Hey guys!
We just got back from spring break, and it’s been such a strange adjustment coming back to school. I spent spring break road tripping through the Southwest with my parents, and saw a lot of incredible national parks and took literally over 1500 pictures. I’m forcing myself to save the editing for post-midterm season, but we’ll see how long I can hold out on that– I already cheated and went through a few I was really excited about.
In the past, I’ve blogged about my concert experiences at USC and around LA (check out my post here). I’ve seen some of my favorite artists perform here, pretty much every artist ends up making a stop in LA. However, something that was on my bucket list since last semester was going to an event hosted by an organization known as Sofar Sounds. SoFAR stands for Songs from a Room, and the basic concept of their events is that they host local underground artists in small local venues, and you don’t know who’s performing till you get there. You know the date and the neighborhood of the venue when you buy tickets, and the address is announced the day before the event. You get there, and find out who you’ll be listening to- attendance for these events is usually capped to around 50 people, and there are 2-3 artists per show. I wrote about potentially trying this out in my last post (the one I linked above), and the Thursday before spring break, my friend (and fellow VSA!!) Aarya and I went to one in Venice!!
Venice is one of my absolute favorite neighborhoods in LA– it’s so laid back, the streets are wide and there’s sick murals all over. Abbott Kinney is a famous road that runs a few blocks from the beach, and is kind of “downtown” for the Venice neighborhood, and our concert was actually on Abbott Kinney!! The concert was in a clothing store next door to Blue Bottle Coffee (another one of my absolute favorites), check out the sweet setup!!
We happened to go to this concert on International Women’s Day, so all three artists were female, and sO SO GOOD!!! We got to see DQN, an indie/folk/R&B artist with killer fashion, Eva B Ross, a soulful R&B performer (and UCLA alum but otherwise perfect), and Alicia Blue, a super unique indie rock artist. Eva B Ross was my favorite artist, and the best part of going to a concert in such an intimate setting was that we got to hang out and chat with the artists after their performances. Aarya and I, once we got over our fangirl nerves, went up and talked to Eva for a bit, and she was even cooler in person than she was as a performer, which is saying a LOT. She told us about the EP she just recorded and invited us to some house shows in the future; how sick is that?!
I probably talked about this in my last post, but I grew up absolutely loving music. My parents played Beatles albums in the car, I played piano for over half my life and I was super involved in jazz band in high school. Coming to college in LA was a dream come true for me because of the insane music scene, but this event made me see a different part of the music community here. While it’s awesome to see my favorite bands and big-name artists perform, an event like this was truly a community event, and everyone there was there for the live music experience, regardless of what music was actually being performed. Meeting the people around us and the artists made me realize how lucky I am to be in such a vibrant cultural city like LA. I thought the entire event was pretty rad, and Aarya and I had a great time. I’ll definitely be going to more of these events in the future!!
That’s all I got for this week, as always, fight on!!
Rhea
