Meet Loss Combinator | DJ, Producer, and Founder of Tears In The Club

We had the good fortune of connecting with Loss Combinator and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Loss Combinator, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
My entire life trajectory has found its focal point and gravitational center in the future. Every endeavor to which I have dedicated myself involves a pouring of my own energy into a realization of the future I grew up expecting. Why is humankind still earthbound, how can we understand the origins of the universe, when will we encounter or uncover extraterrestrial life, and why isn’t wave music and its associated and adjacent genres getting air time in the LA nightclub scene? Wave, hardwave, neo grime, hyper trance and neo y2k breakcore are all genres of music that embody a vision of the future that captures both the most utopian technological paradises and the most dystopian urban apocalypses. In many ways Los Angeles represents both of these alternate futures simultaneously and in the present. I spent more than a year chasing wave music across the globe, attending a events from London to Moscow to NYC. What I ultimately realized was that I needed to do whatever I could to establish LA as an international hub of wave music, and founded Tears In The Club to pursue this future.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
When I created Tears In The Club, my primary goal was to create an experience worthy of the music. Goethe once stated that architecture is frozen music. For the music I think he was talking about, I believe the converse also holds – music is liquid architecture. I think what sets this event apart is the conciseness, cohesiveness and clarity of the vision and presentation. The music featured at Tears In The Club evokes a space and then takes you there. The spaces can be vastly expansive and exhilarating or claustrophobic and intense, but they are at their core both extremely emotional and extremely futuristic, almost evoking a sort of time reversed nostalgia. I don’t think anyone else is really trying to present this sentiment through a music focused event with consistency.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I love LA and I think it’s one of the only places in the world you can find anything if you look hard enough. Any time someone visits, I try to get them to at least the following:

Dan Sung Sa
6th St Bridge
The Getty Museum
The Last Bookstore
Blue Bottle
SpaceX
The Huntington Library/Gardens
and obviously Tears In The Club

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I think I owe a lot to Enigma (Michael Crete) for showing me from a very young age how music could shatter barriers of classification in the most timeless, emotional, and secularly spiritual way. I also owe a lot of inspiration and influence to Crystal Castles who really impressed upon me the full impact electronic music could have from the standpoint of energy transfer. Crystal Castles were really my gateway from post-hardcore and metalcore into the world of high emotion, high intensity sehnsucht via electronic music. Finally, it was Juche via Virtual Self that opened my eyes to the fact that a new world was being built within the music scene but extending far beyond both aesthetically and technologically. I realized I needed to be a conduit for facilitating this world building exercise.

Website: https://www.tearsintheclub.io

Instagram: losscombinator

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottshermer

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC_90NHSkk6yHqUH0bnBdOog