Blank Blue’s Nobody and Niki Randa Waiting for the Big One

PHOTO by JOHN GILHOOLEY

At Fingerprints Records, Niki Randa had a little trick she’d like to play. They sold butter-flavored lollipops that if stripped from the wrapper looked like lemon-flavored lollipops, and about two sucks in, whomever she’d given one would make the sad sour face of thwarted expectations. Elvin Estela laughs now about how he tried hard to play it off—“but he was totally a vegan, so it was hilarious,” says Niki. Now they eat less misleading lunches together on break from Fingerprints, where they both started working about 90 days apart in 2001 (“I hear so much music now that I hate it!” says Niki sweetly), and after work they bike off together to Elvin’s home studio to make Blank Blue.

Elvin Estela is known by everybody as Nobody and his 2000 album Soulmates made the Nobody name famous: “Every time someone wanted to be cool, he didn’t mention DJ Shadow as the illest sample producer,” wrote one reviewer, remembering. “He actually mentioned Nobody.” But each full-length since pursues a purer sound—a full and real synthesis of psychedelia and hip-hop, more powerful and precise every time—and Blank Blue is Nobody’s newest, a group only six months older than their first song and only one week older than their very first show (at Little Temple on June 12). At this point only two reviewers have pestered them (myself and Alex Roman), and we both thought of the same thing: Os Mutantes, a band that tried everything but sounded always like themselves.

Blank Blue had Greater California’s Greg Brown playing live percussion, and they had Nobody’s laptop, sampler and Korg, and Niki, too, with one hand curled around the mic stand, and they had drums and drone and reverb so thick it was almost medicinal, plus poise and presence that must’ve come by divine right since this was only the second song they ever played. “Sink all around me,” Niki sang, slow and sad, and I remembered a half-lost old song (that must be a certain precursor to Nobody) with one line by one girl caught in an analog loop: “Waiting to die / Waiting to die / Waiting to die / Waiting to die . . . ,” she says with a catch at the end—and it’s not grim but wild and alive. And I also thought of Alison Statton—another girl with a voice that just comes down from above—and a song called “Final Day” that’s almost only heartbeat and voice and would be about losing love if it weren’t about the end of the world.

They only played a few, and when they were done, the room seemed so tiny; and the famously calisthenic DJ Gaslamp Killer (he of the signature slam mix) was ready to go and played what must have been the best fit he had: “Paint It Black,” with sitar and Jagger’s dissipated lyrics and a beat that just rolled all over the floor. And though it wasn’t Mutantes, I could see his point. Nobody and Niki, both of them working in the same record store and both now playing music that made the lights slightly blur—these songs were going to last for a long time.

• • •

Elvin was a kid from the city of Carson where first-wave champion DJs like Joe Cooley used to play at Samerika Hall, and he was at the very first an MC. He even put out a cassette in high school with the only raps he ever recorded. The decision that helped introduce him to the world as Nobody came on orientation day at Loyola Marymount. He saw a class on the form called ‘Recording Arts,’ and so he checked that one, he says.

If he hadn’t become a producer, thinks rapper Busdriver—who used Nobody for about half of his last album, Roadkill Overcoat—he could see Elvin as a spiritual guru leading his own cult. Instead, Elvin climbed up to eventual music director of Loyola’s much-loved radio station KXLU and signed to world-class hip-hop/soul/jazz label Ubiquity off an instrumental beat tape he’d originally made just to sell hand-to-hand. DJ Mike Nardone—host of LA hip-hop institution We Came from Beyond—had a package ready to send to Ubiquity, and at Elvin’s request he included a copy of Nobody’s tape. They called Elvin a week later and signed him. “I was only 21!” he says.

2000’s Soulmates was his first record, built on deep sampling from buried genres—renaissance folk like Sunforest or Anne Briggs or something in the very first track?—and reinforced by top LA MCs mostly out of Project Blowed. Initial surprise and skill made it what probably still is his biggest record. Bold, said the Wire; seductive, said Spin; dope, said Alternative Press. Nobody remains one of the people who defined the city’s sound, says Ubiquity press and radio coordinator Andrew Meza: “He’s pretty much the epitome of Los Angeles beat-making.”

A little funny to come and write about this early part of the Nobody discography so many years later. Listening back, Elvin always had a fearless and fluid sense of how to make and play music. He was early into ’60s and ’70s psychedelic music, notable still and until producers are as conversant with Can as they are James Brown, but there wasn’t that sense of stripping-for-parts you get from more savage samplers. 2003 follow-up Pacific Drift—subtitled Western Water Music Vol. 1—offered measured instrumentals and disassembled covers of songs like the Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year” and the Monkees’ headspun “Porpoise Song,” followed by 2004’s And Everything Else and the 2005 group Nobody and the Mystic Chords of Memory put gentle beats and psychedelia into a full band.

Soulmates made the splash, but listening in sequence shows how Nobody’s sound never settled: he learned how to play guitar and how to really write a song, and he smiles now about the two-plus-two sample alignments he remembers using for his earliest work. And every so often he’d put out a record with such depth and precision in it that you would feel you were listening incorrectly if you weren’t learning something. Producer Daddy Kev DJs alongside Elvin each week at their Low End Theory club. He has probably fifteen years of respected experience and says, “I aspire to the taste Elvin has.”

“There’s importance in what he does,” says Busdriver. “He plays a very humble, humble role, but he’s in fact doing something very particular and unique. And his talent encompasses all the things. He’s one of the few production music guys who gives LA their unique stance on things. I just hope he gets his chance. Like for his first record—people really heralded him. I think he’s due for another run at being the guy people talk about.”

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

Six years in almost the same room and they never thought to play music together. Elvin actually sings more around the store than she ever does, says Niki, who grew up in choir and whose grandfather was a jazz musician, and whose uncle is on the cover of a Byrds LP. “That’s why Elvin started talking to me!” she laughs. And after a few nervous overtures at the very end of last year, they discovered some kind of uncommon compatibility that Niki calls the “unibrain”: “We have the same personalities,” she says. “We suffer from the same schizophrenia,” says Elvin.

Kev agrees that Elvin has a dual personality—as much as Elvin loves CocoRosie, Kev says, he loves DJ Quik; and articulate Elvin snaps into slangy Elvin (“It’s funny. He’ll go into the zone with me a little bit on the phone after a few minutes—totally like, ‘Sup, cuz!’”) the same way the zoned-out album-cut Nobody snaps into block-rocker remix Nobody, like at a Low End Theory club Unreleased Beat Invitationals event, where producers and residents Elvin and Kev tested new instrumentals on a riled and noisy crowd. There, Elvin stepped up dressed like Love’s Arthur Lee (he favors vests) and landed a dinosaur 808 bass beat that could pop the tires on a jeep.

It’s a flexible aesthetic that puts Nobody remix credits after tracks by the Postal Service and (soon) the Shins—but at the same time, you notice a kind of gradual concentration. On Soulmates, Elvin says, lyricists came prepared with their own finished material; on Pacific Drift, he backed his guest vocalists down to cover songs; on Tree Colored See with his Mystic Chords of Memory, he finished an entire album with the same three people. Blank Blue’s record includes family and friends—keys from the Tyde’s Anh Vo, guitar and bass by Josh Teague, strings by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, more guitar by Ben Knight and Beachwood Sparks’ Farmer Dave, plus back-ups by Kristina Simmons and even whispered vocals by Elvin’s wife Susie—but Blank Blue is at heart Niki and Elvin, chewing gum in living-room chairs. It’s the most personal project he’s been in, says Elvin—no one e-mails him vocal tracks.

There are eight Blank Blue songs now, mostly finished and mostly unreleased and some so fresh they don’t even have names—one has a working title based on Lil Jon’s whaaaaaaaaat?! (which Elvin makes sure to spell out to preserve the energy)—and the only one you can actually hold in your hand is called “All the Shallow Deep,” which leads the new From LA with Love compilation. It begins with the kind of low oscillation I am told comes from certain crystals—the lavender diamond theory, actually—and then Niki’s voice appears more like sight than sound. I’m sure it was done with just a wise hand on a slider, but she blooms into the song like ink into water, a beautiful effect that fits perfectly an album planned as the sequel to Pacific Drift: Western Water Music Vol. 2.

“Psychedelic,” she says, “means putting imagery into sound.” Pacific Drift was a water album, Elvin says, and Blank Blue is a water album with a story—about the quake that comes and slides us into the ocean. The city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest vision of itself, wrote Joan Didion, but the city sinking might be deeper. In 1769, Spanish explorers noted the duration of colossal quakes by timing how many ‘Hail Marys’ they could say, said UCI researchers.

Elvin remembers when he was just 10 or 11: “The entire state was waiting for the big one,” he says—and even though Nostradamus set a date (May 10, 1989), it never came. The fires we survive, but the quake we sometimes forget, even though that’s what will really finish California off. Blank Blue’s album is about what Elvin calls “the West Coast apocalypse.” But they change how it ends, he says. “There’s a really awesome outcome,” he grins. And when we go to a photo shoot at San Pedro’s Sunken City, he looks out from a cliff at the old capsized streets and the dirt swirling in the surf. “Perfect!” he says.

• • •

“The bass on stage was so loud it made my chubby places jiggle!” says Niki—Blank Blue making little earthquakes, as Elvin jabs the drum pad hard enough to make fingerprints. Fun show, she says. Stoked, Elvin says, three separate times. (“Was it awesome? Word? Word!” he’ll say at the bar.) Live drummer Greg Brown was a little nervous about the electronic backline, “but with Elvin involved,” he says, “he’s worked so long with electronics, it’s almost an organic, natural thing.”

That is one of the things Nobody does—one of the humble and hidden talents Busdriver is so respectful of, the things that make him want to . . . please Nobody the creative collaborator the way you might want to please your best professor. What Nobody does, says Busdriver, is add momentum—he charges things, adds drive to things that simmer and slow burn. And what Nobody does, says Kev, is what he hopes he does in his own music: honor as much of the spirit of the Beatles as of Run DMC. And what Nobody also does, I might say, is push toward the most natural reconciliation of rock & roll prehistory and hip-hop history without the Frankenstein cliché-mashing. Everything is possible, said Mutantes even before there were samplers to sample with.

“I love the children of hip-hop,” Elvin says. “They don’t want to make rap anymore. It’s like in Britain when they were all playing the blues but after a while they didn’t want to make blues anymore. But that’s the way they’d learned to make music. It’s the same with us. The only way we know to approach music is by samplers or whatever—synthetically—but we’re trying to do something else with the tools we learned with.”

“There are less rules now,” says Niki.

“How we live is how we listen . . . stoned?” says Elvin. “I don’t know if stoned means necessarily high all the time; it’s a little murky and a little slow—and that’s how music out here sounds. The world isn’t really mellow and slow right now—that’s why people like New York—but soon they’ll come back to us.”

MYSPACE.COM/BLANKBLUE