Venue Review: The Smell, Los Angeles: Experimental Art Collective Venue
Avenue Review: The Smell, Los Angeles: Experimental Art Collective Venue
Los Angeles has always been touted as having the best music arts and creative scene in the world. This is true to a large extent, but it is not true the way we imagine it. The reason that Los Angeles and Southern California have such great music and art projects is that those projects that are just starting and formulating on the edge of boundaries, and ordinance, societal or otherwise; have traction in Los Angeles that they don’t have anywhere else. It has to do with an open-mindedness to embrace the weird and novel, the emergent and the rough around the edges. The polished label plant plays nightly across Hollywood, filling up large clubs and venues, playing the safe and tame interpretations of music; but the real edge defining, genre creating happens across many secluded and lesser-known, coven-like spaces, where the most underground and interesting music breeds and takes shape. One of these gems is ‘The Smell’. Why is it called the smell? Well, because it is smelly. The venue is located in the heart of downtown LA, at the feet of the largest skyscrapers that blot out the metropolitan sky above the dark and dank streets of a sleeping city, at that time music begins to float around the streets, from small venus and dank little clubs, playing Mexican Norte Corridos, banging out 90s club mixes. From this little smelly corner of the world, some of the greatest musical acts that have ever existed, have come together to a little smelly warehouse, where they have unleashed their most passionate and mind-bending projects onto the world. The smell is not run by a corporation but by the same evolving groups of punks and artists who have curated the space for decades. The smell is chiefly DIY, it is also chiefly underground. The smell attracts dissonance, and experimentation, it attracts attitude and actualization. If you are looking for that legitimately cultural experience, where dancing with a bunch of smelly kids in a warehouse listening to abrasive loud undefinable music is for you, then get over there already and join us sometime.
http://www.thesmell.org/
