furiously with every wave of guitar noise that crashed over the crowd. Small specks of light flickered across the dark walls of the theater, burning out as soon as the shoegaze interludes cut back to the song. Everything was tightly choreographed, the lights and sound so in sync with each other that it was as if I had been swallowed by the music. When you can imagine the music as this living, breathing entity and you are, if only for a moment, existing in the belly of it, it’s an amazing, and rare, feeling.
This was my first Ride concert and, honestly, I think it’s an ideal time to see the band. While I love the now-classic albums, Nowhere and Going Blank Again, Ride released an album this year, Interplay, that’s a career best. It’s a fantastic collection of psychedelic guitar pop and one of my favorite albums of 2024. If you haven’t heard it yet, you should fix that asap.
I’ve been listening to Interplay since it was released earlier this year and had wanted to finally catch Ride on this tour. In fact, I was about to check for tickets when my friend Melissa was all like, just won tickets to see Ride, want to go with me? Of course, I did. This was an even better opportunity. Melissa and I have been friends since sometime around Y2K, when we crossed paths nerding out over British bands first in a chat room and then IRL at places like Cafe Bleu, a club night in West Hollywood at the time where you could actually dance to “Twisterella” and sway to “Vapour Trail.” Yet, neither of us had seen Ride before, so this was bound to be a memorable night.
We were looking for a movie to see because it was Tuesday, when tickets at Alamo Drafthouse are close to half-price. The problem was that little looked particularly worthwhile. I have absolutely no interest in ever seeing Wicked, Nightbitch looks like something I might eventually watch if it turns up on streaming and, IDK if I was really in the mood to be terrified by Hugh Grant in Heretic.
But, this Y2K, the new movie directed by Kyle Mooney, sounds pretty funny, especially since we’re old enough to remember the build-up to that New Year’s Eve. In real life, people spent a full year playing “1999” ad nauseam and hawking survival kits, but, then nothing happened. The sky was not all purple. People weren’t running everywhere. We didn’t even get a computer crash. The world remained somewhat normal, or so we thought. And another two decades would pass before I could listen to “1999” again.
Cadal live at Slipper Clutch on November 7, 2024 (Pic: Liz O.)
There are two people in front of me in line at Slipper Clutch, but, from my vantage point at the top of the stairs, I can see inside the venue’s top level bar. The crowd is solid, especially for a Thursday night downtown. Out on the streets, there’s no foot traffic. I can only imagine that downtown Los Angeles’ residents are safely tucked into their luxury apartments, broadcasting night time rituals or sleep hacks or whatever inanity is trending on TikTok this week. Inside Slipper Clutch, though, there’s a lot of life. The bar is bustling, people are walking towards the dance floor. I can hear a band play live, but at this point, I’m not sure which band that is.
I’m at Slipper Clutch to catch Cadal, a band from Santiago, Chile. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been listening to their album, Fiesta Nueva, which came out last year and is full of raw, dark punk energy. On this tour, Cadal is only playing two dates in the U.S., one of which is this show on a Thursday night in early November. It’s the sort of show you wouldn’t want to miss if you’re into borderline-goth, danceable indie bands. Plus, it’s just not that often that you can catch a stacked lineup with a headliner who has never played L.A. before for just $10 at the door. That’s the kind of show I’m compelled to support.
