Bill Raden

Opera experimentalist Yuval Sharon

A funny thing happened to Yuval Sharon on his way to a planned career as a film director. While studying at UC Berkeley, he decided to go to the opera. The production was Wozzeck by Alban Berg. To prepare, he listened to a recording at home and found his imagination fired by Berg's searing, atonal chromatic expressionism. Image after powerful image assailed him as he imagined the staging and what the performance would feel like sitting in the audience. Then he went to the opera house. Compared to his vision, the production seemed boring and bloodless, dispiritingly conventional.

The evening was an epiphany. Certainly such works deserved a better theatrical treatment than this. And he was just the man to do it.

Fast-forward to a recent, overcast morning at the Atwater Crossing complex, where Sharon stands in a raw warehouse he's transforming into the kind of opera house he imagined years before at Berkeley. It's no Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Crisscrossed by wooden ramps and dominated by seven towering, sculptural set pieces, it looks more like an art installation at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

In fact, it is the stage for the new experimental opera Sharon is directing as the inaugural production of the Industry, the avant opera company he formed this year with his partner, producer Laura Kay Swanson. Now in the final stretch of rehearsals, the production will be a world premiere of composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney's Crescent City, which Sharon fell in love with when he was programming New York Opera's acclaimed new-works showcase VOX.

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Deniz Kurtel

Deniz Kurtel makes dance music. She also creates LED sculptures. Saturday night at Los Globos, Kurtel brought together both of her artistic pursuits for her "Double Exposure" tour. Inside the venue, she played tracks from her latest release, The Way We Live. Right outside the club's patio, partygoers could check out her new installation inside a small trailer.

Called The Introspectacular, the LED piece is constructed from wood and plexiglass, both the clear and mirrored variety. The LEDs are controlled by a small keyboard, with each note triggering new colors and patterns of light. The faster you play, the faster the lights twinkle, reflecting off the mirrors to create the illusion of an endless maze-like room. Many people have told Kurtel that the experience is like stumbling inside a kaleidoscope.

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Aaron Frank

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood doesn't have the slightest objection to the term "commercial artist." Often considered the sixth member of the band Radiohead, the 44-year-old Essex native is responsible for all of the band's artwork since 1994 and has the commercial marketplace to thank, in part, for his success. "It's better than graphic designer," says Donwood, lounging in a leather chair at Subliminal Projects, which is scheduled to host the British artist's first exhibition in Los Angeles. Titled "Lost Angeles," the exhibition showcases Donwood's latest piece, an 18-foot-long panorama landscape of the city flooding and engulfed in flames.

Donwood began collaborating with Radiohead on their first hit record, The Bends, and has worked closely alongside the band ever since, authoring several books, holding gallery exhibitions and selling screenprints in between albums. Thumbing through stacks of vinyl as a teen, he was struck by the artwork of punk bands like the Dead Kennedys and Crass. "The record store was like the most democratic art gallery there was," Donwood explained. "There was all this artwork and it was all treated the same."

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Timothy Norris

Last weekend marked the kickoff of Coachella 2012. Either you know that's a huge music and arts and music and music festival, or you're new to L.A. And while this is the first year it's happening for two weekends, size doesn't matter, because one weekend or two, there's something I can guarantee will be on the lips of everyone in attendance. No, I'm not talking substances, I'm talking sound: "Whoo!"

Yeah, that's right, the edgy outburst that Merriam-Webster tells us is used to express sudden excitement, astonishment or relief. I mean, who wouldn't "whoo!" to be wowed by the likes of Abe Vigoda (the band), Bon Iver and SNL-heartthrob Florence and the Machine?

While many an Angeleno can tell you that Coachella has been around (officially) since 1999, who can tell you when "whoo" came about?

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Max Danziger

Rick Allen and his work Shape Shifter

"I threw my drum kit down the steps outside. All the drums landed in a heap on the driveway and I said, 'I don't want to do this.' I was almost 15 and that was it. I was giving up my career," says Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, rolling his eyes at the bratty 15-year-old-version of himself.

"Almost simultaneously," he adds, "there was an article in the newspaper that said, 'Leppard Loses Skins' and it talked about Def Leppard, a local group that had lost their drummer, so I called up, got an audition and I got the job."

The 48-year-old, one-armed British drummer, who has lived in California for 21 years, is relaxed and seated at a table on the patio of a busy Santa Monica cafe. He's wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, earrings and a brown beaded necklace. Though it is lunchtime, Allen hasn't ordered anything to eat or drink. Instead, he has brought a Thermos filled with distilled water and Himalayan sea salts. "Excuse me if I seem a little spacey," he says, explaining that he's on the second day of a three-week dietary cleanse.

Allen also has brought a clear plastic drum stick, one of two types used to create the images for his upcoming fine art debut, "Electric Hand: Rhythm + Change," a limited collection of abstract images created from computerized tracking of Allen's drum strokes, on display on his website www.rickallenart.com.

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Diego, 10, plays the piano near LACMA

On a sunny but breezy Saturday, 10-year-old Diego Grijalva of Gabriella Charter School in Echo Park found himself at 5900 Wilshire Blvd., seated at a piano designed by local artist Evan Skrederstu. Diego, who has played on his school's piano, was intrigued by the street piano and was playing a simple tune.

The piano, strategically placed adjacent to a line of food trucks across from LACMA is one of about 30 currently ensconced all over Los Angeles as part of the international public art installation "Play Me, I'm Yours."

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Tara Tavi

"I wanted it to be like a firework show," Sam McPheeters says about the crescendo of energy and tension in his debut novel, The Loom of Ruin. "It just gets more and more insane."

Co-founder of the legendary hardcore punk band Born Against, McPheeters' first novel will be released on Mugger Books -- a Los Angeles-based press run by an English and philosophy teacher at Compton High School. Between a music career, touring the world and writing a novel, McPheeters has written for the OC Weekly, The Village Voice and Vice Magazine. He lives in Pomona, and he told me about his journey to bring The Loom of Ruin to the shelf.

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Raymond M.

South by Southwest (or just "South by" if you're cool and/or in a fake hurry) is well under way, with the interactive and film portions kicking off last weekend and the biggest draw, the music, just beginning.

Couldn't make it all the way to Texas? Fuck it. For those of us left behind, we bring you the guide to re-creating SXSW here in Los Angeles. It's easier than you think, probably just as fun, and definitely not as much of a hassle.

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Courtesy Harold Lee

Harold Lee

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Harold Lee was a guitar player who dropped out of music school and found himself handling the marketing for a guitar store chain while he worked toward a business degree. One night, he watched his wife play Guitar Hero and have a great time.

"I just started thinking, why not use a real guitar instead of a piece of plastic?" Lee recalls. An idea was born: to make a mobile instructor that would work with any guitar -- and make learning an instrument more like learning a game.

Lee and his team faced a huge hurdle, though, and it had to do with pitch detection.

"Pitch detection for one note at a time is not that difficult -- guitar tuners can do it, and so can your ear," says Lee. "But the tricky part comes when more than one pitch at one time comes from the same instrument, like a guitar." That's called polyphonic pitch detection, and after scouring the research world for an expert in it, Lee and the company's co-founder, Tyson Butler, found Roger Dannenberg, head of the computer music department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Becky Sapp

For some, Los Angeles' musical history fits nicely into categories: There was bouncing beach pop, Laurel Canyon folk, West Coast rap and Sunset Strip rock. But behind this shroud of notable names and iconic acts, there is a richer, more diverse portrait of music in Los Angeles.

The Grammy Museum's new exhibit, "Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-1975," delves into L.A.'s music history, which, like the city itself, often is swept up in broad generalizations and stereotypes. The exhibit, curated by USC professor and music writer Josh Kun (who, full disclosure, was a grad school professor of mine), redraws L.A.'s musical map, focusing on hubs of creativity outside the usual suspects, revealing the sounds of East L.A., Watts and more. It explores the jazz history of Grand Avenue, which was outlined in Charles Mingus' autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, uncovering black and white musicians playing together at a time when segregation still festered.

The exhibit also investigates the influence of political and cultural clashes on L.A. music, focusing on the effects of public discord, including the Watts riots and the Vietnam War protests on the Eastside. The introductory placard for the exhibit provides a backdrop for music of this era: "A boon of wartime industry brought record numbers of Mexican immigrants and African Americans from the U.S. South to a growing metropolis rife with economic promise and racial segregation."

"Trouble in Paradise" isn't just about political upheaval and music -- instead it shows a Los Angeles that challenges the expectations of what our musical history looked, and sounded like. For an insight to L.A.'s real musical history, here are five little-known revelations and artifacts in the "Trouble in Paradise" exhibit.

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