LEVITATION ROOM BIO
Psychedelic quartet Levitation Room build a cosmic wall of sound with dreamy guitars and an alternative dreamgaze flavor.—
East Los Angeles quartet Levitation Room’s floaty, cosmic songs are always a trip. Since forming nearly a decade ago, they’ve self-produced dizzying, otherworldly music that’s connected with fellow travelers in the hallucinogenic world of outré rock music. Led by singer and guitarist Julian Porte along with founding members Gabriel Fernandez (lead guitar) and Johnathan Martin (percussion), the band has enchanted live audiences at Desert Daze and on tour with like-minded groups Post Animal and Psychedelic Porn Crumpets.
The band’s vivid sound has found them placed on popular playlists like Modern Psychedelia and the legendary superproducer’s Danger Mouse Jukebox. Their 2015 debut, “Friends,” has surpassed 18 million streams. Joined by new member Kevin Perez (bass) in 2021, Levitation Room have continued to expand their colorful, unearthly sound, a process that has culminated with the vibrant new album Strange Weather. Collaborating with former Brian Jonestown Massacre keyboardist Rob Campanella, Jason Kick (Mild High Club), and Black Crowes’ Joel Robinow, Levitation Room take a new step in their story and vision with Strange Weather. The record’s lyrical narratives—about love in the park, life in the city, and the fact that “The world today is such an illusion”—are appropriately steeped in ’60s sonics and a dreamy, lo-fi atmosphere. It’s spacey, celestial guitar music for escaping into, and “it feels just like heaven.”
YASAWA GROUP BIO
Matt Taylor co-founded The Growlers just past the turn of the century, and that was an immense force in the bellowing sound of the great American west. And maybe the Growlers did get too close to the sun but making guitar based pop music from California is to have to stare straight into all that glimmers and fades away. You have to answer to and show up at the Dick Dale Stomp or a Suicidal Tendencies’ circle pit, maybe an Eden Ahbez’s prayer circle and be back stage at No Doubt. The Growlers did this and beyond and now have their place in that long lineage.
But this is not that. This is YASAWA Group that we speak of, so let’s get that out of the way. Yasawa, the opening salvo of the Fijian lexicon's fifteen words for heaven. This is the Spoiled Milk And Honey fable of a Contemporary Musical Record in the early part of the 21 st century. This is the alternate soundtrack to the un-scheduled remake of ToLiveAndDieinLA, the pack of coyotes night howl, the train yards past Vernon, the sea gulls crying in the grime of a mid day white washed by the thin sky of the Anthropocene, the millions of gas pipes burning as the wind rustles over the rat shit wrapped in palm fronds. Is it blasphemous to speak poorly of the sun ?