There has always been a creative underground in the City of Angels. Throughout generations, Los Angeles artists have pushed the boundaries of convention under the radar of the pervasive entertainment industry and only rarely has the wider world taken notice. Much has been written about the “creative renaissance” that Los Angeles saw in the 2010s, particularly in the jazz and jazz-adjacent music scene and to be there on the ground floor, in the mix, was palpably exciting. 

In late 2012, something was percolating within my immediate circle of artist friends. It felt like a moment where so much interesting work was being done, but it was all happening in individual spaces. It felt as if each artist was on their own little island with a megaphone trying to get the world to listen. A relatively small group of us had the idea to band together into an arts collective in order to create a larger platform to push each other’s creativity and present and support each other’s work. This was the birth of Creative Underground Los Angeles. 

For about two years, CULA presented new work on a monthly basis, both online and in live events, much of which stretched the creative impulses of each member into places they might have never otherwise explored. Multimedia collaborations, thematic assignments, unusual partnerships, and a fast turnaround mandate all conspired to elevate our crafts to new heights and expand the possibilities for the way we viewed our own voices. In a relatively short time, this collective laid groundwork and fostered connections that have spread throughout our community all the way to the present.

In 2014, Eron Rauch and I founded Orenda Records, which drew from the creative energy that CULA enlivened and focused squarely on the endeavors of our musical community. There was a clear need for a hub to showcase the interconnectedness of our scene: musicians were constantly cross-pollinating and drawing upon each other’s ideas, and often they coalesced into large-form works and recordings that highlighted the collaborative nature of this network. In some cases these projects included unusual or bespoke packaging and presentation, and were both influenced and augmented by artists, writers, dancers, choreographers, film-makers, and creators of all types within our community. It was an intimate and intricate web of shared inspiration, which naturally expanded with each release. The artist roster for Orenda Records ultimately grew well beyond Los Angeles, drawing from across the United States and eventually from multiple continents. Every one of the 100+ albums Orenda Records released over the last decade found its way to this home via personal connection or submission. With a budget of zero dollars and no active recruitment, Orenda Records became a home for people and projects that shared a common spirit of exploration, collaboration, and idiosyncratic expression.

But “the scene” is ever-changing, with integral members coming and going as life unfolds. Some of the incredible performances and vibrations felt in real-time are retained only in the fond memories of the participants and audience members who populated our sacred spaces, like the Blue Whale, Curve Line Space, ETA, the Bootleg Theater and many others. When Eron Rauch, whose photography was ever-present throughout the development of this scene, presented me with this incredible collection of photographs from those remarkable moments, I was personally overwhelmed with nostalgia and love for the energy we all shared. I have always felt that his photography, with all its in-camera effects and extended techniques, looks how the music sounds. Having been present for or a participant in many of the events captured in this incredible compendium, I can hear the people in these photographs and the vibrance of their creative spirit. 

That spirit lives on and has extended across the world in many forms. Now there are new generations taking up the call to push the creative boundaries of what Los Angeles has to offer. The reverberations of the 2010s Los Angeles scene are felt even more strongly as we push through the 2020s and I know that LA’s Creative Underground will be a well-spring of inspiration for the world as long as its artists heed the call.

–Dan Rosenboom, 2024

Let me invite you to a show: Seek the plain door that is a geometric portal glowing well below 100,000 geometric stars of apartment and office windows in the warping orange Los Angeles night. Your fingerprints mar the glass next to a sharpied sign with the band names and suggested donation. You sit down along a crowded wall as brass lasers, pulsating guitar, and fractured-fleet drums work together to twist out a melody then pause. After a brief moment of booming fingers, the bass player pauses then flails while ruffling through their sheet music frantically, almost knocking their stand over. 

The band sends a couple glances as a cough floats from the audience, before the players slam back into the tune. As they pause for where, presumably, another bass solo should be… more sheet music flailing frrrshs fhhsrrsshh fhhreresshs… wait, are the shuffle of the sheaf of sheet music scrabbles and swashes almost a soft perfect counterpoint to the bristling lead line? The realization hits everyone—the band included—that the bass player has not lost his place but heard a deep connection between the tune to the sound of sheet music rubbing together. Confident in their creativity, confident in the band to support, confident the audience will catch on, the base player feels empowered to solo on his charts as the night burns in the creative underground of Los Angeles.   

During the 2010s, all over the city, in venues of all legality, size, and intended function, creative music was bubbling in the cauldron of City of Angels; jazz, contemporary classical, fusion, minimalism, experimental electronic, microtonal, psych, blues, world music, prog, leftfield opera, and many more. All were brewing, mutating, combining their limbs and mouths, and recombining with a swirling network of open-eared players, bookers, and fanatics pushing, playing, listening, and encouraging each other to take musical risks and embrace the most exposed and intimate and blasting idiosyncrasies.

My route into the furthest depths of this scene and into the life that brought these photos into the world, came through a happenstance meeting with Dan Rosenboom. I was already showing visual art and curating mixed genre shows in strange spaces outside the arts and music institutions, and had been looking to connect what I was doing into something bigger. While scheming my next event in my sketchbook in a bar tucked in a rundown deco office building in downtown Los Angeles, a bombastic band, loosely jazz, but all fire, crashed through a brilliant set between two overly fancy but drunk-scuffed and quite heavily occupied pool tables. 

I hit it off with the band leader and trumpet player, Dan Rosenboom, from the connection that we had both gotten our grad degrees at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid 2000s. In fact, he had played a gig in one of my installations! This, predictably, led to more beers and furious note-taking as he shared an idea he had for a collective of all art forms that would push each other to make epic works that would share our vision for art and Los Angeles. Seeing artists all around trying to go solo, the idea of a giant collective that could grow together was the warm, inspiring, and simultaneously unnerving offer I didn’t even know I wanted. As I recall I agreed to join up on the spot, though maybe I faltered for a few moments, but either way in the end the spark that became the Creative Underground Los Angeles (CULA) arts collective ignited. Over the following years, I’d be the main visual artist in CULA as its 20+ members staged wild multimedia events at venues across the city, with the blue whale in Little Tokyo giving us unprecedented leeway and support to transform their space and audience experience.  Out of the momentum of the collective, Dan spun up Orenda Records to be a home to all of the amazing Los Angeles music that didn’t fit into normal genres, and brought me on as the start-up art director. We jammed out over 70 records before I stepped aside to work on other projects, and during this time I also worked closely with the Southland Ensemble (a new music repertoire group) as their house photographer and served as art director for Angel City Jazz festival.  

My main personal artform has historically been photography (albeit in the most loose categorization, given the experiments that made up my practice have been described as “violating the intrinsic sanctity of the medium”.) This is important to note because throughout all my varied work with the underground creative music scene, I photographed for every possible reason: album art, band photos, event coverage, recording session documentation, my own contributions, music videos, press assets, and often just for the thrill of capturing the energy that was constantly going on. There was no intention that the overall archive of 30,000 images would become a coherent project. 

Back to the gig I mentioned at the start of this piece (which really happened at a Burning Ghosts show!), there was a pair of intertwined challenges I constantly faced whose solutions helped shape this body of work: 1) How do you make an awesome photograph of someone moving around some sheet music, let alone holding minimalist microtonal chords for minutes on end? 2) How do you capture what made viewers of the image feel what made these curious moments so mind-blowing and exciting, rather than just images of folks making constipated expressions into their horns. It took years of work to develop a kit of approaches, styles, and skills to succeed. The core of this new practice grew from being more and more inspired by and doing research on the musicians’ use of extended technique. Extended technique on an instrument means opening yourself up to all the sounds and modes of interacting with an instrument, not just the way it can articulate standard notation. I took a similarly open approach to exploring what extended technique meant for a camera with an ever-expanding array of long-exposures, lighting techniques, double exposures, gear modifications, occasional physical collage, and endless organic physical manipulations of the camera during exposures with my hands and body. As such, with only a tiny few minor exceptions, every image and effect seen in this book was accomplished entirely in-camera and without sophisticated digital editing in post. 

There was a second element that coupled with the camera techniques pushing to the edge of the tool that contributes to the unique perspective these photographs bring to the music: the physical and temporal vantage point. Being so embedded and active in the scene, I had incredible intimate access to the players and performances. I was often one of the first people in the venue or studio and could literally stand in the middle of the band during rehearsals if I saw an exciting opportunity. (I had to carry earplugs in my camera bag!) I knew the players, so I could run odd lighting setups or crawl into strange vantage points, and they would just be excited to see the results, rather than annoyed. Throughout my work, most of the players I worked with treated me foremost as an artist in collaboration, sharing their vision for art, critiquing and discussing my work, and even having cycles of direct response, with songs based on my images and images based on their songs. This is a poetic documentary shot from within the scene, not as an outside observer; literally shot from within the music.

By inviting you into these performances, sessions, and explorations, these photographs are an attempt to share with the future how the musical moment felt from the inside. Sadly, many of the venues have closed during the pandemic and the 2010s scene has mostly dispersed. On the flip side, I’m extremely hyped for the inevitable new scenes with whole new configurations of artists, players, venues, and artistic values. Yes, this book depicts a hyper-specific moment of deep sonic history to help fans and researchers build out their understanding of how people and places connected together. But more than that, it's a way for everyone who sees it to immerse themselves in the strange and wonderful community of collaboration and passion that resonates out from the 2010s Los Angeles underground into the vast night sky’s ears. This is a book to inspire other musicians, artists, critics, and bookers—even if they don’t even know that’s what they are yet— to get together with other passionate people and to build their own creative underground with their own bold and rich artistic criteria, regardless of what the current institutions think. 

At the start of CULA, our most far-out dream was to inspire creative undergrounds around the world. Trust me, if you find anything in this book that inspires you, you already have everything needed inside yourself to build a community that is more epic, weirder, louder, quieter, inclusive, diverse, fun, and deep, than you ever hoped for, as long as you work together with your community. It’s surprisingly easy to start the journey to build your own creative underground! Just remember to document it to pass along that moment to inspire the future in turn, all of us burning through the night sky, finding new things for our ears and eyes to share with others. 

–Eron Rauch, January 2025