Higher sets up house downtown

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

“House music is for all senses—you gotta hear it, gotta smell it—we like incense!—and there’s the whole visual thing,” says DJ Frank Lara, half the organization behind house club Higher. “We keep the lights low, It’s not like rave lighting or quinceanera lighting—we keep it dark and intimate and let people close their eyes and go into their own thing with the music. We don’t want them distracted by glowsticks!”

Was that really an issue? “Not at our spot!” says Frank, though it was a slow slog for the old Higher in Hermosa Beach. He and step-cousin Richard Lopez—credited as Slick_Dada—ran it for eight-and-a-half years, he says, and it took about eight years for people to quit asking them to play Britney Spears. And by the time they’d established a little basic education, noise codes and nightclub machinations wiped Higher off the schedule. That was two years ago. Now, Frank and Richard are back for the first night of the revived Higher (also Richard’s birthday!) at downtown’s Rhythm Lounge, with inaugural guests the Shape Shifter’s L.A. Jae, coming producer/DJ Will Rodriguez, and out-of-retirement Does Your Mama Know? DJ Miguel Plascencia.

“[My family] knows I DJ,” says Frank. “But they don’t know I DJ in Miami, and they don’t see me play Deep in front of seven or eight hundred people—they don’t even know exactly what house music is. My mom says, ‘You like disco?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, thanks to you playing those 8-tracks. . . .’”

Harbor Area-raised Frank and Richard both had some of their most high-profile sets at Marques Wyatt’s Deep, the LA house club that set genre perfection. Marques is the James Brown of house, says Frank—formerly Marques’s assistant—and time alongside him (or Frankie Knuckles or Roy Davis, Jr., who Richard says gave him the encouragement to start producing) helped them develop a sense of presence and pace that they hope helps Higher find something more sophisticated then just matching beats.

Frank remembers DJ R.A.W. teasing him years ago over the hardcore techno he used to listen to: “’Sounds like cats fighting!’” he said. He’d grown up DJing everything from the projects to Mormon dances (“‘Push It’? Push what?” they’d ask) and tony parties in Palos Verdes. Richard started young with Technics 1200s his grandma bought him (“I was lucky!”) and freestyle like Nocera and the Cover Girls. Long nights beside international adepts in LA demonstrated new intangibles: “I never used to talk about ‘vibe’ until I started playing house music,” laughs Frank. “I used to be like, ‘Play the next song! Come on, man, you’re playing too slow!’ I was young and I wanted to get my heart beating!”

They like energy still. One of the records Richard is still chasing is Maurice Fulton’s Eddie and the Eggs 12”, which they once fired through a monolithic speaker stack during a downtown set and made the neighbors from across the street come running in because the windows were bowing in and out. But there’s intimacy, too, that comes from reading a crowd and feeding a seamless set back into them.

“Like Tony Largo at 6 a.m. at Does Your Mama Know? You’ve got three hours before the club closes and you’re drenched in sweat and you can’t wait to hear what he’ll do next, and he keeps going and going and going,” says Frank. “I would just get this euphoric feeling, and I’d walk outside and see steam coming off the people on the patio! That’s what it’s all about. The Rhythm Lounge just installed new fans, but we’re gonna make it hot in that place!”

HIGHER WITH DJS FRANK LARA, SLICK_DADA, WILL RODRIGUEZ, MIGUEL PLASCENCIA AND L.A. JAE THE RHYTHM LOUNGE | 245 PINE AVE | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.435.4288 | RHYTHM-LOUNGE.COM | THURS 9:30PM | CONTACT VENUE FOR COVER | 21+