AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

People of LA!

It can now be said—for the next month or so, Beck Hansen's Song Reader will be taking over an entire building on La Brea Avenue, and you should go and see it. There will be original art by Marcel Dzama and Leanne Shapton and Jessica Hische, exhibited inside gigantic, custom-built sheet-music cases; there will be enormous murals by the great Kelsey Dake; there will be a player piano playing Beck's songs, and a good chunk of Beck's own collection of vintage sheet music on display; and there will be, pretty crazily, an actual recording booth complete with all the instruments and audio equipment you'd ever need to record a version of "Do We? We Do" or "Ziz" thats all your own. To push things even further, well beyond the point where it would be possible to skip all this without everlasting regret, said booth will even let you add your just-recorded song to the newly updated, exponentially more snazzy and functional www.songreader.net, where new covers are still coming in every day.

All this is happening at Sonos Studio http://www.sonos-studio.com/ , at 145 N. La Brea near Beverly, and it will keep happening there until March 24th—there'll be other events around the show, too, so keep an eye on their site. Beck himself will be keeping his own eyes/ears/etc. on the songs coming out of that recording booth, and picking his favorites at the end of the month—it could be you, is what we're saying! And as the only city in the known world to be graced with this exhibit (the Hanoi leg is still pending), we wanted to encourage you to get in there—and then to tell your friends in Cleveland and Toronto and New York that the time to visit you is now. (This exhibit ends the same day as the Robert Mapplethorpe at LACMA, so they should be coming by then anyway.)

The book itself, meanwhile, is just about to be back in stock, so this is officially the best time thus far in 2013 to pick it up. And our friends at KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic just featured the Song Reader exhibit on their show, complete with a conversation between Beck and Jason Bentley (and me!) from last week's opening—tune in, if you can! And we will look forward to seeing you ourselves at the LA Times Festival of Books in April. Come by and visit our booth—

Jordan

From McSweeney's