DJ Damian Lazarus steps out onto his balcony and takes in the ever-ready supply of native chic chicas, the waft of pupusas, and the sun-kissed, wagging palms and greenery of Los Angeles' Echo Park. It's here he gathers his steam for heading his label Crosstown Rebels (get on getting this month's Rebel Rave), marinates on slabbing together some seriously eclectic illness for his monthly podcast, lazpod, and readies for his sonic atom-splitting in the most killer dance spots around the world. Like any showman, he sees video-treated to jealous reportage proportions via his Rebel TV platform (see below). We at Flaunt shed some winter weight at a show of his during Art Basel last week for his show, "Fuck Art, Let's Dance" with DJ Harvey in Miami before bidding him adieu to Guadalajara for some more healthy aural nonsense. Somewhere in the shuffle we got to chatting about another epic showman–Neil Diamond (see moody, dynamic solo album Smoke the Monster Out), as well as weird beauty, park shrines, and global party conformity. Lazarus is playing the spine-tingling and sweaty-part mingling Voodoo party here in LA this weekend. Here's your ticket to freedom. Enjoy.

So you're newly based in LA?


Yeah, I live up in Echo Park, Silverlake-way. It’s a really nice community around here and I love the fact that there’s vinyl-only record stores up here as well, which is pretty amazing. To be honest, I wanted to move somewhere out of the hustle and bustle and doom and gloom of London. It was all getting a bit gray and a bit miserable. I just wanted to move somewhere where the weather and there was really nice nature and pop up and put my studio here and have my friends over when I wanted them over and just lock it in.

How's it different for your output?

It’s completely different work ethic–I’m going to bed a lot earlier at night, I’m not partying so much in the week and I’m getting up early and I get all the proper label stuff and work dealt with early, the first few hours of every day and then the rest of the day to kind of to use creatively. There’s a lot of places I like going to around here that do inspire me creatively, like the observatory I find very inspiring up there and up past my house where Elysian Park.


Have you ever gone down to Elysian Park on Sunday and seen the the ceremonies of the guys in the lowrider cars?

I know, yeah I know. I’ve got myself a 66 mustang but I’m a bit scared to go down there because they’re all like really serious car heads and I’d probably be like, 'I really don’t know that much about it, I just know that I like the one I drive.' But every day down in Elysian Park there’s something different going on and there’s little spots, like shrines. There’s this one little area where people have been putting up little toys and little offerings; you don’t actually know why.

Now, Damian, tell me about your love of Neil Diamond.


Oh man, do I have to?

REBELRAVE #8: Wolf+Lamb from David Terranova on Vimeo.



I’m a huge fan! We’re kindred spirits here!


I think my first Neil Diamond experience was hearing "Song Sung Blue" when I was really little. There’s something about, you know when you’re in the car with your parents and you have those kind of car songs–it was just one of those car songs and I don’t know what it was, there was just something about it. I think just hearing "Sweet Caroline"… my love of his music was totally sealed. And then later, I was seeing the jazz thing for the first time and all those songs in that really gripped me, and some of the orchestration is really quite phenomenal.


He's the shit.


And then I guess he did the thing with Barbara Streisand and it was all just over, really, wasn’t it? I went to see him play a couple of times. It’s very funny how these kind of middle-aged super large women are all over him crying and going crazy. For about 20 minutes at one of the shows I went to see, I couldn’t see anything except for this huge bunch of women in front of me flapping their big arms around for about half an hour. And then he came down to the front of the stage and he offered to kiss a couple of women in the audience and that obviously set off this riot, so for the next half an hour there was nothing but these women queuing up to kiss him at the front of the stage … I see the cheese factor  but he has written and performed some really super beautiful songs as well so I’m quite proud to say I’m a fan.


Tell me about the Rebel TV component of the label. What excites you about that?


I love the idea of people being able to get into grips  more with who we are, who the players are, who these guys are that are playing this music and producing this music and playing these super cool dance records. The majority of people I work with have really strong, super powerful, hilarious personalities and I often thought it was a shame that those personalities never really came through. You’d end up with this faceless scene where there’s just this cool music, where people are just getting off their heads to, dancing to, but no one actually knows or sees who’s responsible for them. And I just wanted to bring that back a little bit–the guys on tour in the rock band and doing the press photos and all the rest of it and dressing up and having fun. Hopefully it will entice people to get more involved and be part of something, to feel like they belong to that scene.


As far as the scope of your career, how do you feel like partying has changed?

I think that it’s very bizarre to travel the world and to find people partying the same way every where you go! It’s just one of those bizarre things and I don’t know how many people–outside the youth world should we say–are like, actually aware of that. So I think there’s been some sense of conformity. Global party conformity. Which our music has definitely had something to do with. I think every scene has definite connecting factors, but I don’t want to say that the house and techno world is simply made up of people taking drugs because it certainly isn’t.  I think that over the years there’s been a change in what people bring to partying–as much as the music changes, attitudes to the music change with it. At the moment we’re in a really nice area musically, the music’s a lot more soulful, there’s a lot more passion and it’s less about dodgy drugs.


I definitely think there’s some kind of sensualism and careful articulation. Surely there's a drug scene associated to techno and dance music but I definitely think that more than ever people just need a reason to cut lose and feel free.

I’m always trying to inspire people to make music that’s coming from the heart and make music that kind of draws on an individual’s personal experiences and life stories and to say something special and different about where you’re coming from as a person and as an artist. And I think we’ve crossed our Rebels, like you said, with the Rebel TV films, the Rebel Rate tours, presenting ourselves just as cool people who are doing something different for the greater good, as opposed to just kind of knocking out you know, a quick catchy dance number.


And how about a more abstract question: what’s beautiful to you?


Cats. Definitely very beautiful to me. The sad cat person. For me, beauty generally comes when I see or hear or experience something a bit weird or a bit edgy. Of course I can see the beauty in obvious things, but for me, I get the most enjoyments out of moments of odd, weird, not disturbing, but slightly more trippy moments.


Do you think people can re-invent themselves?


Well I hope so, because I certainly know a lot of people that have been through some times of troubles and realized they haven’t turned out to be exactly the kind of person they would have hoped to have been. People are not idiots. We can see through the flaws and the issues that everyone has in their daily life, and I think that, provided you can come to terms with being honest and being truthful about yourself, then people are going to be more open to allowing you the time and the space to reinvent yourself to what you probably should be.

REBELRAVE #3: Crosstown Rebels at Watergate from David Terranova on Vimeo.

Finally, what visual artist do you think best suits your music?
Wow, I gotta think. I'd probably say a combination of Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, the life and work of Bruce Haack, and the Muppets.