“COVID knocked LA's goddamn teeth out.”

James Quentin Devine says this about Los Angeles with the mixture of irritation and affection normally reserved for a relative who has survived something humiliating.

Scaled Alps made Let the Alpine Play in North Hollywood. The record is full of the city without being full of songs announcing that they are about Los Angeles.

There are muffler shops and porno stores. Palm trees turn into lifelines. Glitter turns to grime. People stay out too late. Cars become atmospheric conditions. Luxury and violence occupy neighboring lines. “Southerly” sounds, according to Devine's own production notes, “like a romantic murder on a houseboat.”

This is Los Angeles in the older sense: not a municipality but a field of disconnected rooms joined by driving.

The pandemic damaged that system in ways that remain difficult to quantify. Venues disappeared. Habits changed. People learned to receive food, entertainment, romance and companionship through the same glowing rectangle. Some of them never entirely returned.

Devine's writing about the period is less interested in nostalgia than in infrastructure. “Regional culture don't scale,” he wrote.

Precisely. A region requires inefficiency. People must spend time in places they would not have selected from a menu. They overhear things. They get lost. Somebody puts on a record they dislike and three months later they decide they love it.

The other night Devine was walking his dogs on Hillhurst Avenue when he passed three conspicuously stylish young people discussing how they had been finding music. One of them said: “From the radio. Like: The Radio.” The others agreed.

Radio is local even when its transmitter reaches millions. A DJ chooses something at a particular time and several unrelated people hear it together. The listener's profile is irrelevant. So is his browsing history. This is a modest form of public life.

“OFF THE APPS / INTO THE STREETS,” reads one of Devine's production notes for “Celestial Sighs.” Not exactly subtle. But cities have rarely survived through subtlety.