La Sera's great new album, Music for Listening to Music To, was released Friday. To celebrate, we asked guitarist Todd "Totally Tod" Wisenbaker to share some of the inspirations that helped him and Katy Goodman — his bandmate and wife — hone their sound. He returned with a grip of videos that broke down their influences track-by-track.
The Oscars are tonight and to honor the occasion — or buck it — we've compiled a list of a few of our favorite moments where movies got music right. Soundtracks are exempt — this is just for when music is an actual part of the scene.
Ahead of Astronauts, etc.’s U.S. tour next month, mastermind Anthony Ferraro tells us how the band has grown from a studio project recording the group’s debut album, Mind Out Wandering, to an adept team interplaying live throughout the psychedelic pop tunes.
Our buddy Jacob Summers of Avid Dancer has been sitting on a recording of one of his favorite live songs, "Gazing at the Edge of Everything," that’s never been heard until now. He shares it and tells us the backstory in today’s How Nice feature.
5 Every Day — the local happenings app and members club created by YACHT — has recently
undertaken an effort to restore and modernize the Triforium interactive light-and-sound
sculpture in Downtown L.A. Head to our website to get a learn more about this rad project.
A year after Kisses recorded its brilliantly fun album Rest in Paradise, the L.A. duo’s Jesse Kivel chats with producer W. Andrew Raposo of New York disco mainstays Midnight Magic about their collaboration, James Murphy and a few still lingering questions.
We're lucky to call a couple of Los Angeles' finest DJs Daniel.T. and Cooper Saver our close friends, but there's still plenty about our city's dance and DJ scene that's a mystery to us. In hopes of correcting this, we asked the guys for a primer on the local go-to spots.
Rather than diving straight into work after New Year's, we took a weeklong trip to Mexico's stunning Isla Holbox. Our timing couldn't have been better.
Recently Maxim Ludwig visited Los Alamitos Race Track in Cypress, California, just less than an hour out of Los Angeles. It was his first time playing the ponies but he came out with some valuable lessons on what to do (and what not to do) when placing equine bets.
As the year winds down, we too are slowing our roll and looking back at everything 2015’s given us. In this spirit, we asked some of our friends and family to tell us what their favorite albums of the year have been — new or old — and why. We got in on the fun too. This isn’t a best-of ranking by any means, just a dabbling of what’s moved us. How Nice.
At a time when things can start feeling a bit too materialistic, or buying gifts can feel like it's just for the sake of doing so, we look to our friends at the minimalist home goods store Formerly Yes for a counter point — discussing their inspiration, backstory, and why less is more.
When we heard PAPA's singer and drummer Darren Weiss has been running a minor league barber shop out of his home, we had to tag along for a trim and ask a few questions about his new hobby.
Sterling Bartlett has been a friend and favorite artist of ours since the beginning. So when he recently unveiled a new style that was totally different from the stuff he'd been doing for years, we had to ask him what sparked the change.
Maxim Ludwig’s 1976 Datsun B210 is a dream to drive but only plays 8-track tapes, leading to a treasure hunt for whatever albums he can find on this very defunct medium. Luckily he’s managed to nab some real gems.
Rachel Fannan of Only You shares her love of Michael Jackson's Thriller for our Hit City Record Club series. "My inner spirit is always waiting for an MJ bump," she writes — whose isn't?
LA's ever-cool Korey Dane shows us a few of his favorite haunts around town, capturing a day in 24 exposures with a feeling of visual poetry.
For the past six years, our buddy Evan Weinerman aka Arms Race has been one of our favorite music video directors and a standard go-to for us and a number of our best friends in music ranging from Lord Huron to Local Natives to Superhumanoids and more.
Today, we review our favorite of his clips with some commentary on each from the man himself, whose creative vision never fails to take us somewhere interesting.
It was our great pleasure Friday to release Kisses' new album, Rest in Paradise. As the Los Angeles duo's third LP, we feel it's their strongest work to date, crafted around great songs and moving grooves, performed live to record with New York's mighty disco band Midnight Magic.
We are always eager to know and tell a deeper story — below is a letter from Kisses' Jesse Kivel and Zinzi Edmundson have penned explaining their work, influences and creative processes in the context of their ever evolving life together.
We spent last weekend up north at the second annual TBD Fest in Sacramento, hosting our own Hit City U.S.A. stage and it was great. In spite of the near 100° temperature, a day of sets by Shy Girls, Papa, Avid Dancer, James Supercave, O and Hit City DJ’s kept things plenty cool.
Today we introduce a new recurring feature called Hit City Record Club, in which our artists and friends tell us about one album that’s had a significant impact on their lives.
Here, one of our favorite Los Angeles DJs and producers Cooper Saver details how Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours changed his life. In so doing, Cooper tells a familiar story with his own unique distinctions — channeling a formative age while explaining how that album helped define his musical taste and sense of self, as well as nudge him to get a fake ID and sneak into dance clubs. As he says, “I owe this record a lot.”
In advance of Astronauts, etc.'s Mind Out Wandering release this Friday, we asked band leader Anthony Ferraro to introduce us to the photographer behind his album's subtly evocative imagery. He sat down with Ginger Fierstein, who he met years ago around the Bay Area music scene, to discuss his friend's creative vision.
After a recent visit, Yosemite National Park easily tops our list of favorite places in California. But we're not alone in our admiration. Through our own trial and error, can offer some tips to make your trip to Yosemite as rewarding and stress-free as possible.
We all have different sides to ourselves, provoked by our surroundings. It is an act of physical space affecting our mental space — for Pearl Charles, like a lineage of amazing musicians before her, an important place for inspiration is the desert around Joshua Tree, California.
Each year we're increasingly impressed by the massive festival production that has become FYF Fest. We hit the The LA Sports Arena & Exposition Park around USC this weekend and took in the whole extravaganza, made complete with epic sets by Kanye West, Toro y Moi, Savages and many more.
When we stopped by our favorite local guitar shop, Old Style, recently we were shocked to hear from owner Reuben Cox that the whole thing started basically by accident. And a bit of an odd one at that, considering he's not even really a musician himself.
Our pal photographer (and Princeton drummer) David Kitz's Instagram account has become a recent infatuation — in part because unlike many photographers out there, his account pulls exclusively from pictures shot on his iPhone. We brought this up recently and he said it’s a matter of liking the limitations that come with it.
What was it like growing up in Iran in the 1960s? It's hard to imagine your parent's youth 8,000 in a country you've never known first-hand, and one that's changed so drastically since as well. In today's feature, our good friend Joe Sharaf retraces his roots, while giving us a peak into a bygone time.
It was by random chance we happened on Jeff Ogiba’s “Things I Found in Records” Instagram account but were immediately smitten by his collection of oddities discovered in album sleeves. His super specific concept makes for amazing bits of micro nonfiction, almost like music-collector archeology.
It's with some reservation we share with you all one of our most frequented camping sites — South Fork Group Campground in Angeles National Forest. Located one and a half hours north of Los Angeles, this hidden valley retreat is a great personal favorite for easy weekend trips away from the city in a surprisingly lush portion of the Antelope Valley.
Our friends Mt. Si recently released a beautiful music video for their song “Oh,” featuring singer Sarah Chernoff (of Superhumanoids, the Franks) at the real, picturesque Mt. Si in Israel. Good bud Garret Curtis directed the piece, so we asked him to share some behind-the-scenes shots from their special trip.