LA Story: Leaving Records and
Music for Life Support

Leaving Records is not a new label, or new to Los Angeles. The endeavor was founded in 2008 as a blog before soon evolving into a label run by McQueen, now 37, and his former partner Jesselisa Moretti, a creative director and mixed-media artist who helped identify their visual identity. (Moretti is supportive of the label, though she is no longer involved.) At the time, McQueen was deep in the LA beat scene, where a loose collective of DJs and producers melded hip-hop, jazz, and electronic production to cult acclaim. He befriended experimental producers like Flying Lotus and Daedelus, and frequented Low End Theory, a defunct-but-seminal weekly party that served as a springboard for like-minded artists. Reminiscing about those first years in LA, McQueen giddily tells me about meeting the legendary jazz saxophonist Marshall Allen. (This is sort of like an aspiring actor getting coffee with Denzel Washington.)

From its early days, Leaving was an outlet for McQueen to release music that was maybe weirder, perhaps less defined than what was dropping on other prominent local indies, like Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder. "There's still a faction of our audience that really loves and identifies with the beat scene or instrumental, electronic hip-hop," says McQueen. "That's kind of my roots; my background comes from underground hip-hop."

Leaving was originally part of beloved outsider hip-hop label Stones Throw, where McQueen had a joint venture and partnership deal, and where he worked as an A&R, handling artist development and talent scouting. Eventually, the demands of the side project eclipsed McQueen's day job and he quit to focus on the project full-time.

As of December 2020 Leaving Records is wholly independent, which has helped McQueen expand events like the monthly series at La Culebra, and release music at a scale that wasn't possible before. As Leaving expands, McQueen has doubled down on equitable artist-label relationships. A tweet from @leavingrecords last year proclaimed: "Hello artists. Leaving Records will never own your masters. Have a great day." And McQueen has waded into the NFT and Web 3.0 space with GENREe DAO, a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) with its own crypto token ($GENRE) and manifesto.

As demonstrated by the names of albums and live performances, Leaving Records values straightforward language, which is curious for a label whose sound is everything but. On flyers and T-shirts you'll find a cheeky Venn diagram that depicts the many overlapping styles of its artists. The chart's circles are like a college radio DJ counting off their favorites: new age, ambient, experimental, electronic, collage, rock, funk, folk, world, jazz, hip-hop, and techno. The tagline "all genre" is provocatively literal.

The musician perhaps most closely associated with Leaving's current renaissance is the saxophonist Sam Gendel, whose unconventional approach to the instrument has been lauded by everyone from The New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh to jazz traditionalists. Ryan Schreiber, the former editor-in-chief and founder of the music site Pitchfork, recently tweeted his most-listened-to Spotify artists of 2021 and Gendel was No. 1: "It’s felt like a pretty steady ascent to me, but the curation has just become so reliable," he told me via Twitter DM. "They’ll take these conventionally academic forms of music—modern classical, experimental, ambient—and sort of throw out the rulebooks, and all the stiffness that haunts those genres flies out with it.”

Not coincidentally, many Leaving artists are formally trained and have complicated feelings about it. But many are also self-taught. Olive Ardizoni, who records as Green-House, has an intuitive, collage-like technique. "I don't have these, like, mad skills," they tell me.

I ask McQueen about new age specifically, because it's a style and movement that has recently undergone a critical and cultural reassessment. Simon Reynolds, a writer who often explores the ramifications of musical categories, highlighted Leaving in a piece that tracked the cultural reappraisal of ambient and new age music a year before the pandemic began; new age progenitor Laraaji, whose archival music Leaving has released, is now celebrated as an outsider genius. Enya is cool now.

McQueen came to those sounds much earlier, around 15 years ago, when he was still living in his home state of Florida and doing community service at a Goodwill. "The year before I left for LA all of these strange new age tapes were at the thrift store," he says. Though he thought some of them were "cheesy" he immediately wanted to sample and flip them, use them to expand his repertoire as a musician. "I kept collecting discarded or overlooked new age tapes from that point forward. No one was really looking for that stuff." Douglas McGowan, soon a mentor to McQueen, introduced him to Laraaji himself, solidifying McQueen's connection to the scene. But as he continued still deeper, becoming immersed in an unfamiliar world of meditation and alternative healing, he didn't always like what he found.

"There were red flags and toxicity and stuff that we were not feeling or aligned with the values of how we live," he says, looking back. Now he only takes what he needs from that world, eschewing the more elitist and fringe elements, embracing the good stuff. "Laraaji is an example of opening that door and that culture," he says. "He's pretty new agey! All these affirmations, laughter meditation—but he has this super-relatable, funny layer that's super amusing, super humorous, right? And that's just amazing to me, that he doesn't take himself too seriously."

But other Leaving artists have little to do with new age—the San Francisco–based producer Xyla's take on club music, for example, is inky, rave-oriented, mathematically precise—and the ones influenced by aspects of new age don't necessarily identify with the term. Ardizoni, for instance, points out that Madame Blavatsky, a 19th-century Russian noblewoman credited with many of the ideas that inspired the new age movement, haphazardly lifted and appropriated those ideas from other cultures: "You know, classic colonizer shit."

Maybe it's his background as an "ex-punk, noise, floor-core person," but McQueen's puckish branding is as shit-stirring as you'll get from a collective who literally soundtracks mindful meditation workshops. Ardizoni sees humor as an important part of their art as well. "Some of my songs I think are just fucking funny," they say. "But it's not ironic! I wrote [a song] with a picture in my mind of a hamster dancing in a field of sunflowers. Art can be more than melancholy, or sad, or angry. And it can still be just as valid."

La Culebra is located in northeast Los Angeles in Highland Park, minutes from the Arroyo Seco Parkway section of State Route 110—the first freeway in the West. The terraced grounds are lush with California flora, but the 450-foot snake monument and the educational chickens are not something you'd find at just any park. Though La Culebra may seem like the sort of neighborhood refuge where a teenager would sneak a tallboy, it has a rich tradition of Chicano activism and community organization. The park was transformed from a vacant lot following the civil unrest of '92, and has become a center for education and art for Highland Park locals. This history is something McQueen takes seriously; he now worries the event has become too big for the space, and plans to find a larger location. (La Culebra will remain a home for smaller-scale activations.) A hand-painted sign lays out the rules: Enjoy the park. Please respect the art. Do not paint rocks and trees. Get involved.

Perhaps because the outdoor concert series had been on hold due to spiking COVID numbers (a virtual iteration, Listen to Music Safely in Your Home Next to a Fern, has occasionally stood in for the live event), the mid-March show has brought more people to the park than ever. So many, in fact, that the serpent-cum-bench barely has an unoccupied scale, and the line for vegetarian dosas, tea, and medicinal chocolate is prohibitively long. Fans are packed on blankets or milling about, all stoked on music that wouldn't be out of place in an upscale spa.

When it starts to rain the crowd is shielded by the canopy above, where the branches of a pepper tree have been handwoven into a gigantic lattice. And the performers in front are shielded by the embrace of a massive oak. The vegetation has the doubly wonderful acoustic effect of turning the makeshift performance into a natural bandshell. Still, the rain is troublesome; Leaving has borrowed a special sound system from their friends at Mobius Acoustics that needs to function properly and not electrocute anyone so the crowd can appropriately vibe.

Today's lineup includes Sam Wilkes, a jazz bassist known for his frequent collaborations with Gendel, playing with the bandleader and pianist Jacob Mann; The Growth Eternal, lead by Byron Crenshaw, maker of iridescent grooves with vocoder and bass; Raays, whose synth soundscapes opened the event; and the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter June West. West, whose voice is equally at home backed by drum machines or spare guitar, has a thread of '70s LA and its Laurel Canyon folkies woven through her melodies. Wilkes's bass vibrates through the crowd with warm, masterfully executed runs.

He has a deep appreciation for The Grateful Dead and his sometimes-psychedelic take on his instrument feels spiritually linked. (Wilkes tends to keep his love for The Dead private; the methodical players of contemporary jazz may not get the appeal without the mythology and cultural context that's so important to Deadheads.) "[The Dead] opened me up to so many classics in rock 'n’ roll, country western and Appalachian music," he tells me. "Even some gospel music as well." An interview with Dead bassist Phil Lesh was the unlikely vehicle for turning Wilkes on to the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen: "I saw it when I was 11 years old, I kid you not."

The value of categories and genres has become a sort of inside joke on music Twitter when it comes to played-out ideologies like "rockism" or its paradigm-shifting replacement, "poptimism." Leaving Records’s "all genre" credo could be seen as part of this conversation, in that it plays with descriptors while rejecting the gatekeeping they may represent. "We need these types of classifications to talk and write about different sounds," Schreiber says. "What I like about 'all genre' as opposed to 'no genre' is that they’re not denying or disallowing classification; it just frees the label from being too closely associated with any one style."

This mishmash of approaches results in a thrilling eclecticism. Green-House, for instance, shares few similarities on paper with Gendel and Wilkes's progressive take on jazz. But their debut album, auspiciously titled Music for Living Spaces, is just as representative of Leaving's ethos. "I didn't create the music with this prophetic sense of, like, shit's gonna go down," they say. "However, I'm working class. I'm nonbinary and I'm autistic, and those things make life really fucking hard for me regardless of wheither or not there's a pandemic. I wrote that music from the perspective of being me and needing something like that to listen to and be inspired by." Ardizoni says they see music in the way they regard food—another aspect of a healthy lifestyle. And they've seen fans do exactly that, using Green-House to accompany dental work, flights, childbirth.

The harpist Nailah Hunter, who has collaborated with Ardizoni, put out her first music with Leaving right as the pandemic began. "People were craving the space that I was creating with that music," she says. "I'm glad that it was there for them when it started. It's interesting to think that as things are kind of shifting—we're doing live gigs, we're indoors—I am thinking about why do we need this music right now? And that links back to what the label was doing before the pandemic. Their mission has always been the same; it was really needed during the pandemic, it will continue to be needed."

It makes sense that Leaving's first releases were largely sold as cassette tapes, a package favored for its DIY distribution and unique listening experience, which, if you'll remember, makes skipping tracks really annoying. It's a format that says, Have patience, trust us, stop fiddling. Patience is not a prerequisite for enjoying Leaving Records's catalog or the day's event, but it does help. It is also a useful quality for weathering the prosaic activities that define life during a pandemic. For many, lockdowns made space for gentle music that helped to ease anxieties and quash intrusive thoughts, sounds that met the bizarre situation in which the world found itself.

For Gendel, regardless of one's musical background or style of playing, it comes down to McQueen’s multitudinous-yet-intimate approach. "There's a sincerity that I think comes with Matthew, and he attracts other people who share that," he says. "Everyone who works with him probably has their own relationship with him, that's unique to them. And for me, that's really what Leaving is. He's fully trusting and I fully trust him. My relationship with Leaving Records is really just my relationship with Matthew."

As it turns out, the bummer weather did little to dampen the spirits of folks at the park, most of whom were mostly oblivious to the panicked work of McQueen and his team scrambling to shield the equipment and instruments. As the afternoon wanes, the scene is an urban-bucolic tableau: Parents play with toddlers, hippie-types share joints with beatific smiles, dogs do dog stuff. At one point, a man climbs atop a picnic table to request signatures for a 25-dollar-an-hour minimum wage petition. In front of our spot, a group of young women in their 20s pass a whippet cracker. The event comes to a close as the thrum of Wilkes's bass reverberates through the leaves. You get the feeling that all this could only happen right here, at this park, in Los Angeles. Experimental. Healing. All genre.

Nathan Reese is a writer, editor, and creative director living in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Interview, Pitchfork, Complex, and The New York Times.