Right here’s one other mammoth effort to lift funds for these impacted by the fires raging in Los Angeles. The LA-based experimental label Leaving Data has launched a compilation right now referred to as Staying: Leaving Data Help To Artists Impacted By The Los Angeles Wildfires. It encompasses a whopping 98 tracks, together with beforehand unreleased music from André 3000, Julia Holter, Baths & Rachika Nayar, Sweatson Klank, Steve Roach, Reggie Watts, and Carlos Niño & Pals, plus an unavailable monitor by Laraaji. Different artists on the comp embrace Samantha Urbani, Emily Sprague, Nite Jewel, Hundred Waters, Cole Pulice, Daedelus, Spencer Zahn, Extra Eaze, Lael Neal, MatthewDavid, and lots of extra.
The comp isn’t streaming (to listen to it, you gotta purchase it), however we do get a public preview through “Dried Apricot,” the Baths x Rachika Nayar collab, and Laraaji’s “Joyous Dance ’82.” Hear these songs beneath, the place you may also discover a assertion from Leaving.
Right here’s that assertion:
Every part has modified, and it’s altering nonetheless. The early days of 2025 (an already baleful yr, vis-a-vis America’s darkening political horizon) have wrought heretofore unimaginable destruction within the land we now name Los Angeles. The wildfires that started on the morning of Tuesday, January seventh—and that are nonetheless raging—are, in scope and depth, in contrast to every other catastrophe, pure or artifical, within the metropolis’s residing reminiscence. Hundreds of houses destroyed. Twenty 4 lives misplaced on the time of writing (that quantity will nearly definitely rise), and innumerable lives eternally altered. The devastation arrived out of the blue, and has persevered over the course of a punishing and surreal week.
We rise within the morning after not sleeping. We examine the air high quality. We examine the fires’ progress on the identical app we’ve all put in (the Metropolis’s alert system retains misfiring). We add one other picture to the go bag. We surprise what the fuck the phrase “8% containment truly means,” or what distinguishes “prepared” from “set” when the evacuation warnings are fired off inside mere minutes of each other. And what occurs when warnings flip to orders. We evacuate. If we now have time, we stroll by our houses, recording every room, narrating all our possessions, for “insurance coverage functions.” If we don’t have time we simply go. We arrive someplace…secure…safer? We exhale. One other alert. We evacuate once more. Hadn’t even unzipped the go bag. We textual content. We name. They’re not answering. They’re in all probability fantastic however why aren’t they answering. In all probability the identical cause you’re not answering. There’s no time and you’ll’t suppose. Your telephone is exploding. Kin and mates are watching the information. “How shut are you?” You might be too shut. You might be shut even should you’re not shut as a result of the fires preserve beginning.” Kenneth.” “Sundown.” The winds preserve shifting. The vehicles are all parked within the street and all of the keys are gone. It is sort of a nightmare. You possibly can’t get away. It’s right here and it’s all over the place. And for all too many this agonizing cycle retains on repeating after the unthinkable has already occurred: The lack of residence.
The unfoldingness of this occasion is tough to articulate. Having skilled unprecedented rainfall the earlier winter, and unprecedentedly dry situations within the months since, the area is, at current, uniquely weak to catastrophic fires. The Eaton and Palisades Fires, already estimated to be the 2 most harmful fires within the Metropolis’s historical past, are slowly being contained, however the Santa Ana winds are anticipated to return. With them, extra worry and uncertainty. We pray for rain in a determined and historical manner.
Everyone seems to be exhausted, enraged (the same old suspects are at greatest shrugging and at worst stitching division; the profiteers are already salivating), to various levels surprised by loss and sick with grief, and nonetheless, someway, mustering the braveness and vitality to behave collectively, to contribute, nevertheless they could, in the direction of the preservation of life.
We’re caught between (propelled by?) devastation and motion. The impulse to easily break down, and the information that there’s large work to be achieved, now and sooner or later. To protect what stays, and to regain what we’ve misplaced.
The people and communities affected on this second are quite a few and various, however it’s the case that Los Angeles’s musical neighborhood has been completely upended. The Palisades fireplace, with its attain into older components of Malibu and Topanga Canyon, and the Eaton fireplace, in its digital erasure of Altadena, have affected a number of the solely areas in Los Angeles the place working musicians might reside with a modicum of consolation—Although, as we’re all too conscious on this second, precarity has all the time been a part of the discount right here.
A quick phrase on Altadena specifically: Lately, Altadena has develop into a wealthy and vibrant hub for artists of every kind. Nestled beneath the San Gabriel mountains, the area’s demography shifted within the latter half of the 20 th century—due largely to a historical past of redlining, that observe’s authorized cessation, and subsequent white flight—to develop into a thriving Black enclave inside Los Angeles. Former residents embrace a minimum of Octavia Butler (whose Parable of the Sower rings now as terribly prophetic) and Sydney Poitier. That Altadena has remained one of many few areas inside Los Angeles the place residence possession is possible for working households and artists of all stripes isn’t any coincidence. Numerous generational houses and historic Black-owned companies have been destroyed. Among the many numerous establishments confirmed to have been misplaced on the time of writing are Madlib’s property, the Theosophical Society’s archives, and the altar of kitsch and wholesomeness that was The Bunny Museum.
Leaving Data specifically has deep roots in Altadena. Label founder MatthewDavid lower his enamel printing J playing cards at a house operation within the neighborhood, and numerous Leaving artists reside within the space. Many of those artists have both definitively misplaced their houses, or are at the moment ready to study their destiny. The trail to rebuilding (how lengthy it can take, what it can price, whether or not it’s even possible) stays terribly unclear.
However, within the spirit of doing what we are able to, and doing what we do greatest, Leaving has pulled out all of the proverbial stops to launch a profit compilation consisting of affiliated artists and supporters far and extensive (a lot of whom have certainly misplaced every little thing). Searching for to complement the quite a few GoFundMes and the profound, typically harrowing acts of mutual support which might be at the moment buoying restoration efforts, and in lieu of donating to a 3rd occasion group, all proceeds can be donated on to impacted people. 50% can be meticulously, manually allotted to Los Angeles artists and music colleagues in want, as equitably as doable. We can be referencing current music neighborhood support spreadsheets / paperwork already circulating, alongside a succinct inside listing of these affected in our rapid neighborhood. The opposite 50% of funds can be allotted to displaced Black households and neighborhood impacted by the fires, once more, as equitably as doable (ie https://gofund.me/3f23de7d).
Private and collective therapeutic, ecological recuperation, non secular transcendence, radical communality — these considerations are woven into Leaving’s roster and catalog. By no means within the label’s historical past has it been so referred to as upon to have fun and implement these rules. Although we could not even know what “hope” constitutes but, we all know we’ve acquired it someplace. We all know it’s in solidarity, and we all know it’s within the music.
-Emmett Shoemaker for Leaving Data, January 13, 2025, ~10:30pm
Staying: Leaving Data Help To Artists Impacted By The Los Angeles Wildfires is out now. Buy it and/or peruse the tracklist right here.