Kutmah's 
Deportation Blues

Courtesy Kutmah

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

You can't sort 30 years of life in 30 seconds. But that's what confronted Kutmah on the morning of May 5, 2010. Except that he didn't know it at the time. So when he asked the immigration authorities if he could bring his sunglasses to block the sour light of 6 a.m., they snickered that he wouldn't need them where he was going. Then they ushered the artist-DJ-producer out of his idyllic L.A. life and into a grim holding facility in New Mexico.

It's been almost two years since Kutmah was deported, and those who know him sustain a quiet vigil. Born in Brighton, England, Justin McNulty came to Los Angeles when he was 12; here he attended high school and established a reputation as a vital underground artist.

Nanette Gonzales

Blessed with impeccable taste and the ability to mix ostensibly incompatible songs, McNulty emerged as a fearless and boundary-pushing DJ at Dublab and Low End Theory. Starting in 2004, his Sketchbook Sessions at Little Temple helped build L.A.'s celebrated beat scene. His wood sketches of nudes attracted renown. Larry David might have said his life was "pretty, pretty good."

The albatross was a voluntary departure agreement McNulty inked in 1997, wrongly assuming marriage was imminent. Neither the 6,000 signatures the "Free Kutmah" cause accrued, nor his community value mattered to the law, so the government repatriated him to England.

But it's not where you're from, it's where your records are at. One hundred weeks later, McNulty's vinyl and heart remain in Los Angeles, though his dentist is in London.
"Nothing's been terrible. But I don't drink beer and I don't like soccer," McNulty says the day after a root canal. "I don't feel very English."

He's well aware that England is probably the world's best place to be trapped. But though his old digs in East London reminded him of Echo Park, it's not home. Now he's in Brixton, where he has started up a Sketchbook night and hosts a radio show on Internet station NTS.

The exodus allowed McNulty to travel for the first time in his adult life. There were shows in Egypt, Israel, Italy, Germany and London, where he's rocked alongside his peripatetic Low End Theory peers. Beyond friends and family, McNulty misses many of L.A.'s amenities: car stereos, the sense of musical community, tacos. His deportation order stands for eight more years, but McNulty can apply to return earlier, although that ordeal could take up three years -- if it happens at all.