With his new album, Year Of The Living Dead, out today, February 26, 2021 on Kompakt, Vienna-born and LA-based producer John Tejada finds a blissful extended moment of balance between the new and the familiar. Anyone who’s followed his career to date, which has included four previous albums for Kompakt, outings for storied labels like Plug Research, Playhouse and Cocoon, and numerous remixes and collaborations–most recently, his Wajatta duo with comedian and musician Reggie Watts–will immediately sense the warmth and eloquence that Tejada brings to his gilded, pliant techno and electro hybrids. But there’s more here, too; an explorer’s glimmer in the producer’s eye, as he gets to grips with new ways of working and being, while offering a reflective opening for the listener, something echoed in artwork by graphic designer and ‘contemplative artist’ David Grey.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, Don’t Let Get You Down, due out on the groundbreaking Brainfeeder label on February 28, 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada brings out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album, Casual High Technology, hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, Don’t Let Get You Down makes good on that promise.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Times Entertainment in association with The Montalbán is pleased to announce the World Premiere of The Soul of Broadway – Impossible Dreams starring Terron Brooks with musical direction by Mark Vogel on Sunday, November 3, 2019. This special one-night-only concert experience, produced and directed by Brian Purcell and choreographed by Leah Seminario, will bring a fresh perspective to Broadway songs—including classic and contemporary favorites —as Brooks reinterprets them all. The award-winning Brooks, best known for portraying Eddie Kendricks in NBC’s Emmy Award-winning miniseries The Temptations, has starred on Broadway in The Lion King as Simba and Hairspray as Seaweed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic music-based nonprofit Give a Beat launched the Prison Electronic Music Program in two California correctional facilities in July 2019 as part of a contract awarded by California Arts Council’s Arts in Corrections (AIC) program. The goal of Give a Beat’s year-long program—which focuses on the fundamentals of DJing and beat production—is to help students develop their own sound expressions and technical acumen while also learning business development and music history. It is designed to help students return to the workforce with valuable technical, social, and entrepreneurial skills. Led by passionate DJs and music producers, currently the course is being taught at California City Correctional Facility (CAC) and Kern Valley State Prison (KVSP). This first Prison Electronic Music Program will run through June 2020. It is Give a Beat’s most expansive and long-term music production offering/course to date.

Read the rest of this entry »

Saudade Theatre, the first Portuguese theatre company in the United States, presents the World Premiere of My Favorite Suicide, written and directed by acclaimed Portuguese playwright Mickaël de Oliveira, in a co-production with Lisbon-based theatre company Colectivo 84. My Favorite Suicide is an apocalyptic play that pits society and nature against each other, in which one extreme situation is debated in the context of another, even more, extreme circumstance. Performances of My Favorite Suicide will run from Friday, October 18 through Sunday, November 3, 2019, at 905 Cole Theatre at Anthony Meindl’s Actor Workshop in Hollywood, CA. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Atlas Obscura presents Red Thread, theatrical exploration of the concepts of chance and chaos with performer and award-winning magician Siegfried Tieber. Using sleight of hand, magic, and illusion, Tieber’s latest creation guides participants through an unlikely journey, blurring the line between the improbable and the impossible. The whole experience may leave Tieber’s guests wondering if their decisions are theirs and of their own free will, or if they are predetermined. Co-written by Jared Kopf, Red Thread will open on Thursday, October 3, 2019, and run through Sunday, November 10, 2019. Each evening will take place at Pskaufman Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, the subterranean art gallery and event space of award-winning shoe designer and creative visionary Paul Kaufman. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Highways turns 30! The performance space presents Behold! Highways’ Queer Fest 2019 May–June, its annual queer performance arts festival, which appropriately collides with the enduring creative space’s 30th birthday. From May 3rd through June 30, 2019, two months of new LGBTQIA work will be presented by Highways’ extended family of artists, writers and performers such as solo-theatre legend Tim Miller (a founder and original co-artistic director), eminent artist-activist Michael Kearns, the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer Sean Dorsey, and Black Lives Matter Co-founder Patrisse Cullors. Look for specific Dirty 30 anniversary events that bookend the festival (5/3, 5/4 and 6/29). Behold! will also feature such emerging performance artists and curators as Tyler Matthew Oyer, Marval A Rex, Celeste XXX, Moises Josue Michel, Kyoko Takenaka and Shruti Purkayastha. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Mount Wilson Observatory –  the scientific marvel above Pasadena, atop Mount Wilson – is pleased to announce the third season of its Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome, which will take place on the first Sunday of each month, inside the iconic vaulted dome of the 100-inch Hooker telescope. A wide range of musical adventures, thoughtfully curated by Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan, will be presented in this acoustically remarkable venue during the six-month run of the 2019 season, which concludes on October 6^th. See the Concert Series schedule and line-up below. Poised for rediscovery, the grounds of the legendary observatory— founded in 1904 by astrophysical pioneer George Ellery Hale—are open for free to the public year round. Read the rest of this entry »

Wajatta in November 2019
Extended Biography

When beat-boxer/comedian/musician Reggie Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer John Tejada first joined forces as Wajatta, the results were hailed as “a surprising and winning new collaboration” (NPR) and “in league with Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle’s classic house” (Los Angeles Times). Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic dance music, Watts and Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. It’s a cosmic collision of funk-infused techno and soul-steeped vocal acrobatics, equaling and at times surpassing the brilliance of their solo work.

Wajatta (a mashup of the artists’ last names, pronounced wa-HA-ta) began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in 2016, where John was playing a late-night DJ set and Reggie, a long-time fan of John’s propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds (John was born in Austria and raised in Los Angeles; Reggie moved at a young age from Germany to Montana and later Seattle) and similar interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.

When they began making music together, the chemistry was immediate. In their very first session at John’s home studio in Los Angeles, they completed three tracks. “It was pretty instantaneous,” Reggie agrees. “What he played me was really fun and sparked a lot of possibilities in my head.”

Their initial collaborations resulted in the acclaimed 2018 debut album, Casual High Technology, that seamlessly married Reggie’s mix of beat-boxing, scat-singing and multi-octave, R&B-inspired crooning with John’s nimble, harmonically rich forays into house, techno, hip-hop and beyond. Since that release, the two friends have squeezed more recording sessions into their demanding schedules, continuing to find new inspiration in one another’s talents. 

The best of those sessions are now part of a second full-length, Don’t Let Get You Down, due for release on Brainfeeder on February 28, 2020. As thrilling as Casual High Technology was, Don’t Let Get You Down is a major leap forward, a reflection of the way John and Reggie’s partnership has grown deeper and more intuitive.

They build most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done in person: “We never just share files,” John notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a neverending quest to, as Reggie puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, Don’t Let Get You Down’s 11 tracks crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games.

That organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. Besides a number of concerts in Los Angeles, they’ve performed a handful of shows around the U.S. — San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Taos — as well as high-profile events and festivals such as Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), and a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.

On Don’t Let Get You Down’s final track, “All I Need Is You,” listeners can get a taste of one of Wajatta’s most unique concerts. The fully improvised song was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington (Sia, Spike Jonze, FKA Twigs). It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Reggie’s off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”

Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into the American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/reggiewatts.

In Wajatta, Reggie infuses those same techniques into John’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” John explains. Though he’s a big fan of Reggie’s uncanny beat-boxing skills, John prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”

John, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings. Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Reggie delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/johntejadaofficial.

With influences ranging from Detroit techno to Chicago house, Marvin Gaye to Mantronix, Wajatta’s sound is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Reggie vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and John’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Reggie says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.”

On April 11, 2018, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts announced its 2018 Artist Project Grants recipients. Among the ten recipients, Fulcrum Arts was awarded a $40,000 grant for its ambitious Lawrence English project Sirens, which will launch during its A×S Festival starting November 2, 2018. In fact, Sirens will be the highlight of Fulcrum Arts’ 10-day biennial festival. English will create a site-specific installation utilizing some of the remaining 160 civil defense sirens – the original role of their sound was as an agent for alert and protection from WWII through the Cold War – that are scattered across Los Angeles. Reappropriating the sirens for the project, the artist will employ sound as a means to create a spatial mapping, reconfiguring Los Angeles’s geographic, political and historical landscapes. 

Read the rest of this entry »