The Eagle Rock Music Festival is set to soar

Saturday’s lineup includes headliners Flying Lotus and Health. And with the demise of Sunset Junction, this could be the year the northeast L.A. festival breaks from the pack of other local fests.

 

 

The biggest story in local music so far this year is a festival that didn’t happen.

The last-minute cancellation in August of Sunset Junction (potentially for good) happened for a variety of reasons — poor permit planning, neighborhood opposition and lack of funds, among them. But it did prove two things about L.A. music: Angelenos are incredibly passionate about local festivals for good and ill, and there is a giant opportunity for an inexpensive, easygoing neighborhood-level show to claim that institution’s mantle.

The Eagle Rock Music Festival may be moving to grab that audience. Since moving out into the streets in 2006, the festival has doubled in attendance annually, last year attracting around 100,000 fans over one day of surprisingly experimental local music. This year’s lineup may be its strongest yet. And even with the solid bookings of Make Music Pasadena, the Silver Lake Jubilee and the Abbot Kinney Festival, this may be the year Eagle Rock codifies its reputation as the must-see local festival. And it asks only for a $5 donation.

The festival, which is produced by the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, takes place Saturday along Colorado Boulevard in the northeastern L.A. neighborhood. Headliners include the jazz-infused avant-garde beatsmith Flying Lotus and the deconstructionist noise-rock quartet Health — L.A. natives who have each had marquee billings at Coachella in recent years.

The Low End Theory, a Wednesday club night held regularly at the Lincoln Heights club the Airliner, brings a collective of brain-frying beatmakers to its own stage at the festival, such as Nosaj Thing, Tokimonsta and Gaslamp Killer, with their fractured dubstep and electronica. Other stages will highlight the revival of throwback garage rock with Barrio Tiger and Allah Las. The Eagle Rock music studio the Ship, run by indie impresario Aaron Espinoza, also will host its own stage, featuring widescreen rock such as Shadow Shadow Shade.

Machine Project, please make at least one more dog/human ticket available for this production. Thank you.

Dear Machine Project,

I live very close to your gallery and I own a dog who is about to go through serious surgery. Is there any way you would permit us to attend your production of "Tragedy on the Sea Nymph: An Operetta in Three Acts Starring an All-Dog Cast"? The ten-minute silent film, directed by Elizabeth Cline and edited by local folkstress Emily Lacy, will be accompanied by live human singers and musicians in a musical score composed by Lewis Pesacov, guitarist in Fool's Gold and Foreign Born, as well as the producer who imbued Best Coast's debut with (even more) lovesick fuzz.

HEALTH makes a Nollywood action movie, and it is insane

They have swum with dolphins, thrown blood-slicked orgies and creepily stared at us in thunderstorms. Now L.A. noise misanthropes HEALTH have spent literally tens of dollars in cutting an upcoming Australian tour promo video that pays homage to the completely bonkers thriller-movie scene of Lagos, Nigeria.

We can't post it, as the dialogue is a little too hard-boiled for a family blog, but we will link to it and promise that it has more gunshot noises than a Wacka Flocka Flame album and a better shootout finale than "Machete." It's no "Baby Police," but what could be? Stick around until the end and you'll never be able to look at Kylie Minogue again.

-- August Brown

YouTube pulls Health's 'USA Boys' video

We had a few kind words for the L.A. noise-rock quartet Health on Wednesday after the band sold out and blew away the Echoplex on the first date of a new national tour. Apparently YouTube was not as impressed, as the video-sharing service just yanked Health's new kind-of-sexy video for its single "USA Boys," which is really no randier than anything you'd see on basic cable on a school night.

As the band's Twitter feed suggests (in profane terms), its spectacularly gruesome and violent clip for "We Are Water" is apparently A-OK, but a bit of bare thigh will damage young psyches. Fortunately, Vimeo thinks its viewers aren't quite the shrinking violets that must be over there on YouTube, so click here to view the lovely "USA Boys" clip.

-- August Brown

Photo: Health at the Echoplex. Credit: Bret Hartman / For The Times

Live review: HEALTH at the Echoplex

 In HEALTH’s new video for their single "USA Boys," a young couple throw a wild rumpus in a decrepit warehouse, drop a few hallucinogens, and collapse in a surprisingly forthright tangle of soft-core sex.

It’s also kind of a metaphor for the fiendishly ambitious Los Angeles quartet’s career up to this point. Their self-titled debut in 2007 imagined a very strange world where Ornette Coleman recruited a bunch of recovering thrash-metal heads to back him at the Super Bowl halftime show. The tracks were essentially dozens of jagged sonic objects clanking together.

But HEALTH performed them with painstaking skill and ferocity, and had such an unexpected asset in singer Jake Duzsik’s wispy voice (which recalled My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher more than anything), that what might have been a notch in the Smell’s beloved realm of the barely listenable took on the heft of a future arena act.

After a dance-inclined remix record and 2009’s album "Get Color," in fact, they became one, opening for Nine Inch Nails on that band’s final round of touring. "Color" dialed down the competitive restlessness of their songs and let their drummer, the surgically punishing BJ Miller, finally play deeper rhythms. Duzsik wrote more evocative melodies, and like on the indie-hit "Die Slow," their textures turned less violent and more creepily synthetic.

Health and Entrance Band: Reaffirming the idea of the rock band

It’s a golden age for “projects” in pop music. Stars are frequently ciphers for the skills of equally famous producers. Rappers as singular as Jay-Z turn over huge swaths of albums to guests. Mainstream rock acts can be just as singles-devoted as their pop and R&B counterparts.

A pop nation of unattached free agents yields tons of unexpected pleasures. But two young and rising bands in Los Angeles, Health and Entrance Band, are reaffirming the more old-fashioned virtues of being in a band in new ways. “Band”-ness is a different thing from being a guitar-drums-bass rock combo. It’s about being a cohesive unit where each member is distinct and irreplaceable, and where the interplay between them adds up to something singular and new. Entrance uses the pyrotechnic instrumental virtuosity of its three members to aspire to a stoned, Hendrix-sized wallop, while Health explodes practically every trope of punk, noise and electronica and puts the pieces together in almost gallingly ambitious ways. They don’t have much in common, except that each act evokes a bit of that old saying about the Velvet Underground -- that everyone who heard them went and started their own band.