Albums

ALBUMS // Spartan Jet-Plex – Godless Goddess

Posted on Apr 4, 2019By Misha

Post by Misha

I started work at a new place last week. It’s across town in a part of the Los Angeles coast that has been dubbed “Silicon Beach” for its concentration of tech office transplants from The Bay Area. Inevitably, their clean glass and steel workspaces and open floor plans are accompanied by a slew of massive new housing developments – condos with price tags from “the low to high 2 millions” (as if that spread of nearly a million dollars was mere pocket change) advertised on giant banners hung over their freshly landscaped lawns.

“Silicon Beach” stretches along the bluff where I lived when I first came to Los Angeles – I went to college just up the hill from the new developments. Back when I lived there the whole area that is now Silicon Beach was mostly wetlands and a few strange, nondescript warehouses. What’s left of my memory of the flora and fauna amounts to a running trail where you can hear frogs and birds chirping if you happen to run around sundown.

But the thing that really unnerves me about coming back to the neighborhood is how the city clears out the further west you drive. Coming off the 405 to wide, empty boulevards and crisply manicured sidewalks with no one walking on them. It is eerily silent save for the occasional jackhammer from a nearby construction site. I’ve read about how Los Angeles’s entire homeless population could be housed just in the unoccupied units caused by overdevelopment, and I can only assume that a large number of units in the new developments I drive by on the way to work contribute to that statistic.

It is such a stark contrast to the teeming, restless, dirt-under-fingernails city that exists just a few miles east. Where I live, the sidewalks are claimed by taco carts and tent encampments. Half disintegrated trash clogs the storm gutters and mixes with street art and graffiti tags in a grim, but tenacious tableau. Emptiness, fresh paint, blank-slateness are hard to come by.

I’ve taken to seeking out experimental and or apocalyptic-leaning music for my drive through Silicon Beach. Just something to acknowledge and articulate how strange it all is. Spartan Jet-Plex’s Godless Goddess instills the overbright, sunny landscape with just the right amount of foreboding and dread. I enjoy watching Lululemon-clad thirty-somethings pushing dogs in strollers with ‘Fear’ bouncing around inside my car. Letting the maniacal laughter of the last 30 seconds of ‘Baubo’ play loudly through open windows at a stop light, unnerving the Google coder couple about to walk into an open house and drop 2 million dollars on a hastily built condo whose poorly insulated ocean facing windows will look out on another construction site within the year.

Despite its somewhat bleak current utility in my life, Godless Goddess is a lovely and tender record, well suited to a wide range of emotional journeys through Los Angeles and beyond. Buy it here via Grimalkin Records, a wonderful, activist-minded record label and artistic collective based in Virginia.