A multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and visual artist from Southern California, Cameron Lew has crafted his Ginger Root project steadily since 2017, inviting a fervent and growing legion of fans into storylines drawn across mediums: captivating albums with accompanying films and globe-spanning tours. The Ginger Root sound — handmade yet immaculately polished synth-pop, alt-disco, boogie, and soul — takes shape through Lew’s lens as an Asian-American growing up enamored by 1970s and ’80s music, specifically the creative and cultural dialogue between Japanese City Pop and its Western counterparts from French Pop to Philly Soul to Ram-era McCartney. SHINBANGUMI, his long-awaited third LP, and Ghostly International debut set for physical release in 2024 with a visual album component, translates roughly to a new season of a show. It finds Lew more poised, idiosyncratic, and intentional than ever in a new chapter of life, unlocking “exactly what Ginger Root should sound and feel like,” he says. “In terms of instrumentation and musicality, it’s the first time that I felt very confident and comfortable with what everything should be comprised of. On the more personal side, I’m coming out of the last four years of writing, touring, and living as a different person; SHINBANGUMI is a platform to showcase my new self.”

Since his first release of “aggressive elevator soul” music and dispatch from his beloved weekly YouTube cover series during college, Lew has captained the ship of Ginger Root, able to write, record, and mix the music while creating the art and videos from scratch. What makes Ginger Root special is the project’s ability to weave influence beyond pastiche into a bigger picture, exploring that rarified pop pleasure center where referential meets refreshing.

In 2018, the project delivered its first album in collaboration with Acrophase Record, Mahjong Room, followed by several projects including the 2020 LP, Rikki. Between each move, Ginger Root has played alongside many modern Indie standouts, such as Khruangbin, Durand Jones, Omar Apollo, The Marias, and Hippo Campus.

With much of Rikki’s release feeling lost to the moments of that year, Lew decided to take a step back and try to write a succinct project to engage listeners for as long as possible. His redirected energy, paired with the newfound influence of Japanese art and culture from his experience learning to speak the language, yielded City Slicker in 2021. On the strength of breakout songs like “Juban District” and “Loretta,” the project connected with a massive audience on the internet, with his YouTube amassing 160,000 subscribers and his Spotify nearly hitting 1 million monthly listeners.

Ginger Root released the Nisemono EP in 2022 and has since played sold-out shows across North America, Europe, and Asia as fans await new music. In 2024, Ginger Root presents SHINBANGUMI across a sequential music video series, resuming the conceptual narrative from his 2022 EP Nisemono, which follows Ginger Root as a newly-fired music supervisor in 1987 starting his own media conglomerate, Ginger Root Productions. “If you watch music videos one through eight, you’ll be presented with a story that’s comparable to a traditional movie; something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Pearl & the Oysters, international adventurers in eclectic pop, crash-landed their starship in Los Angeles in the year 2020. Born and schooled in Paris, the couple launched a nomadic romance fueled by music that would later see them crooning in New York jazz clubs, then wading the swampy waters of American DIY art rock in Gainesville, Florida.

Today in L.A., the band’s evolving sound complements a buoyant moment in a scene where their brand of space age jazz-pop is more than welcome.

Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack met on the first day of high school in Paris – bespectacled Juju and curlyhaired Jojo, both music-obsessed, nerdy, and drawn together by a “poetic connection” and mutual heroes unusual for high schoolers, like Burt Bacharach, Kurt Weill and especially, Antônio Carlos Jobim. “It’s very French of us to be into Brazil, but like, 1960s-French,” said Joachim. “When we were kids, it wasn’t that cool.”

At college, pursuing musicology degrees at the Sorbonne, a romantic connection emerged. Today, Juliette and Joachim’s shared journey as love partners and music-makers gifts listeners with a rare experience in pop music – the output of a near-telepathic musical language grown over decades of 24/7 connection and collaboration. But back in school, each struggled for the respect of their academic music mentors. Of Joachim, Juliette said “You were studying classical composition in the conservatory where Debussy and Ravel were schooled. And the teachers wouldn’t understand why you would do pop music on the side.”

But the “eternal schoolboy,” as Joachim self-describes, dedicated years to the study of his hero Jobim, the eventual subject of a PhD dissertation at the University of Florida. Joachim’s Jobim, MPB and Tropicália, analog synths, Juliette’s love for jazz, Blossom Dearie and the Great American Songbook, and the pair’s shared delight in global pop fusion groups like Yellow Magic Orchestra alchemized into the kaleidoscopic world-building sound of Pearl & the Oysters, first unleashed on their self-titled 2017 debut. Later, the band caught the ears of Peanut Butter Wolf’s label Stones Throw, who signed and released 2023’s effervescent and ornate Coast 2 Coast.

For the band’s second LP on Stones Throw, Juju and Jojo welcome the familiar fans climbing aboard the Oysters’ signature rocket ride to paradise. Planet Pearl, true to form, is a hypnotic vision-quest conjuring moonlight, tropical waters, exotic botany and buzzing things in flight. But it isn’t all bubbles and fizz in Oysterville. Having always played imaginatively with the personae of crash-landed aliens, on Planet Pearl our voyaging strangers sing to the alienation of a journey closer to reality – navigating the daunting environs of Los Angeles, the digital age of creation-as-content, and the rootlessness of long cross-continental tours.

For all its lush loveliness and the pure ASMR pleasure of its textures in headphones, Planet Pearl represents a more bittersweet, reflective journey for the Oysters’ canon to date. On their 5th full-length album, the band feels sufficiently introduced; they’re ready for another level of intimacy – truthier conversations. An attentive listener does well to connect with darker whispers in some of the band’s most outwardly charming songs. With an evolved depth of intimacy, and an unflagging zeal for experiment and play, the experience of Planet Pearl heralds a brave and prolific future for our restless voyagers.

XINXIN, pronounced “chin-chin”, is a wholesome yet fierce genre-bending quartet who interplay expressively to channel the energy and honesty of the universal “child within”. From the suburbs of LA and the Inland Empire, Janize Ablaza (Vocals, guitar), Stephen Reed (drums), Carlos Elias (bass), and Jonah Huang (Keyboards), strive to convey the range of the human experience in their music in which insecurity, humility, trauma, and peace coexist. This philosophy is paralleled by their eclectic influences, including grunge, jazz, metal, RnB, and electronic music.

The four-piece debuted their first full-length album ‘Xinxin’ with Preference Records in November of 2020 which included their singles ‘Trust’ and ‘Control’ which received heavy rotation on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. You can experience their latest releases ‘In Perfect Time’ and ‘Clarity’ – perhaps in your car, on your way home from a long a** day of work or while cooking yourself a nice meal – available on all streaming platforms.