Credit: Brick Stowell

If you want to understand where Alexander Spit is coming from, consider the abridged ingredients list that fueled his commercial debut, A Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside: an iMac, ProTools, a piano, a four-track recorder, two 11x17 drawing sketchbooks, cigarettes, marijuana, beer, whiskey, MDMA and psilocybin.

Mushrooms and molly are off today's menu on a bright February Friday afternoon at Spit's two-bedroom apartment in Virgil Village. The Bay Area-bred producer-rapper of Filipino ancestry is sticking to softer psychedelics, twisting spliffs with scientific precision.

It's a welcome respite from a frenzied six weeks. The 25-year-old born Alexander Manzano just released his first album for respected indie-rap imprint Decon, played Last Call With Carson Daly, and dropped a highly praised, "Method-acted" music video re-creation of Hunter S. Thompson's trek from L.A. to Las Vegas -- in which Spit's drugs took hold well before the edge of the desert. It encapsulates the doom-laden vibes and berserk distortion of his breakout record.

Credit: Rebekkah Castellanos

When Edrina Martinez was a little girl, she wanted to be an astronaut or a rock star. Two things got in the way of the 21-year-old electronic producer who calls herself Astronautica: lack of science skills and the Low End Theory.

"I was always enamored by space and how big and massive it is...except I sucked at math and science," Martinez remembers of her early years in San Dimas, home of the most excellent waterslides but not exactly a hotbed for ethereal and aqueous beats. Today wearing a scoop-neck tee and black leggings, she is olive-toned and of Filipino, Mexican and Nicaraguan ancestry.

It's rare that you hear a rap song on the radio and your only thought is, "Who produced this?" That's what happened last summer when I first heard Kid Ink's "Drippin'." The beat sounded like the trap on Alpha Centauri: a nightclub brawl between funky extraterrestrial synths and bludgeoning drums, a missing link between The Neptunes and Lex Luger.

The producer was 23-year-old Khalief "KB" Brown, a Virginia-bred, Rancho Cucamonga-based former shipyard worker, legal assistant and ASCAP intern.

See also: What the Hell is Trap Music (and Why is Dubstep Involved)?

Credit: Rick Rodney

Amigo the Devil

If you never met him, you might mistake Amigo the Devil for a monster. The 25-year-old murderfolk maudit's most popular song is called "Perfect Wife." With gallows humor to make Marshall Mathers wince, it details gruesome spousal abuse that escalates until the wife rifle-blasts her husband.

Two other beloved anthems are "Dahmer Does Hollywood" and "The Reluse," which was originally titled, "Ed Gein." The latter opens this month's self-released Diggers EP by loosely sketching the necrophiliac Wisconsin serial killer who once made a belt out of human nipples. Think Johnny Cash at his blackest, mixed with Father John Misty, if he exhumed graves at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Almost everyone has once wanted to dress like a rock star, but most people realize how absurd they look in leather pants and sequins. Wisely, then, Hollywood-based clothing company Worn Free sticks to the safe bet: T-shirts, all made from designs previously rocked by Hall of Famers like Bob Marley, Elvis, John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Joan Jett.

Under the wrong aegis, the idea could devolve into Venice Beach kiosk kitsch. But the brand, founded by British expat Steve Coe, offers tasteful curation and a sartorial backstory with every re-press. Worn Free has carefully cultivated licensing relationships with the artists or their estates. And there's something to be said for sporting a replica of Kurt Cobain's "Grunge Is Dead" shirt or the very-based "Jesus Looks Like Me" tee once worn by Deborah Harry.

Credit: Patricia Miller

Matthewdavid

"All profoundly original art looks ugly at first," opined art critic Clement Greenberg. He was alluding to the abstract expressionism that he helped to popularize, but his mantra describes much experimental music as well.

A thin membrane divides the beautiful, bizarre and bogus. One man's Animal Collective is another's yelp for institutionalization.

Andy Scott

You only need one song to blow up, and sometimes it doesn't even need to be originally yours. Salva learned this in June when the electronic producer collaborated with RL Grime to remix Kanye West's "Mercy." With no premeditated plan or press campaign, the pair threw it up on Salva's Soundcloud page and, almost overnight, a remix done on a whim had turned them into rising stars.

"I'd heard that Kanye liked my remix from [RL Grime's] EP so I said we should remix 'Mercy' and send it to Kanye," Salva says at a friend's house in Beachwood Canyon, shortly before playing the King King, the first stop on a 10-city North American tour. "We really just did it to say 'What's up' to Kanye. We bounced it back and forth, put it up, and it went viral."

Earl Sweatshirt

Half of January has elapsed and we've survived. There was no collapse due to fiscal cliff, Central American apocalypse or dubstep deluge. A new year unfurls, fraught with unfulfilled resolution, sundry ratchetdom and witch-hunting Hansel & Gretel adaptations. As Candide and R. Kelly once said: It's the best of all possible worlds.

What looms in 2013? Will Kanye and Kim Kardashian's baby get a spinoff reality show or merely inspire Kanye, Big Sean and Cyhi the Prynce to make a hip-house mixtape with Full House artwork and skits? (DJ Khaled plays DJ Tanner.) Here are 10 prognostications and the local records that I'm most eager to hear.

Cassandra McGrath is telling me the saddest story I've heard in a while. We're in the dining room of the 28-year-old folk singer's Echo Park house and she doesn't really want to read from Rising From the Ashes, an autobiographical anthology she organized and edited last year, featuring pieces by her former Belmont High students. But I'm prodding and so she selects "When Pain Is Your Teacher."

It's about twins born impoverished in El Salvador, raised by their great-aunt and great-uncle. Neither boy meets their parents until the age of 6, when they visit from America. At 9, the author is brought to L.A. but his twin, his best friend, has heart problems and can't make the trek. The author doesn't see or hear news about his brother until five years later, when his father tearfully informs him of the brother's death. His mother and another brother also die, for undisclosed reasons.

Frank Ocean

Kendrick Lamar attributed L.A.'s primacy to the women, weed and weather. He was quoting Biggie, who consecrated the left coast via song, despite his long-standing enmity toward Tupac, the city's patron saint. And both rappers were (very) loosely paraphrasing 19th-century civic booster ads attempting to convince Iowans to move to Pasadena.