Bella Lieberberg

Este, Alana and Danielle Haim

​"It's hysterical to think about now," says Danielle Haim, guitarist from Los Angeles band Haim. "But honestly we never even knew we could make money playing shows. We played for free so many times that we could have gotten paid; I felt bad even asking." And yet somehow, with consistently crammed shows and a few famous admirers, Haim have been building a serious local buzz.

It's a sunny weekday afternoon and the three sisters Haim -- bassist Este (oldest), guitarist/keys/maracas Alana (youngest), and Danielle (middle) -- all vocalists as well, are sitting around the living room table in their parents' Valley Village house where they rehearse, and where Alana still lives. Their mother Donna emerges from the kitchen with a bowl of Israeli chocolates. Their father Mordechai, who is Israeli, comes into the living room now and again to check on his daughters.

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Marianne Williams

​Six years after the members of Big Sir were forced to confront their mortality head-on, singer-composer Lisa Papineau and bassist Juan Alderete are back with their third album of jazz-prog-electronic jams, Before Gardens, After Gardens.

Right around the time they were finishing their last album Und Die Scheiße Ändert Sich Immer, they both fell ill and were diagnosed with serious diseases. Alderete discovered he had polycythemia vera, a rare bone marrow disease where the body produces too many blood cells, while Papineau was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. "The bottom fell out," says Papineau. "In the midst of this juncture, Juan dreamed a song, woke up, recorded it and emailed it to me in Paris. He said, 'I know it may be corny to say this, but from now on everything we do really has to make a difference ... even if only to us ... there's no point any more to do less.'"

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Michael Miller

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Michael Miller and Paul Stewart had capped a successful Kickstarter project and planned a digital imprint of their book, a collection of photographs from the golden era of West Coast hip hop, called West Coast Hip Hop: A History In Photos. But the coffee table book garnered enough interest for a hard cover edition and fine art print show, opening this Saturday at Known Gallery.

"I started shooting in 1988, in Paris," says Miller. "I was actually painting houses and I just happened to meet Peter Lindbergh, the world-renowned fashion photographer. He gave me my first professional camera. I helped him out on a few shoots." Miller had his first big job with Cacharel, a huge French fashion brand. He shot Linda Evangelista, Karen Mulder, and Elaine Erwin, some of the era's biggest supermodels.

But getting access to supermodels would prove simple compared to the likes of Tupac Shakur, Cypress Hill and Ice Cube.

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​See also:
*Lana Del Rey - The Troubadour - 12/7/11
*The Problem With Lana Del Rey (Is You)

Lana Del Rey used to be known as Lizzy Grant, and her song "Trash," a live performance of which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, is remarkable for its tacky narrator. She is pure trailer trash. Her fake nails are decorated with "pink tiger stripes." Her hair is "high and white." Her flower is tight. "Don't you want to come to my motel, honey?" she sings to a hick named Bill.

This Lizzy Grant -- who has an edge and real stage-presence -- is nothing like the Lizzy Grant you've been reading about, the one who Thought Catalog claimed made "pop music for bored college girls who shop at Anthropologie."

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Mike Vorassi

​Future Islands is on a mission -- to not have one. Five years after their founding, the Baltimore trio remains as categorically amorphous as ever. Their Twitter tagline contends that they're "Too noisy for new wave, too pussy for punk," and indeed they go out of their way to skirt genres. Lead singer Samuel Herring calls it artistic freedom.

"We just want to show what it's like to be completely unguarded," the frontman explains as the band crosses the Iowa plains in their re-purposed "Hugs and Kisses" pet-grooming mobile. "It's about getting away from the dudes in the dude suits."

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​How to avoid parodying himself must be director David Lynch's biggest challenge these days.

Lynch does his trademarked Lynchian dark dreams again (and again) on his solo debut album Crazy Clown Time, a collection of tunes recorded in his home studio with himself on guitar and voice. But Lynch's songs are not songs per se but obsessive single-note drones over plodding beats strewn with heavily reverbed atmospheres and sundry sounds.

"Pinky's Dream" opens the experience with the musical motifs that pervade the album: a slow thumping drum, twanging Stratocasters and scraping string ambience through heavy washes of reverb/tremolo. Its noir-concentrate ambience is aided by singer Karen O of the YeahYeahYeahs, presumably puffing a cigarette.

And who is Pinky? Lynch doesn't say exactly, he infers: "Pinky's dream / blowin' away." The menace wisps in and out, even on "Good Day Today," where Lynch claims he's tired of negative news but can't help savoring the tension. A few tracks such as "So Glad" stand for nothing much more than the sensual chill of slow snare thwacks and slinky tremolo'd Strats; here Lynch enacts (presumably) a creepy old misogynist railing about his departed "ball and chain."

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Justin Bua

​Justin Bua is a hip-hop painter; you may have seen the print of his painting "The DJ" (see below), at Target, of all places. It's been out for over a decade, and has been selling ridiculous amounts of copies for years.

He's done portraits of everyone from Nas to Kool Herc to Queen Latifah. How to recognize a Bua? His characters' arms tend to be stretched like they're made of Silly Putty, as you can see in the portraits collected in his new book, The Legends of Hip Hop. He taps into, and then magnifies, the essence of each artist: "The DJ's" fingers are elegantly elongated, b-boy Ken Swift's Adidas-clad foot seems to belong to a giant, and Jay Z slouches into his throne atop the Brooklyn Bridge.

We met up with him at Silver Lake "wellness bar" Naturewell, where he told us about his evolution. He wasn't always into specific portraits; with works like "The DJ" he intended to create everyman portrayals. "Likeness is great, but it's secondary. I want to capture what's beneath the surface. That's dangerous."

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​Like a latter-day Serge Gainsbourg, the singer Adanowsky emanates cosmic sensuality, leaving a trail of fluttery-eyed females in his musky, potent wake. Such was the case as he glided through Harvard and Stone last week, all furrowed brow and crumpled shirt, looking like a broken-hearted mariachi without a guitar. (He also performs in L.A. tonight and tomorrow; details at the bottom of the post.)

Adanowsky, whose real name is Adan Jodorowsky, was in town from Mexico City to perform songs from his latest album, Amador -- Spanish for 'lover.' It's a collection of croony folk ballads designed to inspire long afternoons in bed and prolonged eye contact.

Amador is second in a series of four records, geared at exploring "the corporeal, the emotional, the sexual and the intellectual" in that order, he tells us, sitting in the cramped smoking area behind Harvard and Stone. "It's the earth, water, fire and air." Each album sees Adanowsky adopt an entirely new character and this persona, the Amador, is quite simply "obsessed with love," Jodorowsky continues.

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Beth Maher

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She ain't no Princess Peach, but Kreayshawn now has her very own video game. Kreayshawn: The Game bowed earlier this month, courtesy of Toronto-based illustrator-cum-game-designer Beth Maher. The 8-bit creation places the L.A. rapper alongside Van Halen, Michael Jackson and Journey, among others, in the gaming realm.

"I thought it would be fun," Maher tells us over email, adding that it's her first game and she built it through a workshop helping young women to get into video game development. "A line like 'I got the swag, and it's pumping out my ovaries' deserves to be immortalized somehow, and I think video games -- as an art form -- can function as pop-cultural commentary."

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Illustration by Art Spiegelman

​Story by Erik Himmelsbach

Van Dyke Parks lives on the fringes of the city, up the hill in the northeasternmost nook of Pasadena. He's comfortable there; it's a geographic mirror of his own five-decade career as a culty wingman whose fingerprints are conspicuous on several gargantuan moments in pop history. He's been a recording artist, film scorer, producer, arranger and, most famously, muse to Brian Wilson during the doomed Smile project.

Now 68, he's asserting his own body of work through an avenue of the record racket that has mostly escaped him during his five-decade career: live performance. "Being in a room, working without a net, flying like a Wallenda, acrobatically, with this thing that fascinates me, the song form," he says.

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