A consensus seems to be growing that Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance for independent music. In a recent Sunday feature, we set out to discover just how it is that while the major labels continue to suffer layoffs and severe sales losses, this city’s scrappy, savvy, taste-driven indie imprints have, in fact, been thriving. As a corollary to that, we’ve spoken to and profiled 12 of L.A.’s most active young labels, from artist-owned black metal powerhouse Southern Lord to chart-climbing indie rock outlet Danger Bird to progressive hip-hop imprint Anticon. Here’s hoping they’ll all end up in a GZA song some day.

Sargent House (Echo Park)
Longtime talent manager Cathy Pellow started Sargent House in 2006 with one artist: Seal Beach prog-punk band Rx Bandits, who were ready to call it quits after selling around 150,000 records through MCA/Geffen and, according to Pellow, "never seeing a penny." Today, her stable comprises "a middle class of awesome musicians," also proggily inclined, able to live off their earnings. She also manages a sister label co-run by the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez Lopez.

In Sunday's Calendar, I trawled through the corners of Los Angeles' music scene that's still actively recording and releasing albums on glorious...tape. From the garage-rock scrim of Fullerton's Burger Records to the blissy psychedelia of Eagle Rock's Not Not Fun; to Frosty and matthewdavid's all-cassette DJ night at Hyperion Tavern and a grateful but skeptical Pasadena manufacturer, it's a boomlet on the genre margins that nonetheless is giving an old, reviled medium some new cache and a way for fringe bands to make a permanent document of difficult sounds.

As Amanda Brown of Not Not Fun put it -- "Some friends of ours said they were starting a new project that sounded like outsider dinner jazz called Low Light Situations, and we were like 'Great! Why not put this out on tape?'." Read the whole thing here.

-- August Brown