If you’re unfamiliar with the notion of the exquisite corpse, it’s a drawing game based on collective effort. A paper gets folded into thirds, one person fills the first third, then it gets passed on to the next participant. The lines continue, snakes become deformed heads, sunsets become melting Crayola acid landscapes, brute male figures become voluptuous women, and the final product is nearly unrecognizable to the person who began it. By this same process of musical mutation, Los Angeles’ Human Ear Music has passed along styles and songs among its collective members until their final sound has become an author-less accumulation all its own.
The record label began with Jason Grier, the curator of the project who lived for an entire year in an apartment lit by neon bulbs because he didn’t want to part with his pair of secondhand prescription sunglasses. Or actually, it began with Ariel Pink who initially made hour-long drone tapes using only his car stereo and mouth until recently gaining the attention of experimental rock group Animal Collective’s label Paw Tracks. Or possibly it began out of the primordial ooze at California Institute of the Arts where the all- original Human Ear members met and chose to make psych-rock that works like disco.
Human Ear Music has championed its own sound in a world of hyper-mediated record and distribution deals. Grier and Pink founded Human Ear Music in Los Angeles in 2006 and now have a dozen artists. Their collective environment and self-produced records allow each musician the freedom to float between bands, create innumerable collaborative efforts, and work their own underground network of shows and albums.
“In the way that we’re doing it, we get all the benefits. It’s almost one step above MySpace in how much approval you’re allowed, how much validation you can get,” Grier said. In other words, within their self-governed world of underground music, they’re allowed to fill their own niche, however jarring or deconstructed it may be.
The bands that make up Human Ear Music’s distinctive sound, a product of Ariel’s low-fi recording techniques and friends’ own goth/vamp/samba bedroom noises, are notably unmarketable ““ not to say they’re not completely nuanced, genuine and sounding like they were culled from the historical dregs of the last 100 years of Americana. Pink describes his musical ethic as eliminating such designations as “good” and “bad.”
“There’s no such thing as a good song, there’s only an experience. A product at the end, a production in the sense of everything coming together and being what it is.”
However, in organizing the entire “business aspect” from Jason’s apartment near Koreatown, Human Ear has legitimate say in how they’re represented and what product they want to create. Of this burgeoning DIY ethic, Janet Kim of Human Ear band the Softboiled Eggies describes the solidarity of collaborating musicians as essential to the preservation of new music.
“We should help each other against the bigger people. We’re already so smashed down, there’s already so much against us,” said Kim.
Which means, though you may not see them double billed with the Decemberists, if you look hard enough around L.A., you’re bound to find something affiliated with Human Ear. Family Bookstore off Fairfax carries their compilations alongside local zines and other hand-selected works from L.A. artists. Their shows at the Echo Park gallery space Tiny Creatures are big deals when supported by projection shows, complete with Eastern-influenced snake goddesses mixed with gently waving trees.
Their musical range itself is so broadly based, you’re just as likely to see Vanilla Ice-inspired girl group Weave! at a hip-hop club as goth-styled Geneva Jacuzzi at the Echo. So, unless you can get out of L.A., Human Ear bands are essentially unavoidable, even if you may not know who they are. While no one is individually high profile, they are immersed in the music culture.
Which means, whether you believe their music indulgent or wholly original, unlistenable or the correct blank slate for the reinvention of pop, they’re residing in L.A. for as long as their music keeps mutating.