Alum’s record label Los Angeles Music Project mixes music, management

UCLA alumnus Joshua Brooks first began to experiment with mixing music after one of his friends bought him a set of turntables in 2001. Then a physical geography student, Brooks began playing at local parties, but he never expected to work full-time in music. However, the original gift prompted a musical career that has included playing at Coachella, curating a music blog and launching an independent record label, Los Angeles Music Project.

Brooks said when he began his DJing, he played a lot of trance music and enjoyed mixing music from Paul van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, and John Digweed. Although he got a teaching degree in earth science after graduating from UCLA, his DJ career came to the forefront when he co-founded Los Angeles Music Project with his business partner, Alex Slater. The label has a roster of nine electronic dance music artists and will celebrate its two-year anniversary Friday at V Lounge in Santa Monica.

Los Angeles Music Project began after Slater met Brooks while he was working as a DJ. Although Brooks played a plethora of instruments, including the clarinet, saxophone and trumpet before college, he said he first started to think about music seriously at UCLA after receiving praise for his work as a DJ at parties.

“I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing right now if it weren’t for my experience with music that I gained while I was here at UCLA,” Brooks said.

He said the label, which he and Slater started to help artists manage their careers and market themselves to larger record labels, puts out music that especially caters to college students. When they work with an artist, Brooks and Slater help with release strategies, album artwork and booking shows. Slater said their goal is to allow artists to focus solely on their music while learning to manage themselves.

“Here’s a good way to think about our label: we’re like an incubator,” Slater said. “We curate and pick artists specifically and then try and push them in certain trajectories through their own means.”

Since neither of them had managed artists before Los Angeles Music Project, Brooks said he and Slater faced a few challenges when they initially founded the label.

“You’re going to learn a lot from other people, but a lot of it we learned on our own through trials and errors,” Brooks said. “One of the big things that we’ve learned is just going out and making connections … and having a presence in the music scene that you want to be involved in.”

Brooks said that these connections have evolved into friendships that he never thought would happen, including friendships with artists Gladiator and Bixel Boys.

“I’ve met some amazing people,” Brooks said. “It’s funny that I can call some of these people my friends and realize that they’re looked at so differently from the way I look at them.”

Brooks also said that he struggled with consistency when he first started the label.

“When I first started, I wasn’t … putting out content regularly, making music regularly and just connecting with people,” Brooks said.

Brooks said that he became more consistent with his output last year when he and Slater started the Los Angeles Music Project blog, where they post commentary on weekly mixes and daily tracks. Slater said the blog has a 1,000-person email list and each post gets about 200-300 views a day. Slater added the two intentionally focus on reviewing songs from artists that they do not represent.

“We wanted to represent ourselves as knowledgeable in the industry and gain the respect of the people around us without being pretentious,” Slater said. “We’re just nerds at the end of the day. We love music that much that we will want to spend time creating those things.”

Both Slater and Brooks said they sometimes find that the connotations of the electronic dance music genre are inconsistent with their musical focus.

“(Electronic dance music) is a general catch-all for that genre of music, which is fine to associate with, but I wouldn’t necessarily pigeonhole us as EDM,” Brooks said.

Brooks said the label’s artists focus on house and tech house music, which he said is less of what one would find at a large electronic dance music concert and more appropriate at a smaller party setting. One such artist is Greg Gonzalez, who plays under the name Templeton and will headline the label’s anniversary party.

“I think that’s the cool part of where music is now. Before, you had to really be something and that was it,” Gonzalez said. “Now, it’s like, ‘Well, I can release this style on this label and I can release this style on that label and it’s still all good.'”

Slater said he and Brooks encourage their artists to explore musically without forcing them to put out a certain number of tracks.

“I think our goal is to get Templeton in a mindset where he doesn’t have to worry about the ancillary appendages of his existence,” said Slater. “(He can) just make music, which is what he wants to do.”

Slater said they plan to continue working on the blog in the future. He said they also want to produce smaller events instead of the huge parties that they have hosted in the past.

“We’re going to make more of an effort to produce specific events that are smaller in scale but more intimate,” Slater said. “At the end of the day, (we want to) provide a story for people to tell when they come out of (an event).”