MARK + JONNIE HOUSTON

We were pushed into the dimly lit bedroom; “Welcome,” pronounced a lady lounging on the bed in lingerie, “There are a few rules here: no photography, no name-dropping and no neon drinks. Have fun.” We barely had time to recover before the bed slid back to reveal a staircase.

This was our first experience of one of the Houston Brothers’ bars, No Vacancy, a 1920s-style speakeasy in an old Victorian house in Hollywood. Waiters serve punch bowls rather than bottles to guests settled into red velvet loungers or sitting at wrought-iron tables in the vine-covered courtyard outside. A DJ spins a great selection of oldies for the mass of bodies on the dance floor, who will only stop to watch the burlesque performers or the tightrope walkers precariously tiptoeing above them.

Seven hours later we were back in the club interviewing the business partners, who have so far opened a total of six bars and one restaurant, with new projects at The Line Hotel in Koreatown and one in Austin also on the horizon. We wanted to hear more about the concept behind their speakeasy enterprises – all of which are completely different, with each entrance proving even more interesting than the last. Most importantly, we wanted to find out more about their role in giving the L.A. nightlife scene a much-needed revamp...

For the full article get issue 10 here.

you can check out No Vacancy here, and keep up with the brothers here.

words: Serena Guen // photos: Olivia Seally

KILO KISH

My name is Kish Robinson, I’m 24 and was born in Orlando, Florida. I make music (under the name Kilo Kish), make art and do some design stuff. Five years ago I was at Pratt and took a year off because my financial aid didn’t go through… I was such an academic kid, I never imagined my life without school in it so I was devastated. I never really worked for myself or had to provide, my financial aid paid for my dorm, so I was like what am I going to do?! I got a touch of freedom and couldn’t go back to Florida, I was dating J. Scott at the time and I moved into the extra room in his house in Ridgewood. The rent was $443 a month… it was so far from everything! I never really worked for myself, had to provide, didn't even have a resume! I walked into this salon in SoHo called Georgia and I went in like can I work here? And they asked me if I wanted to be an intern and I said no (laughs). And they’re like OK! You can work here, for $7.50 an hour. So I worked there for like 40 hours a week and I made the $443 a month to live in New York… that’s what I did for the whole year!

I never went back to Pratt, I did an internship with this brand called Salvore and it sold to Barney’s, it was scarves and just patterns… cool screen-printing stuff and I was kind of into tactile arts, I wanted to see where that went, I knew I didn’t want to be a fashion designer but I am into patterns and working with my hands.

I didn't have any formal education in music; when I was little I played the violin for three years but I don’t remember anything. And I was in chorus in elementary school, I knew how to read music when I was a kid, but I forgot everything because I just didn’t care or keep up with it. So my music started around that same time when I was living in the house with J and Smash. Smash had a little home studio set up and we would just make weird stuff and Mel would make beats for us (laughs). Mel was so into it, it was just fun… typing out bars to people on AIM, I just saw it as a funny thing to do for a couple years. Then when I was 21 I started getting comfortable playing my music for people and taking it more serious, I played it for Ty and all those guys at Supreme, then they would play it in there.

The moment that everyone found out that I was making music was when I had that Village Voice cover and if you were in New York it was everywhere and just so easy to see, so everyone was like wait when were you even doing this? That was great because I didn’t have to explain it or make it a thing.

FF- How do all of your interests relate to each other?

KR- When I was a kid I had every magazine sent to my house. Magazine subscriptions were my favorite thing when I was like 14, 15, I had all the Vogues on my wall. When I was in high school I started a fashion club and I won best dressed in my senior polls and stuff (laughs). But I liked thrift shopping then and cutting up clothes and sewing stuff. I had a shirt brand that I started when I was a kid, I sold them to nerds in my class. And I had a bracelet brand when I was sixteen… they were the shittiest! Phil (Annand) when he was in high school made an actual, legitimate brand that made money…

FF- Yeah he said the stuff he made was shitty back then too (laughs)

KR- He made a legitimate brand that was really good… mine was not that!

I’ve always wanted to have a store,

to have a space that exists where all the different parts of my creativity can live.

I think that’s my actual dream creative project, this cool space where I can sell and keep all of the fun, different things that I make and collect. I love making music but I also love crafts and weird stuff like that, stupid little figurines, children’s books, audio books, clothing, games, things that I just make up.  

I liked music for the same reason, when I first started and because you could just be complete; if I have an idea I can make a complete thing that’s finished by the end of the day. Whereas with drawing and painting was something I always had to go back to, spend so much time and fixing. It takes a lot of precision, where as with music you can be freer.

Now, of course, it just became every other art outlet for me where I have to dissect it and painting and drawing is a little more freeing. The relationship among them is that

they switch back and forth between the one that’s the main focus and the one that’s the hobby. When all of your outlets are commodified, when do you make your personal art? And where does that fit?

If you’re doing a Capsule collection and your design aesthetic is being commodified, if you’re doing music and your sound is being commodified, if all of these things are consumed, then where does the art for you come in? They shift and you just find that balance… that’s how they’re related.

FF- Three people that are in a similar lane that you can recommend FF to chat to?

KR- Brandee Brown, Laura Harrier and young Kitty Cash!

FF- Do you feel like you are a freshman, sophomore or senior in your field?

KR- Sophomore… I feel like you kind of have to kick around and go through certain things to get a handle on what you’re doing and now I’m definitely in a different head space about it. I was a freshman was up until maybe last year, because I didn’t really take it that seriously and I feel like I hadn’t done anything yet. But I wish I would have trusted myself a little bit more, in my own capabilities. I wish I was able to see what other people saw in me, earlier on. But now that

I see music as an outlet for my art, just like I can make painting my art, just like I can make a collection my art. That gave it a different level of seriousness for me.

So that’s where I am now, it’s also just getting older… you have a little more pride in the things you do and they’re more calculated and you’re less aloof with your work method. So I just want to make the best things that I can make and try to learn and get better at what I do. I just want to make stuff until I’m old. Hopefully, by the time I’m sixty I’ll just be able to chill, money-wise and be able to paint and draw and make books and eat fruit in the morning and just be old, you know?

you can listen to Kish's music here, and follow her instagram.

as told to: Olivia Seally // photos + styling: Olivia Seally

QUIÑ

It’s 5PM and I’m wandering through Silver Lake in Los Angeles with a pixie-like figure as the sun goes down. We’ve moved from sipping mint tea and chicken broth at Café Casbah and are making our way to House of Intuition to shop for crystals. Passing natural birthing centres, juice bars and restaurants with names like ‘Forage’, the east of L.A. feels different, a welcome respite from the flash and fortune of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. People are rambling through the streets rather than rolling to the next stop, and there’s even talk of going paddle boating in Echo Park nearby.

Said pixie is Bianca Quiñones – the L.A.-born half Mexican, half Puerto Rican singer ‘Quiñ’. To the average listener, Quiñ’s music is a modern twist on R&B, her voice sweet like Cassie but hypnotic like FKA Twigs when layered over distorted backing vocals and electronic synth. Her own description, however, captures the essence of Quiñ far better. Wrinkling her freckled nose so her septum ring shimmers and scrunching her blonde curls on top of her head, she explains: “It’s called fantasy soul, as my music comes from a little fantasy world in my head. It is kind of like my higher self is writing my songs for me.”

Like Silver Lake, Quiñ is the antithesis of Hollywood; she proved this when she gave the finger to her first label after they told her to take out her septum nose ring: “I said no because they didn’t realise that none of that shit matters. If I took it out it would have defeated my whole purpose on earth, which is showing that it doesn’t matter – these beauty ideals – none of it matters. How am I supposed to change the world if I am dumbing myself down for a world I don’t believe in?”

She is now making music on her own and is in control of her own image and message, releasing dreamy, all-encompassing tracks like The Cure and Dragging Me Down while gigging around L.A. at Whisky a Go Go, On The Rox and The Roxy. Her show later that night at The Lyric with Mindfield is sold out and the opening of her new music and performance night No Service at The Standard reached capacity last week. Her latest project is called Nine Lives and is coming out in chapters of three. It’s about her on a dead planet where the only way to escape is through her dreams. She laughs, “The dream world is a whole other thing though,” and we decide, for today, to stick to Silver Lake.

for the full article get issue 10 here.

you can check out QUIÑ'S music here, and follow her on instagram.

words: Serena Guen // photos: Olivia Seally

PHILLIP T. ANNAND

My name is Phillip Toussaint Annand, age 24 and I was born in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. I’m the founder of Madbury Club; a creative house that shoots, directs, consults and creates. Within Madbury I am the “Director of Near Death Experiences”… we just try to not have titles, but Director would be the short version.

I went to a private middle school after going to a public elementary school and everyone there was really smart but had only experienced one sliver of life, in Princeton, New Jersey. So I got into all the best private high schools in the nation but once my parents got the bill, even with the scholarship, it was just crazy… it’s like paying for college twice, just to go to high school. So I left and went to public school but they pushed me so hard in private school that when I got back I was just bored… I was like a year and a half ahead of everyone else. Nothing really grabbed my attention, so I started doing graffiti because I was bored and always drawing and in suburban Jersey no one else was tagging, so it was just me, running around and fucking shit up. My first tag was OREO8…

I tagged this 40 foot piece on the back of my high school and everyone knew it was me.

I just got dumb and was having too much fun (laughs) so I realized I should maybe do something a little more positive with my art. So I’d draw on tees and sneakers and we were always in SoHo, buying Bape and Stussy. And then I knew the Hypebeast guys, from being featured on the site. So once I started putting things out there, that got attention.

My first real break-through was a street wear line called Award Tour.

It started so innocently… like I look back on the stuff I did and I don’t know why kids liked it so much. I just made like a hundred shirts, that were terrible,

and sold them in my high school for ten bucks a piece at lunch and made a killing. That was really the foundation that everything started on. It was just what I was doing in New Jersey, like hanging out with Flatbush Zombies before they were Flatbush Zombies, and just bull shitting and drawing. I was probably seventeen or eighteen when it was at it’s biggest… Award Tour was sold in fifteen international stores at one point, so it was pretty crazy. It got multiple people interested in buying it or wanting to run it and tandem with me, which was cool I just never really knew the people approaching me and they were taking it way more seriously than I did (laughs). Like I just give these shits to my friends… but I definitely see people, like my friend Micah who does ONLY NY, and I see where they’ve taken the brand to and how big it’s grown. So sometimes I wish I kept at it, but it wasn’t fun anymore, it wasn’t what I wanted. Everyone had a street wear line, everyone was making tee shirts. It just reached a super saturation point. And it wasn’t even about what other people were doing, it was just that I’d look at shirts and have no interest in figuring out what to put on them any longer.

Five years ago, in 2009, I was a freshman in college going to school for graphic design, for one semester and then I got the fuck out of there. The classes were just painfully slow; they started from a very basic point, foundational art classes. And I already knew how to make money off it from my clothing line, Award Tour, and I wasn’t super big on the fine art aspect so I left. Then I just started taking random classes at Rutgers… first class I took was about hippies and counter culture movements of the ‘60s. So I was never working towards a major, I was taking all these classes that I was actually stoked on. That’s why I was killing it with a 4.0, because I would sit there and actually listen everyday. That was around the time that I was getting bored with Award Tour and Madbury Club was just beginning.

It’s crazy to see how far Madbury has come, from that first very first shoot. I can barely even credit the first couple of years of Madbury to having anything to do with what we’re doing now.

And I don’t know what we’ll be doing in another two years, which is kind of the beauty of it. So I definitely feel like we’re sophomores in our field.

At this point, we’re established but it hasn’t even come close to being fully realized. We do a lot of work, but it hasn’t even turned that corner to what it can be.

It’s a funny process I see happen all the time though; you do something, you work really hard at it and you get known for what you do.

Once you get notoriety people start coming to you and the more and more work you do for others, the further you get from those things that drew people to your work in the first place.

Well… this is what we put in work for right? To get paid to make art, you can’t really say no or shy away from it. But then sometimes it takes a couple of years to realize that your work is no longer your work, it’s your clients. So, for example, I had this mental thing where I had to make Nike a client, I worked really hard to get us to that point. When we got there it was fucking awesome! We were shooting these things, had all these opportunities… and I just had to realize, this is work. I transitioned from feeling like our Nike work was going to be the beginning of our legacy, to realizing that it's just work to get done, in order to open up lanes and opportunities to do our own stuff, the stuff we really want to be doing.

Now we have eight people full time off Madbury, that’s fucking great.

But you have to come full circle and step back and see what it is we’re really doing.

With Madbury, we’ve never had a physical manifestation… we had a funny office in Hoboken at one point, but what do you make in an office? Fucking office work. We never used it because we were restricting ourselves by having that space. The biggest priority for me now is to have a physical manifestation of what Madbury is, and allow it to grow. I see it like Willy Wonka’s factory, I want that… you come through and do whatever you want; every resource, everything you need is at your fingertips.

I want to make a kung-fu movie (laughs) with every new New York rapper as a character in the movie, which would be hilarious. Like Bodega Bamz as the villain, Action Bronson! Meech and Juice as spiritual gurus! So I’ve been writing that script… film stuff is fun. We just stumbled into that… doing the music videos for the Zombies; that just happened because they needed videos so we just got it done. But yeah, we just create shit.

Would I consider myself an artist? Yes, but I don’t think I’ve made any art in like five years…

there are little experiments I do that’s fun, like I made that bench *points outside. Or if I make my kung-fu movie, it’s not going to be an art movie… I just like kung-fu movies, I have funny looking friends and I think it would be cool to put them all together. We just experiment and create.

FF- A lot of your success has come from the fact that your team is so close, are there any cons in working with your friends?

PA- I spend all day constantly thinking about how to optimize Madbury, like how the pieces fit together. I look at it as a sports team so that’s how I approach it... I have to coach. So I’m like Phil Jackson, the Lakers… then you have Kobe, you got Shaq, you got Derek Fisher, you got Ron Artest… you got all these fucking personalities. Especially because we have four photographers within Madbury! It’s a lot of egos, but everyone has to have that common goal. For example, Ellington just shot Lebron James the other day… everyone on the team would’ve loved to do that.

But you just got to believe that everyone’s turn is going to come, if we’re all in this together then your good is work is my good work, you shine, I shine… and that’s a hard thing to buy into sometimes.

Also, those guys are all my best friends, since before Madbury’s existence, so I know their weaknesses, what pisses them off, what they’re good at etc. So in traditional work environment you get performance reviews, we don’t have that at Madbury. I don’t sit down with my guys, like “come into my office” (laughs), that’d be weird as fuck. There have definitely been moments where I felt it would’ve been easier if I just did stuff myself, but I wouldn’t want to do it any other way. Everyone always says don’t work with your friends, I’m like what could possibly be better than working with your friends!? If you could find how to make it work, that’s so noble. And there couldn’t be anything more fun than making money with your friends… dude, we take pictures of basketballs and sneakers… that’s what we’d be doing regularly!

Everything we do; running around, traveling, creating, I’d pretty much do it for free. So I wouldn’t want it any other way. The capabilities of Madbury are greater than just the capabilities of me, myself.

FF- Suggest a few people who inspire you.

PA- Hyun Kim is a good one, he’s like the producer at Madbury, he used to write for Vibe and a bunch of hip hop magazines, he did a bunch of shit… he’s a little older. But he has this writer’s brain, where it’s almost as if he can’t hold a normal conversation because he’s interrogating people all the time. But he has a very good way of stepping into a situation and is naturally interested in everyone’s story. There’s always a follow up. So it’s fun to see him interacting. And I’d say

(Kilo) Kish is another good one. Just from seeing her theory and approach with her work, I don’t think she gets enough credit. She has a conceptual art approach to the music she’s making and the way she puts her projects out.

The last show she did was for a project about collaboration; every song was with someone else. So she had every piece of correspondence with everyone she collaborated with on a huge gallery wall; every note, every email, printed out - everything about the project. It was manifested there in front of you and the only thing people really say is like Kilo Kish H&M ad… but it was just really great seeing it first hand. I also have to say my father would be number one… my dad is the coolest guy I know. He doesn’t make any mistakes, I’ve only seen him fuck up a couple times in my life. I just mean little shit, like I’d hammer a nail and hit my finger, I’ve never seen him do anything like that… once you hit 45 you just start moving slower and it’s like I’m not gonna knock this glass off the table! You just see things and fix them (laughs). It’s just his thought process, when someone speaks to him he listens and thinks about it and then responds articulately. He really taught me the beauty of language. Whereas with me, everything’s always just breaking and being thrown around! At one point I know I’m going to slow down, and it’s gonna be fire.

FF- So when you do slow down, where do you see yourself? What, to you, are the qualities of a life well lived?

PA- Family is the biggest for me. If you had to bust your ass for your family all your life, and you worked in a coal mine or something… I don’t know if you would stand up proud at the end of it and think you lived your life the way you wanted to. But if you can give your family opportunities based off the work that you did, that’s a life well lived. That’s how I approach Madbury as well as my own family, I’d do anything for those guys.

you can check out Madbury Club here, and follow Phil's instagram.

as told to: Olivia Seally // photos: Olivia Seally