London-based Resident Advisor helps boost L.A.’s underground electronic music world
On Friday night, at the formidably luxurious private workspace NeueHouse in Hollywood, hundreds of L.A. techno fans gathered to watch themselves.
Twenty and thirtysomethings, dressed in all-black or florid late-night outfits, downed cocktails as they awaited the debut of “Real Scenes: L.A.,” a documentary on L.A.’s underground electronic music world, produced by the growing media and ticketing firm Resident Advisor.
As familiar faces from L.A. nightlife appeared onscreen — the Dublab collective, Fine Time’s Tahl Klainman, producers John Tejada and Dam-Funk, among many others — the crowd burst into spontaneous cheers of recognition. For perhaps the first time, the city’s diffuse but resourceful underground club music scene saw a documentary that resembled their lives and work.
“Real Scenes: L.A.” heralds a new era for Resident Advisor, the 15-year-old London-based site run by Nick Sabine and Paul Clement that’s grown into the online focal point for progressive electronic music. Built on a platform of news and event-ticketing (think Ticketmaster but for edgy raves), the site has expanded to include longform journalism, comprehensive technology reviews and feature-length documentaries.
After opening its first L.A. office last year, the “Real Scenes” series will air locally on KCET and nationally via the cable network LinkTV, putting a challenging niche of dance music into millions of homes (the L.A. installment airs locally Saturday). The series documents and demystifies the global reach of electronic music, visiting cities ranging from mainstays like Paris and Berlin to Mexico City, Bristol, UK; and Johannesburg, South Africa.
But as sites like Vice and Pitchfork also move into film and TV production, can Resident Advisor compete while telling stories that do justice to a worldwide scene?
“Resident Advisor was built to have a voice, and in electronic music, that’s what sets us apart,” Sabine said. “We absolutely see electronic music as an art form. We just published a 10,000-word feature on gay clubbing in America today. These films are an extension of that voice.”
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When Resident Advisor opened its office in Los Angeles a year ago, the city was perhaps its most difficult yet promising market. Southern California was a decade into its EDM boom, and the scene had been largely dominated by large festivals like Hard and Electric Daisy Carnival. New York, Tokyo and London were much larger markets, and while the site draws around 3 million global unique viewers monthly, only a sixth of that comes from the U.S.
But L.A. clearly had a huge interest in electronic music. As listener tastes have shifted to the darker, weirder genres RA champions, a growing infrastructure sprung up to support that curiosity. But the city’s ephemeral network of impermanent venues and private events meant that a central organizing hub was essential.
“L.A. has been interesting — in the last 18 months, our audience has tripled there,” Sabine said. “It’s rewarding to feel like we’re playing a role in that.”
As a result, the city made sense as the first subject of its collaboration with KCET (other installments previously ran online, and will air in the coming weeks).
Resident Advisor was built to have a voice, and in electronic music, that’s what sets us apart. We absolutely see electronic music as an art form.
— Nick Sabine, who runs Resident Advisor
The L.A. film — languidly shot in magic-hour light with glimpses of late-night car trips and flickering party scenes — depicts club music as a binding idea for fans and artists in a fragmented city. From backyard studios in northeast L.A. neighborhoods to downtown warehouses and mind-bending Joshua Tree excursions, it captures the lives of the city’s artists and promoters as much as the mechanics of its music industry.
“It’s the kind of thing I’d wished for but didn’t exist,” said Patrick Nation, the director of “Real Scenes: L.A.” and the head of Resident Advisor films. “In L.A. there’s such a mix of landscapes, people and music and we had to find a way to weave it all together.”
“The way people go out at night reflects their time and social situations, and the music scene allows us to tap into these wider issues.”
The film can be a little credulous: it sometimes reads as a long commercial for the avant-garde radio station Dublab, and it never quite tackles the gentrification and spiraling housing costs that are upending L.A. artists’ lives. But if the films tilt toward painting a positive and communal picture, that’s in purposeful contrast to stereotypes about electronic music in L.A., which has been marred by reports of drug deaths at major rave events like Hard Summer.
For KCET, the “Real Scenes” series continues work done on other programs like “Artbound” that illuminate artists’ lives and processes in ways that might be cryptic or unknown to outsiders.
“It was extremely compelling for us how they portrayed electronic music as a great global leveler and as part of the larger ecology of cities,” said Juan Devis, the senior vice president for original content at KCET. “When youth music gets taken away and big festivals and sponsors rule over it, that’s when it gets corrupted. These documentaries break the stereotypes of this scene as a place where you pop a pill and go wild.
“We wanted to turn a lens on this enormous movement in L.A. and the world that deserved a serious look.”
Resident Advisor is far from alone in tackling this material. Vice has its own cable network that recently tackled Compton’s current hip-hop scene, and a Conde Nast-backed Pitchfork has launched a similar global-underground documentary series. But as a wholly independent site, Resident Advisor might be better equipped to weather the storms of dance-music trends that brought down firms like SFX, which recently declared bankruptcy and spun off its own music content portal Beatport.
As fans’ tastes shift away from mainstream EDM to more ambitious electronic music, a new generation is approaching this scene with a globally minded curiosity. “Real Scenes: L.A.” suggests that the gold-rush mentality of the last decade of L.A.’s dance music scene may be fading in favor of something more artistically substantial.
“These documentaries are powerful. For [the film on] Bristol, we wanted to explore how it became such a hotbed of producers in a city of just 400,000. But artists were finding it difficult to get permits to have shows,” Sabine said. “ After the mayor saw our film, however, it got noticeably easier. That was directly because of ‘Real Scenes’ – it reframed the whole way of thinking about this.”
Resident Advisor / “Real Scenes: Los Angeles”
When: Midnight Saturday
Where: KCET
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