Back in 2015 I was caught between trying to move out of teaching and back into hospitality. Frustrated in London, I took a work placement in Los Angeles for 5 months at the start of the year with a half-a-mind to extend it further. Behind This Wall had run its course as a club residency in London with the closure of Plastic People, but we’d always dallied a little in making up drinks and running peripatetic bars & sound-systems in unloved spaces.

With clubs in California operating under draconian licensing measures (seeming alien at the time!) bars provided a sanctuary where drinking and music happily collided. Chatting to a bartender atop the Ace Hotel in Downtown, he introduced me to a no-Campari negroni using an exotic alternative called Gran Classico in its stead. Campari’s popularity had at some point lead to an alteration in its production to meet the demand; this new product religiously followed the original recipe for the ‘Bitter of Turin’, eschewing artificial additives, unnecessary sugar and corn syrup necessary in mass production. My tender championed a blog - ‘Medicinal Mixology’ - which archived similar alt-liquors and preached a cleaner drinking experience to help beat the sickly high so eponymous with quick-fire cocktails. This was drinking on vinyl! An elevated experience without the bumpy landing of a hangover to boot.

In a mediative moment, mentally juggling between staying and returning, I wrote to Dan at Oval Space pitching a concept for a summer takeover based on my experiences in LA: marrying drinking, food, design and programming into the same ethos of taking care of all the components in the experience, without any compromise. He bit into it, I returned - and after that summer residency armed us with fertile connections, the opportunity to open the bar on Mare Street revealed itself.

Below is a selection of photos I took with a 35mm Minolta camera over the course of my time in L.A. To me, it’s a city of juxtapositions, something almost bio-mechanical, where I could awkwardly begin to feel comfortable in my sense of isolation. The city sits at the end-of-the-line for the consumptions of manifest destiny, where the last wave of the American Dream gently swelled itself to its full terrifying potential.

Reflecting on this mood seems apt in the current climate but also hopeful: that out of this detachment ideas can germinate. The emptiness of the city buried against the triptych of sky, mountains & ocean makes for a compelling subject: shining like a blinding cult, it oozes a confidence that one day it will surely break off from the mainland and drift out into the Pacific.