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Eagle Rock Music Festival brings Low End Theory to a wider audience

By Jessica Savio

Oct. 4, 2010 2:43 a.m.

While Saturday looked like a typical weekend day in the streets of Westwood, with residents hidden in homes and bars watching sports and students locked in cafes and libraries readjusting to the study routine, the Eagle Rock neighborhood was filled by families and individuals coming from all sides of Los Angeles.

Eight blocks of Colorado Boulevard were closed off to traffic, in between Eagle Rock Boulevard and Argus Drive, for the 12th Annual Eagle Rock Music Festival.

The festival once again accomplished its mission to educate the community about the growing local musical trends, exposing a wide spectrum of the population to scenes that are largely exclusive.

The Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, which organized the free event, successfully reached out to a diverse audience, recruiting attendees from all over town and creating a hospitable block party atmosphere to host what was truly an all-ages event. Whole families were a common sight, including the elderly as well as children.

In the past, the festival has typically showcased emerging indie rock and punk rock bands, such as No Age, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Crystal Antlers and Mika Miko.

In the last couple years, the festival introduced further variety, giving space to some left-field-hip-hop/ experimental-electronic producers such as Peanut Butter Wolf, Free the Robots, DJ Kutmah, DJ Nobody and the Gaslamp Killer, on what was named the “Future Music Stage.”

It was a very fitting name for that stage, indeed. This year some of those artists ““ and many more ““ performed on their own stage, “Low End Theory,” with the rest of their crew.

Most people might associate the name with the 1991 album by the American hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest; for the fans of what some call “beat music,” however, “Low End Theory” is a weekly music session that takes place on Wednesdays at the Airliner club in Lincoln Heights.

Beat music is an emerging type of electronic music focusing on the peculiarity of the sounds and beats themselves, rather than arranging these elements specifically for dancing. It is usually characterized by the exploration of sounds in the lower end of the musical frequency range, and the insistence on pure sounds and beats rather than lyrics or melodies can sound either intriguingly novel or disconcertingly unfamiliar.

Because of these characteristics, it is likely one of those things that “either you love it, or you don’t.” It seems like recently more and more people have gotten to discover and learn to love this music.

According to Billboard, the 2010 album Cosmogramma, produced by the scene’s most prominent artist Flying Lotus (real name Steven Ellison) ranked third in the Electronic Album category within a week of its release, topped only by Lady Gaga’s albums.

However, most other producers from the Low End Theory scene remain largely obscure to the mainstream audience, and it took some time for many of the festival attendees to abandon themselves to the beats, although toward the end of the night, all the spectators responded enthusiastically to Flying Lotus’ biggest hits, such as “Do the Astral Plane,” “MmmHmm” and “Massage Situation.”

Taking Low End Theory out of its natural venue revealed the scene’s true potential and proved that this music can resonate with a much more varied crowd than just the Airliner regulars. Although a couple of young spectators seemed overwhelmed by the loudness of the sound system, children as well as elderly fans danced energetically to the rhythmic bassline.

The notable size of the audience, and its unexpectedly diverse age composition, represented a great success for both the organizers and promoters of the festival and the Low End Theory artists.

“This man has more of Los Angeles on his shoulders than the mayor,” said music producer Dibia$e regarding fellow producer and Low End Theory founder Kevin Moo, also known as Daddy Kev.

While it might be a bit of a hyperbole, Eagle Rock Music Festival showed that the Low End Theory club may grow to have much more influence than its creators could have ever dreamed of.

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Jessica Savio
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