We are thrilled to announce Blast! [12], our annual garden party and fundraiser will take place on Sunday, May 31, 2015 from 4 to 8 p.m. With a Battle of the DJs, food, beverages, and a Bootleg LP Art Auction, Blast! [12 ] takes place at the private residence of the Hillenburg Family in San Marino, CA and supports SASSAS’s experimental art and sound programming.

Blast! [12] features a BATTLE OF THE DJs  with twelve DJs in a raucous mash-up of musical styles, with sets by Mitchell Brown (KXLU, Dublab), Tom Chasteen (Dub Club), Dan Cook (Gimme Gimme Records), Jessica Espeleta (Party Chambers),  Money Mark (Beastie Boys), Dave Muller (Three Day Weekend), Tom Recchion (LAFMS), Eddie Ruscha (Dub Club), Brian Simon (Dublab, Anenon), Gabie Strong (KCHUNG), Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile, riot grrrl) and more. The MC will be actor, director Tom Stern (Freaked, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Man Show). This year’s party also celebrates the launch and forthcoming first release of SASSAS Records, a limited edition quarterly vinyl subscription.

Tickets include food, drinks, and great sounds…plus a chance to win one of four pairs of Listening Party tickets or a SASSAS Records subscription.

The BOOTLEG LP ART AUCTION is inspired by record album covers, and includes work by: Julie Adler, Tom Allen, Kevin Appel, Skot Armstrong, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Judie Bamber, Miyoshi Barosh, John Bauer, Scott Benzel, Leonardo Bravo, Anita Bunn, Carolyn Castaño, Jeff Colson, Liz Craft, Aaron Curry, Sam Durant, Brad Eberhard, Elif Erkan, Morgan Fisher, Sarajo Frieden, Francesca Gabbiani, Liam Gillick, Phyllis Green, Tim Hailand, Stephen Hillenburg, Margaret Honda, Violet Hopkins, Bettina Hubby, Steven Hull, Ivan Iannoli, Jim Isermann, Farrah Karapetian, Alice Könitz, Norm Laich, Richard Louderback, Joseph Lee, T. Kelly Mason, John Miller, Yunhee Min, Aaron Morse, Fredrik Nilsen, Stanislav Orlovski, Joel Otterson, Gary Panter, Anthony Pearson, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Stephen Prina, Tom Recchion, Lynn Robb, Steve Roden, Eddie Ruscha, Amy Sarkisian, LeRoy Stevens, April Street, Ricky Swallow, Mungo Thomson, Fred Tomaselli, Devon Tsuno, Dani Tull, Michael Uhlenkott, Tam Van Tran, Chris Wilder, Julie Wilson, B. Wurtz, Jason Yates, Liz Young

The auction artwork will be on display to the public at 1301PE located at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048 from May 27-30, with an artist’s reception on Thursday May 28 from 6 to 9 p.m. Pre-bidding via the SASSAS website starts May 19 and the auction culminates at Blast! on Sunday May 31. For the first time ever, bidders will be able to access the auction online starting May 19 and continue bidding until the final gavel at 7pm on May 31.

All proceeds, including the art auction, benefit SASSAS’s extensive programming, including its sound. concert series.

DETAILS ON THE DJs –

Mitchell Brown

Mitchell Brown (KXLU, dublab)
Mitchell Brown (AKA Nanny Cantaloupe) is a DJ on KXLU and dublab (Perplexagon), a music label owner (Melon Expander) and an assistant to mentally and physically alternatively-abled children. As a sound artist/musician he improvises and composes using analog electronics, magnetic tape manipulation, electro-acoustics and percussion, among other things. Current musical projects include Golden Hits (with fellow labrats Frosty, Jimmy Tamborello, Katie Byron & Ben Knight), Fancy Space People, Brain Sucking Peanunanners (founded with children), Points of Friction and collaborations with Joseph Hammer, Matthewdavid and Hymnal, among many others.

Tom Chasteen

Tom Chasteen (Dub Club)
Tom Chasteen has been a fixture in the LA underground music scene for over two decades. He started the seminal electronic dance music label Exist Dance in 1991 and produced over 50 releases in that genre. Since 2000 he has been running and DJing at Dub Club, which has become known worldwide as a respected venue for Reggae music. He has worked with many legendary Jamaican musicians both in the studio and promoting live shows.In 2010 he produced a documentary film about the Dub Club entitled “Return Of The Rub A Dub Style”. In 2013 he released 3 albums on the Stones Throw label, 2 Dub albums and a double LP “Foundation Come Again” featuring 20 veteran performers from the classic 70s era of Reggae. His work has been written up in The Wire, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and many other places.

Gimme Gimme Records

Dan Cook (Gimme Gimme Records)
Dan Cook opened his shop Gimme Gimme Records in the East Village of NYC in 1994 where it remained until 2012, when he moved it to the Highland Park area of Los Angeles. He is also a former Matador Records recording artist, and had a reissue label called Octipi Records which specialized in strange disco recordings. In 1999 Cook started the Raremusic online radio component of Grandroyal.com, a streaming radio station which allowed listeners to hear hard-to-find tracks before the days of massive reissues and streaming services. Cook has published several books of his photography, and is a member of the S_U_N_ publishing group. He has a lot of records, and DJ’s occasionally.

Jessica Espeleta

Jessica Espeleta (Party Chambers)
Jessica Espeleta hosts Party Chambers on Monday nights at the Melody Lounge in Chinatown, which has recently featured such DJs and performers as Ariel Pink, Sean Nicholas Savage, Kirin J. Callinan, Puro Instinct, Tara Jane O’Neil and Telepathe.  She has jocked the discs at clubs all over L.A., and played guitar & bass in Love As Laughter, Weird War, the Chameleons, and many others.

Money Mark

Money Mark (Beastie Boys)
Money Mark (Mark Ramos Nishita) is a producer, keyboardist, and musician, best known for his collaborations with the Beastie Boys. He has performed, written, and collaborated on every Beastie Boys album from 1992’s Check Your Head to the group’s final album, 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Mark co-authored the Grammy Award Winning album, “The Mix Up.” He contributed the keyboard phrase that opens and underpins “Where It’s At” from Beck‘s 1996 album, Odelay, plays keyboards with the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet, and has performed with Karen O, among many others.

Dave Muller

Dave Muller (Three Day Weekend)
Dave Muller, who has become known for his paintings of vinyl records, likes to use the word “sampling” to describe his process. Muller, who has also been an active DJ since the 1980s, is interested in the history of music, and the ways in which records can evoke personalities or moments in history. Among his best-known works are what he calls the “Top Ten” paintings—paintings of the spines of 10-album stacks based on an individual’s actual or imagined music preferences. His subjects have ranged from close friends to Barack Obama. He is also known for making wall-sized murals diagramming the genealogy of music that extend into the far future, and making a “zip” (his narrow paintings of a single record spine) every day for a year based on what he listened to.

Tom Recchion

Tom Recchion (LAFMS)
Tom Recchion is a sound and visual artist/composer/art director & graphic designer based in Los Angeles. He has been making weird and wonderful sounds since the 1970s as a co-creator of the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS). In the LAFMS his group The Doo-Dooettes became one of the 3 anchor points for the collectives’ endeavors as well as playing in AIRWAY, Smegma and many other groupings of the collective. He’s collaborated with Half Japanese, Carl Stone, Aaron Moore, Jad Fair, David Toop, Christian Marclay, Mark Trayle, Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, Max Eastley, Sonic Youth, to name a few. Currently he is plays in the improvisational group Extended Organ (Paul McCarthy, Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, Alex Stevens and the late Mike Kelley) and working on solo and collaborative projects. He has also been studying ceramics.

Eddie Rusha

Eddie Ruscha (Secret Circuit)
Dada Munchamonkey or Edward Joseph Ruscha V, son of LA-based artist Edward Ruscha (Edward Joseph Ruscha IV) is an experimental musician, using mostly analogue equipment and performing productions through almost live experimentation. Starting writing music in the mid 80s as a founding member of 90s noiseniks Medicine and Maids of Gravity, Ruscha was then responsible for forming the Future Pigeon who have in recent years grown from a two-piece outfit into a collective comprising of nine musicians. Next he began work on a project with Rub n’ Tug’s DJ Thomas called The Laughing Light Of Plenty, meanwhile also working under the alias The Secret Circuit, creating experimental cosmic music.

Brian Simon / Anenon

Brian Simon (dublab, Anenon)
Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an artist and the founder of the Non Projects record label. An experimental artist using contemporary tools, Brian mines the intersection of electronics, jazz, improvisation and spiritual atmospherics. Simon has performed internationally throughout Japan, Europe and North America, sharing the stage with the likes of Morton Subotnick, Julia Holter, Laurel Halo, Baths and many more. Anenon’s releases have all been subject to critical acclaim, including a spot for Acquiescence as one of XLR8R’s Best Releases of 2012.

Gabie Strong “Crystalline Morphologies”

Gabie Strong (KCHUNG)
Gabie Strong is a California based artist and the host of Crystalline Morphologies, a feminist free-form freak-out radio program featuring noise, doom, drone and experimental music broadcasting on KCHUNG AM 1630. The project title conceptually links minimalism and materiality to ambient sound and noise. She also co-hosts Earth Art Radio (E.A.R) program on KCHUNG. Earth Art Radio is a monthly talk show highlighting artists working in site-specificity and landscape.

Allison Wolfe (photo Kyle Davis)

Allison Wolfe  (Bratmobile, riot grrrl)
Allison Wolfe was raised in an all-female, single-parent household by a lesbian feminist mother, who started the first women’s health clinic in Olympia, WA. While attending university, Allison co-founded a punk feminist fanzine Girl Germs, an all-girl band Bratmobile, and third wave feminist punk movement riot grrrl; she also initiated a non-profit feminist music festival Ladyfest in 1999. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches English, DJs, and sings in the band Sex Stains. Allison is a 2015 USC Annenberg Fellow working on a masters in specialized journalism in the arts and an oral history of riot grrrl book.

DETAILS ON THE MC –

Tom Stern

Tom Stern
Tom Stern is an American actor, director, writer, and producer living in Los Angeles, California. Along with collaborator Alex Winter he has worked on a number of short films and music videos for bands such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ice Cube, and Butthole Surfers. They also directed Impact Video Magazine that featured short films, performances, and interviews with the likes of Butthole Surfers, painter Robert Williams, hip hop pioneers Public Enemy, robotic art collective Survival Research Labs, and comedian Bill Hicks. He has worked on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, among many others.

BOOTLEG LP ART AUCTION –

Julie Adler, Tom Allen, Kevin Appel, Skot Armstrong, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Judie Bamber, Miyoshi Barosh, John Bauer, Scott Benzel, Leonardo Bravo, Anita Bunn, Carolyn Castaño, Jeff Colson, Liz Craft, Aaron Curry, Sam Durant, Brad Eberhard, Elif Erkan, Morgan Fisher, Sarajo Frieden, Francesca Gabbiani, Liam Gillick, Phyllis Green, Tim Hailand, Stephen Hillenburg, Margaret Honda, Violet Hopkins, Bettina Hubby, Steven Hull, Ivan Iannoli, Jim Isermann, Farrah Karapetian, Alice Könitz, Norm Laich, Richard Louderback, Joseph Lee, T. Kelly Mason, John Miller, Yunhee Min, Aaron Morse, Fredrik Nilsen, Stanislav Orlovski, Joel Otterson, Gary Panter, Anthony Pearson, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Stephen Prina, Tom Recchion, Lynn Robb, Steve Roden, Eddie Ruscha, Amy Sarkisian, LeRoy Stevens, April Street, Ricky Swallow, Mungo Thomson, Fred Tomaselli, Devon Tsuno, Dani Tull, Michael Uhlenkott, Tam Van Tran, Chris Wilder, Julie Wilson, B. Wurtz, Jason Yates, Liz Young

SPECIAL THANKS –

The Hillenburg Family

1301PE

Blast! [12] Auction Committee:
Cindy Bernard, Gabriel Cifarelli, Carole Ann Klonarides, Katherine Niemela, Fredrik Nilsen, Christina Ondrus, Renée Petropoulos

Blast! [12] Performance Committee:
Daniel Corral, Danny Gromfin, Greg Lenczycki, Tom Recchion, Joe Potts