Credit: Claudia Lucia

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

Until recently, it was tricky to quantify Alejandro Cohen's contributions to the L.A. underground-music world. He's a Swiss army knife of an artist -- the sort of indispensable but underpublicized figure who inevitably helps form the dorsal column of any vibrant art scene.

The Buenos Aires-raised Cohen is foremost a musician, initially as half of Languis, a fondly remembered Eastside band that toiled for a decade starting in the late '90s. He is the artist as selector: a DJ at online radio shrine Dublab (where he's also general manager), a curator of Argentine post-punk compilations and the creator of audiovisual tributes to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. He's also a composer of original scores for PBS programs and documentaries, and a connector who is responsible for dozens of inspired interactions between seemingly far-flung music worlds.

Credit: Tommy B

If you Google "Oak Park Music," the first result is "the Wedding Music DJs." The bedroom suburb of 14,000 is wedged between Malibu and Agoura. You've probably driven past it a hundred times on the 101 and never stopped. There are no large clubs or live music venues. It's the least likely place to have incubated Classixx, L.A.'s best dance-music duo.

During the early '00s, when Michael David and Tyler Blake attended Oak Park High, the reigning sound was post-Sublime or Incubus-ish -- the result of the latter band forming in nearby Calabasas.

"Every Oak Park band wanted to be Incubus. What we're doing now is probably just a reaction to that," says David, sporting a light brown beard, backward snapback, dapper dress shirt and two left earrings. We're speaking in his blue and white Venice bungalow. Ironically, Brandon Boyd, lead singer of Incubus, is a neighbor.

Credit: Andy J Scott

Rapper Open Mike Eagle was barred from playing Harvard & Stone

One man's purity is another man's segregation. You don't expect to encounter those ideas in Hollywood in 2013, but they creep in through coding and innuendo.

Public racial slurs are rare, but people casually mention frequenting a club until it became overtaken by "the...well, you know." The doorman in Knocked Up was only half joking when he expressed his hopes for a black midget in the crowd, because the club promoters only permitted one and a quarter blacks for every 25 whites.

Credit: Todd Cole

Let's just get this out of the way. Until now, Jennifer and Jessica Clavin have been primarily known for singing and playing bass in the seminal Smell punk band Mika Miko. This biographical information has burrowed its way to the forefront of every article written about their new band, Bleached.

The sisters point this out before I can even turn on my tape recorder. But the constant references to their past successes are more of a stamp of quality than an attempt to link them to a bygone era. After all, anyone who saw Mika Miko perform during their 2003-09 run became an instant convert. Four girls created a four-alarm blaze, aided by bleeding saxophone licks and Jennifer shout-singing into a red telephone.

Rheteric Ramirez

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

Rheteric Ramirez raps like a welterweight prizefighter. His flow bobs and weaves. Double-timed uppercuts of words follow methodical chants. Rhyme schemes ring bells like a flurry of jabs. It is his rap-a-dope technique.

This is no coincidence. Over the last decade, the philosophical pugilist born Eric Betances has earned a rep for original cadences, bruising punch lines and naturally brass knuckles. He's a Glendale-raised music geek who also used to, in boxing parlance, "take teeth." He's fluent in the catalogs of everything from Freestyle Fellowship to Arthur Lee's Love, Ariel Pink to Black Randy and the roots of Los Angeles punk.

"I'm basically a very respectful person who had trouble dealing with other people's sarcasm and the disrespectful things they would say leading up to a fight," Ramirez, in his early 30s, says over iced coffee in Koreatown (he lives in West L.A.). "The only option mentally was violence, but I grew out of it by learning to confront things in other ways. I couldn't be a caveman."

Jennie Warren

Cecilia "CeCe" Valencia and David "Tattoo" Gonzalez, former hosts of KDAY's morning show

"Remember KDAY?"

Tupac asked that question on "To Live & Die in LA," but the answer was obvious. Makaveli never even lived in Southern California during the first AM incarnation of KDAY, but the memory of America's first all-rap radio station was already a rallying cry by 1996.

See also: KDAY, the Gangsta Rap Oldies Station, Breaks New Ground by Playing Music From the Bad Old Days

So when its call letters were revived here in 2004, it was the next best thing to Tupac's resurrection. Eventually settling in as one of America's only classic hip-hop signals, KDAY's return was better than the announcement of new episodes of Arrested Development. The Bluth family will get older, but '90s G-Funk stays the same age. Then in 2008, KDAY closed again.

Credit: Ysa Perez

Danny Brown

Beware any tutorial about the "right way" to do Coachella. Stay sentient, steer clear of phosphorescent forms in spirit hoodies, drink water, and never mix barbiturates and liquor. It's a music festival, not an MBA entrance exam. I trust you.

But as Shawn and Jimmy Carter taught us, you've got to learn to live with regrets. Something in the Sahara Tent will overlap with the main stage and you'll have to use the bathroom, the line will be long, and you'll run into that annoying, tank-topped broner from high school. Chaos.

Roughly 150 acts are scattered across three days and 36 hours. You might be unfamiliar with some performers in small print on the flier. Ergo, an abridged Bizarre Ride guide to Coachella -- inclined toward those whose eyes are red from things other than the Internet.

Credit: Susboy

Slightly sick and bone-weary, Shlohmo staggers past airport security and baggage claim to hop into his ride back to his apartment near Fairfax. After sleeping in two dozen beds over the last month, the 23-year-old electronic producer's plane has just returned from his first national tour as a solo headliner. His friends are offering a victory spliff.

The celebration is earned. Few musicians have had as good a run as Shlohmo over the last two years. In the last month alone, the West L.A.-raised art school dropout unleashed the rapturously received Laid Out EP and "Bo Peep (Do U Right)," a collaboration with Def Jam R&B lothario Jeremih. The latter received "Best New Track" honors from Pitchfork, 300,000 SoundCloud plays in its first days of release and unofficial distinction as the best song The Weeknd never made.

See also: Edward "Apple" Nelson Is a Legendary L.A. Drummer and 70-Year-Old Yoga Enthusiast

Sir Jinx is the missing link. He is a vital nerve. Remove the South Central-raised producer from history, and the space-time continuum of West Coast hip-hop is warped for the worse. Check the resume: Jinx produced much of Ice Cube's canonized first three solo records, WC & The Maad Circle's Ain't A Damn Thang Changed, Yo-Yo's debut, Xzibit's 40 Dayz & 40 Nightz and Kool G Rap & DJ Polo's Live & Let Die.

Nelson in Apple and Three Oranges

You could mistake the funky drummer born Edward Nelson for a decade and a half younger than his 70 years. We're in the Highland Park offices of Now-Again Records, the soul archeologists responsible for anthologizing the love-struck early '70s grooves of his group, Apple and the Three Oranges. Right now he's doing the airplane pose, and the elastic New Orleans native is demonstrating through yoga that time has done nothing to dim his agility.