California Sounds: New music from Zack de la Rocha, Kim Gordon and M. Geddes Gengras exudes beauty and grit

The wellspring of music rising from Southern California is a continual source of wonder, one that hasn’t stopped flowing since its settlements became cities. In contemporary California, so much recorded music now gushes to the surface that it’s a struggle to keep up, let alone try to remain informed on the volume of classic music being resurrected through reissues and streaming-service deep dives.

Which is one reason why, now more than ever, a dedicated, ongoing record of Southern California’s most exciting music is necessary. As a means of keeping track of the hundreds of hours of recordings released on various platforms during any given week, the focus of Essential Tracks will shift toward home. Below, three new tracks emanating from the area, the first in a regular series exploring the sounds of California.

Kim Gordon, “Murdered Out” (Matador). As documented in her recent autobiography, “Girl in a Band: A Memoir,” longtime New Yorker and former Sonic Youth bassist Gordon returned to her Southern California birthplace a few years ago, and since then she’s become a regular presence at cultural events around town.

On her new solo track, she focuses her appreciation for cultural aesthetics on what she describes as the “murdered-out” paint jobs on stylish Los Angeles automobiles.

Specifically, wrote Gordon in notes accompanying the release, “I noticed more and more cars painted with black matte spray, tinted windows, blackened logos, and black wheels.” The artist calls the flat-black look “the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul.”

For the track “Murdered Out,” Gordon teamed with Warpaint percussionist Stella Mozgawa for a kind of noise purge. Based on an idea generated by the producer and songwriter Justin Raisen (Ariel Pink, Charlie XCX, Sky Ferreira), the track features Gordon’s seductive whisper-and-sing vocal style propelling an industrial-sized rhythm, along with a bassline that suggests the great San Francisco punk band Flipper.

It’s a relentless track that, like the paint job for which it’s named, exudes grit.

Zach de la Rocha, “Digging for Windows” (free download). For the past few years De la Rocha, the former singer-rapper-lyricist for Rage Against the Machine, has been holed up in his Chinatown studio working on music.

He’s occasionally surfaced for cameos with kindred spirits Run the Jewels, under his pseudonym One Day as a Lion or at one-off Rage gigs, but hasn’t issued a proper studio album. Word of such work has been one of the worst kept secrets in Los Angeles rock, though, and the artist debuted the first track last week.

“Digging for Windows” finds De la Rocha storming out of the studio like Superman from a phone booth, except spitting fire and cussing like a sailor. (No, seriously: The below clip is definitely not safe for work.)

Bouncing along to a rhythm built by Run the Jewels’ rapper-producer El-P and featuring a guitar line from the great Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan), De la Rocha rips through lyrics set in a prison. “This city’s a trap, my partner,” he raps. “Under the lights of their choppers/ Bodies tools for their coffers/ Not worth the cost of our coffins/ Stare at a future so toxic/ No trust in the dust of a promise.”

M. Geddes Gengras, “FACT Mix 561” (FACT download). The experimental producer Gengras makes expansive electronic music in his East Los Angeles studio that values atmosphere and texture over melody and repetition. In much of his work, hooks and melodies are rare, with tones and sonic squiggles moving within the frequency range like lines in a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

His gorgeous new album “Interior Architecture” finds beauty in four long, meditative instrumentals that extend to nearly 20 minutes each. The human voice is seldom a presence in these barely structured works. When one does arrive, Gengras weaves it into the fabric of the composition.

The artist recently released a mixtape as part of the great FACT mix series, and it features a host of similarly attuned music from across the decades. To wit: mostly instrumental music from British folkie John Martyn, English electronic producers Spacetime Continuum, the KLF and Coil and various Gengras remixes. To give it a typically challenging Gengras spin, he mixed in loops and samples from recent rap and R&B jams, some of which loop like Zen koans.