This Angel Flies in the Face of Categories

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon poolside at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, and a few dozen Hollywood hipsters--lured into the daylight by the presence of several top area DJs--are tanning to the sounds of cool tunes.

Getting ready for her stint at the turntables, a petite, dreadlocked woman in her early 30s picks through a box of vinyl records, selecting items ranging from Parisian accordion to party-minded old-school hip-hop, with a heavy emphasis on good-vibe reggae dub.

“I’m not going to do my usual stuff,” says the woman, who calls herself the Angel. “I don’t want to scare them.”

It’s hard to imagine the Angel scaring anyone. Easygoing and with a ready smile, she seems anything but intimidating, befitting her name--which really is Angel (she declines to divulge her last name). Only her Brooklyn accent, still present even though she’s spent most of her adult life in London and L.A., bears any hint of aggression.

But musically, her “usual stuff” can confuse people--a scary thing for the category-minded pop world.

“I’m not nice-and-neatly defined,” she says, sitting in the Mission-style hotel lobby after her DJ set. “It’s complicated to describe what I do.”

She has actively contributed to the confusion. For one thing, while she’s a rare strong female presence in a world dominated by male gearheads and promoters, it’s a distinction she’s resented seeing made and one she’s steadfastly refused to exploit herself.

That’s one reason that though she’s been making records for eight years, she only recently released her first album under her own name. In the past she has worked under the faux-group name 60 Channels and in the collaboration Jaz Klash.

The new album, “No Gravity,” does little to help neaten the definitions, deftly blending hip-hop, dance music, dub, R&B; and ambient elements without really fitting into any of those categories. Her often low-key beats and muted hues get her associated with the “downtempo” subgenre, but that doesn’t do her justice either.

In any case, the striking album shows a subtle sense for sonic atmospheres, and it’s earned the Angel some high-profile recognition. She was the cover subject of L.A. Weekly’s annual music issue and was featured on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” in May.

But even the praise has stumbled over her blurred lines. For example, she’s just been nominated for best dance artist in the New Times Los Angeles Music Awards.

“I don’t consider myself a dance music artist,” she says. “But because I DJ, people assume that’s the area I’m in, or because some of the music is beat-driven. And I don’t do house music and don’t write techno tracks. It cracks me up when I see ‘Angel--techno DJ’ in listings or reviews.”

More often than not she’s identified as a producer, but she’s also a composer (she scored the 2000 movie “The Boiler Room” as well as creating the music for her own albums), remixer and talent scout--she discovered and helped develop female rapper-singer Mystic, whose debut album, featuring three Angel-produced songs, is just out through Interscope Records. (The two will join Bahamadia in an El Rey Theatre concert Sept. 19.)

The talent that could get the widest recognition is her singing--though it’s the talent she downplays the most. While she displayed her attractive vocals in 1998 as one of several singers on her 60 Channels album, she chose to leave the vocals entirely to others on the new album. It’s because it could get her quick recognition, she explains, that she downplays it.

“When women are singers, that’s all many people see them as,” she says. “I don’t want to be limited to that.

“Most acts have one singer and a consistent sound,” she adds. “That’s not me, and it could be confusing to some people.”

Confusing to some, admirable to others.

“In the dance world people tend to identify with one genre--’I like jungle’ or ‘I like dub’ and in that world maybe she has come under criticism for dabbling,” says Kathryn McGuire, associate editor of electronic dance and hip-hop magazine Urb.

“I definitely think her experiments and forays and meldings are somewhat risky in the increasingly segmented, subgenred dance world. But her not selling herself on image or looks and remaining more anonymous behind the boards is very respectable.”

The Angel’s eclectic approach has its roots in her childhood, when her favorites ranged from James Brown to Pink Floyd, as well as the jazz her mother played. She took piano lessons as a youngster, but wasn’t actively involved in music until moving to London in the mid-’80s and becoming interested in the burgeoning electronics-based dance music scene.

“It was just friends messing around,” she says. “We started investing in equipment--one bought one thing, I’d buy something else and before long we were teaching each other the equipment. But mostly it was the excitement and adventure of being able to write music ourselves.”

In the early ‘90s she became friends with the jazz/R&B-rooted; collective Brand New Heavies, and through them met representatives of the Los Angeles-based Delicious Vinyl record label.

“I played them some demos,” she says. “The usual reaction [from record labels] had been, ‘We’ll find you a producer, little girl.’ But they were the opposite.”

Delicious signed her in 1993 and she moved to L.A., with the label commissioning remixes of the Heavies and rap group the Pharcyde, giving the Angel her first recognition in the dance and hip-hop worlds. But the relationship with the label soured and she left in 1994 without having released anything of her own.

In addition to the subsequent Jaz Klash collaboration 60 Channels, she had the opportunity to contribute to a few movie soundtracks, with a big break coming last year when she was commissioned to do the instrumental score for “Boiler Room,” a drama starring Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi. That led to New Line Cinema’s striking a deal to release “No Gravity” as a joint venture of its nascent New Line Records label with Supa Crucial Recordings, started by the Angel and her manager, Kevin Herlihy.

With the album out, she’s hoping to get more film work and is producing tracks for Navigator with hopes of partnering with a major label to release an album. And she believes that acceptance for her wide-spectrum approach has grown.

“I’ve been toying with this experiment since ‘93, but back then it was unheard of for someone to be the mastermind and not the vocalist--before Moby and Kruder & Dorfmeister and others showed you could do it,” she says.

“This is supposed to be art. Therefore there are no walls, no boundaries. But the record industry does create boundaries, and it’s hard for anyone who’s not in one of the formats.”

The Angel, with Bahamadia, Mystic and Ming + FS, plays Sept. 19 at the El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 8 p.m. $15. (323) 936-4790.