Elevator pitch of the “Tigers On Tujunga” video treatment: It’s like a Middle Eastern version of The Terminal meets Orwell’s Animal Farm, but updated for 2017 and set in a zoo where the jungle cats have overtaken their keepers. And the twist is that the zoo is actually Los Angeles itself.
While “Tigers on Tujunga” and the album from which it’s taken, L.A. ZOOO, are infused with traditional Middle Eastern music, their sound, like Bei Ru himself, is 100% City of Angels. The rusted glitz, gauche glam, and limo seat screenplays for which the left coast metropolis is known are all turned inside-out with a Low End Theorist’s touch of upside-down breakbeat exotica. Underbelly becomes duodenum. Little Armenia puts on weight for a new role, following a strict diet of Fat Beats.
Premiering below, “Tigers on Tujunga” is the first video to escape from Bei Ru’s L.A. ZOOO, out now on vinyl, cassette and Bandcamp.