“There’s a thing about Los Angeles. If you come from an older city, this one is only 100 years old, which is remarkable for its size, so it feels like it doesn’t have a character. But because it’s so new, it’s constantly being rewritten and molded,” Garrett ‘Jacknife’ Lee tells me. In the 21st century, all urban spaces are palimpsests — places with physical and visual remnants of their pasts erased, but always creeping through. Thom Andersen captured the cinematic ways Los Angeles Plays Itself, while The Huntington Library holds a vast collection of maps that reveal how Los Angeles has been visually imagined in works of fiction by native Angelenos and newcomers to the city alike. On their debut album Los Angeles (released 3 November), Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee conjure up a sonic cartography of the (in)famous city.
Los Angeles…
