The Escalator by OUE Skyspace

Being back in LA without a car, I have started to use the bus to get to and from work. While I have enjoyed the way that the bus has made me reconsider my visual frame of the city now that I don’t have to focus on the road and I get to be smug about lowering my carbon footprint, I am most grateful that on a daily basis I get to pass by the recent vigilante music installation on the staircase that runs up from 5th street to Hope, just by the second escalator.

Some time in 2018, the Bank of America tower in downtown Los Angeles has decided to re-brand. They have a fancy restaurant on their top floor, a glass slide that you can ride for $40 a pop, and most recently they recently began pumping non-stop smooth jazz onto the street below and the Bunker Hill steps which rest to the side.

The music is full of unabashed tropes, never failing to contain the tone of an undistorted electric guitar that slides into each note and a soprano saxophone whose owner is mandated by law to grow hair like Kenny G’s. Even worse, the volume is such that I can’t help but think that owners of the corporate space are playing it primarily to cause the homeless to flee the immediately surrounding area.

But the city spoke back. The second escalator on the rise up the steps has decided to fight this sonic onslaught with music of its own: a pitch of unwavering volume but timbrally varied squeaking that seems inspired equally by James Chance and the Contortions and Ornette Coleman. There is not substantial dynamic range to the piece or many parts that require subtle listening. The brilliance lies in the unending screech of pure energy erupting from the machine, caused but what I can only imagine is either an extreme lack of maintainance or (as I prefer) a musical vigilante.

Before you write this off, this sound is not some mere one-note affair but instead the solo of varied and occasionally tonal horn player, clearly in the throes of an improvisation that has long abandoned the changes. What is particularly clever is design is that it is symmetric (the second of 3 escalators), and that it tells a different story depending on the direction which you head on the steps. The hold music monopolizes the soundscape at the bottom, the dialectical opposition of the escalator and the tower sits in the middle, and they both fade to the typical sounds of the city at the top. Depending on your direction, you get a different yet equally interesting experience.

I haven’t been able to find dates associated with it, so who is to say how long it will stay. In the meantime give it a visit. Just don’t stay too long at the bottom.