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| Pitchfork |
 Thom Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the most interesting works made about the malleable personality of a real place. With the help of dozens of famous movie clips, it depicts how the city of Los Angeles-- even the places that define its real-world identity-- wound up reduced through the lens of Hollywood to the shorthand of "L.A.," a locale turned unreal through geographically impossible car chases, architecturally incongruent houses, and fake-urban setpieces built in the middle of the desert. The farther east you are, the likelier it is you've been more familiarized with a silver-screen abstract idea of L.A. than the whole, and it's not even necessarily the same abstract idea that other people might have. In subtitling itself Narrative of a City, Proximal Records aims to pull the same abstraction that the movies do, reshaping not a neighborhood or a landmark but a corner of the city's music scene in its own image.The catch is that they don't quite have their own image yet-- in fact, this isn't so much a label overview as it is a scene overview, and a far-reaching one at that. This is an aesthetic that's emerged out of satellites that spin around Los Angeles' resonant Low End Theory diaspora, a base of instrumental hip-hop that splits the difference between Oxnard weed breaks and London dubstep, then simmers it in a base of electro-inflected g-funk. But that's already become an entrenched sound in the last couple of years, something people are starting to build off and mutate in their own disparate directions. And Proximity One pulls from such a wide array that it's hard to take away anything especially unified from it, which is a good sign if you're interested in a city's sonic diversity but a bit of a problem if you want an album you'll probably like more than half of. Still, it isn't a bad start. The narrative conceit helps corral what could have been a chaotic mess, dividing everything into four "chapters" with distinct focuses. Chapter One is the shortest, funkiest, and most accessible, a mini-movement of breezy, borderline psychedelic lowrider bounce that peaks early with an unusually short but joyous Dâm-Funk track ("A Day at the Carnival"). Subsequent chapters dive further into successively wonkier, more abstract corners, filled with off-beat breaks and crackling surface noise and bursts of transplanted melodic fragments. It's wide-ranging, running the gamut from ambient post-dubstep (Suzuki 8-Ball's "Nine-Wing") to bleary-eyed Madlib homages (Juj's "Creep") to feints at Flying Lotus' transcendent meditations (Shlohmo's "Glue Stick"). But it feels like there isn't enough there there-- it mostly comes across like comfort-food reiterations of sounds that felt a bit more bracing in 2007. When scene vet Daedelus breaks through in the last chapter with the gorgeous, soul-warping dubstep cut "Off Angles Edges", it becomes that much more obvious how far some of these other artists' styles have to go....full text |
| Alphapuprecords |
| Proximal Records is a Los Angeles-based independent record label with a mission of supporting and promoting vibrant new voices in the local electronic music community. The brainchild of L.A. natives Carl Madison Burgin, better known as Sahy Uhns, and composer/ producer Jeff Elmassian, Proximal provides a home for local artists to connect and collaborate. Their debut release, Proximity One: Narrative of a City, takes the listener through the musical landscape of Los Angeles as they hear it. With a disregard for popularity and scene, Proximity One juxtaposes established and up-and-coming talent and the result is a cohesive and inspired record. Proximity One: Narrative of a City features L.A. staples such as DaM-FunK and Daedelus, current beat-makers such as Teebs and TOKiMonsta, and Proximal's very own Sahy Uhns, Benedek, Lawrence Grey, Wake and BearClaw. With vision, talent and a commitment to the city of Los Angeles, Proximal Records will always be a step apart and a step ahead....full text |
| Urb |
| Los Angeles is a paradox. It has an international reputation as the quintisential American city, yet driving around in its sprawling urban and suburban sprawl, any sense of positive, unique cultural identity is swamped by negatives — endless concrete and asphalt, strip mall, car lots and fast food drive-throughs. For a place so iconic, it’s remarkably hard to find a there there. In the past few years, though, something big has happened in LA with the rise of a cohort of new instrumental hip hop producers. While Flying Lotus is the most famous, the scene is wider and deeper than just Steve Ellison and his friends in the Brainfeeder crew. Proximal Records is a new record label formed to document the musical output of this new LA sound and Proximity One: Narrative of a City is the label’s debut release. The most prominent contributors to this compilation — Dam-Funk, Daedalus and TOKiMONSTA — might be the hooks that pull in the curious listener, but as nice as their contributions are (a space-disco joint “A Day at the Carnival” from Dam-Funk, a meloncholy sample-fest from “Cigarette Lust” TOKiMONSTA, and a dubby stepper “Off Angle Edges” from Daedelus), the less well-known artists are just as crucial to making Proximity One a satisfying listen. Owen Vallis’ “Trunk” employs heavy swing time and big bass drops to update the Boards Of Canada’s stoner head-nod sound. The corrosively cynical spoken word piece by Rosie Diveen on “Sea Water” rubs uneasily with Denny Denny Breakfast’s woozy beatmaking. ”Buttabump” by Wake is constructed from clipped, crusty little sound-bites, stitched together so drily the track seems to contain as much silence as sound....full text |
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