Chris Emond
How one musical artist is putting San Jose on the map as the nation’s premier cultural center
By Dasha Balashova
A s he appears on the Zoom screen, Chris Emond is wearing a baggy t-shirt and heavy silver rings. He pushes back his messy blonde hair with one hand, as he explains he’s at a friend’s house. His recent album, Panthers Juno, just turned three months old.
Emond, 19, is an alternative music artist hailing from San Jose, California. He describes where he grew up, the South Bay — which includes San Jose and its surrounding cities — as “a place where we didn’t have something that we could latch onto while growing up.” In an effort to change that, Emond founded OL (Orange Label) Records, which has since been dubbed “San Jose’s Record Label.”
OL Records was founded in November of 2019. There’s no particular sonic identity. “It’s really just what I like,” Emond says. All eight artists on it are unique, even cutting edge. He recently began working with 21-year-old independent artist Keni Can Fly, who is the logical progression of the indie rap movement. His experimentation with the production process creates a fresh and lighthearted sound, functioning in playful juxtaposition with his sometimes more contemplative lyrics. OKMidnight, another musician on the label, is a cross between the pop songwriting style of The 1975; the electronic hyper pop movement, spawned by Dylan Brady (of 100 Gecs); and the hip hop influence of artists like Swedish rapper Bladee and London-based Misogi. Most importantly, there has to be a story behind each person. Emond handpicks everyone, listening to their music. He has found a particular feeling that good music gives him. When he hears someone who taps into that emotion, he goes after them.
In Emond’s hometown of San Jose with a population of about 1 million, the music scene is dispersed with no uniform identity. There are separate artists, like Miguel Kultura — who makes music inspired by the 2010’s hip hop he grew up on and traditional Mexican folk music — or Natasha Sandworms — a local indie rocker whose music has a lo-fi feel to it (a music subcategory in which imperfections are a deliberate aesthetic choice). Cafe Stritch in downtown San Jose hosts a small indie rock scene, and Caravan Lounge, described as “a real-life Moe’s Tavern” by local Content Magazine, does shows too. There is also the occasional house show or party, but invites to those are reserved for friends-of-friends.
Emond describes the scene as very underground. “There are a lot of indie rock bands and a separate Lo-Fi music community,” he says. It’s difficult for him to pinpoint it as anything specific, mainly because of the talent drain to larger cities like Oakland and San Francisco, even Los Angeles. It’s easy, however, to drown in these cities’ overflowing pool of artists. Dionne Warwick’s 1968 hit “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” tells the story of a San Jose native, who returns to her hometown after a failed attempt to break into the LA entertainment industry.
“When you say you make music in San Jose, you’re not actually part of a greater community at all,” Emond says. He’s changing that notion for the kids of his city. Making music in San Jose sets OL apart.
Emond is already making his mark on the local music culture. He’s currently working with the Preservation Society to save San Jose landmarks — the Burbank Theatre and the Western Appliance sign — from demolition. He plans to turn them into a venue and the premier recording studio in all of the South Bay.
Emond has always been around music, and his exposure to it organically morphed into a deeper interest as he grew older. “I feel like that’s a really cliche story you hear from a lot of people,” he says, “Like my dad put [a recording of] the Beatles up to my mom’s stomach.” He recalls a time when he was nine or ten years old when he was listening to the radio; Eminem and Nicki Minaj kept coming on. “I just remember every song was copy paste. I was like ‘this can’t be it.’”
Emond spent all his summers in Los Angeles — the hub of all things entertainment — which fueled his desire to leave his own mark on the musical industry. As a teenager, he followed around musicians from Odd Future on Fairfax Avenue, an area densely populated with on-trend clothing stores. Odd Future was a musical collective, which included musicians Tyler, the Creator, Hodgy, Syd tha Kyd (of The Internet), and Frank Ocean, among others. The group had a cult following for their style and organization of the annual festival Camp Flog Gnaw.
Emond realized that for him music is really the pinnacle of all things creative. “It allows you to open all the other doors,” to art, fashion, festivals.
Emond attached himself to different music styles at different times. Some of his biggest inspirations are the Strokes, for their alternative rock sound; MGMT, for the psychedelic nature of their production, drums, and vocals; King Krule and Yellow Days, for their deep, creamy vocals (which Emond’s voice is sometimes compared to); Jai Paul, specifically his 2013 album; Tame Impala; the 1975; and more recently artists like Instupendo and MISOGI, for their young and effortless sound. Today, he finds himself embodying the style of these artists. He’ll hear something he likes and tries to figure out how to make that sound and implement it within his own music.
All throughout high school, Emond was playing around with sounds, trying to find his own signature voice. He released his first track in August of 2015, at the onset of his freshman year of high school. At first, he was just making beats on SoundCloud. Then, he began adding his vocals. In December of 2018, he released an experimental hip hop mixtape, titled August.
“Music is your individual culture.”
“Music is your individual culture,” Emond says. By making music with a home base in San Jose, he’s bringing that culture there. It all started with his idea of making a local music festival in January of 2020; OL Fest was born. The idea was to bring together artists mainly from San Jose, encompassing any and all genres. At the time, Emond was living in New York and in his freshman year at New York University for Music Business. He planned everything remotely, but the initial venue pulled out three days before the festival’s set date. Around three hundred tickets had already been sold, forcing him to quickly find another location. The event ended up being a huge success. “Somehow it worked,” he says, “and I realized that I had this group of people who were expecting something from me, and I still had no idea what I was doing.” Orange Label, which was initially created just for OL Fest, became OL Records.
At first, the creation of OL was happenstance. When Emond found himself stuck inside due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, however, he made a plan and laid everything out. Over the course of the rest of this year, everything fell into place. He began collaborating with long-time friend Keili FitzGerald on the label’s website and visuals, released t-shirts, designed a signature font, and signed new artists. Now, he writes out his goals for the label every day.
“At its base… it’s my vision,” Emond says of OL Records. He had the idea of making something like an organization or a group of people in a creative coalition for a while, but only after the festival did it come to fruition.
The name was inspired by a tangerine tree which grew in the front yard of his grandparents’ house. It’s nostalgic; he remembers how delicious they were, “you just wanted to eat like fifteen.” One day in high school, Emond drew an orange circle on his Air Force 1’s, and the image stuck with him. The symbol represents coming from nothing, digging your roots deep into the ground, and flourishing. His grandparents came from nothing, and his parents were the first in their family to go to college.
“Building up South Bay as the premier cultural center, in both Northern California and nationwide.”
OL Records is primarily a record label. Underneath that, is the brand’s core vision: “building up South Bay as the premier cultural center, in both Northern California and nationwide.” Emond scouts artists nationwide — building up the backbone of San Jose’s new sound step by step. On how bringing artists together from all over the country works together with being a label from San Jose, he says, “The matter of coexisting is necessary; it’s hard to make it in San Jose because there’s not a lot here yet. So the way to make San Jose great is to take all the other locations and bring them here and then bring them out.”
“I will do everything to build up San Jose.”
This idea works in two ways: taking artists from San Jose and bringing them to New York or LA or taking artists from other places and making San Jose their second location. Although there is somewhat of a network of studios in the South Bay, most of the label’s work is done outside of San Jose. Producing high quality sound in other locations allows OL to draw more attention back to the city. “I will do everything to build up San Jose,” Emond says. He plans to build a recording studio in the city, which will allow more of the work to be done on site.
OL Records has primary and secondary artists. The primary artists, like Emond and Keni Can Fly, are directly part of OL’s creative collective. The label also offers contract-based services to secondary artists, like branding, videography, and production. OL is constantly working with new names; Emond recently released a video collaboration with meme rapper Yung Nugget.
Emond himself is one of the primary artists on OL Records. In August of this year, he released his debut album: Panthers Juno. His work is the embodiment of everything the label represents, visually: with an abundance of film photography and camcorder videos, overlaid with doodles; sonically: through its freedom of genre non-conformity. It’s truly eclectic, with influences coming from all over the place — from electronic music to household noises and old voice recordings to psychedelia and indie rap to the sound of old records.
“It’s kind of a narrative of his life in San Jose and what it’s like to be a teenager in suburbia.”
A lot of his music is a metaphor for growing up in San Jose. “I think that his music is very true to himself,” says FitzGerald, OL’s main photographer. “It’s kind of a narrative of his life in San Jose and what it’s like to be a teenager in suburbia. Just like falling in love and falling out of love and friendships and relationships and creative endeavors… it captures all of that.”
Lyrics like, “Friends wake me up at 4 a.m. / In a van, bumpin’ Outkast / They say run fast you can / L.A.’s waitin’ for you / Say what you want to say, but / I fuckin’ hate it / And I wanna stay in San Jose,” from his song “Tang” really do encapsulate youth in the Bay Area.
Although Emond has been making music for years, he says of Panthers, “I got to a point musically where I felt like I couldn’t make anything better.” On this album, by making music for himself, he found his voice and made an album that he truly wanted people to hear. Compared to his last big drop in 2018, the maturity is evident. He drove himself in far and uncomfortable directions with the sounds he used and created, pushed his voice to sound exactly like he envisioned, and these new dimensions established Chris Emond as a confident, independent artist.
Of how he writes, Emond says, “I need to be really emotional or going through some shit to write.” “95126” and “Monte Sereno,” for example, he wrote in the downstairs area of his New York apartment. He broke his guitar and his dad sent him a low quality, bright blue guitar off Amazon that he used, and he was in the midst of a “really weird relationship period.” These seemingly uninspiring circumstances caused him to write two of the most popular songs off the entire recent album. They’re both nostalgic for home — 95126 is a San Jose zip code, and Monte Sereno is a city near San Jose — home to many of his friends. “Monte Sereno” opens with old voice messages, reminiscent of times past, while “95126” is dedicated to a past relationship.
“I’m going to do music no matter what,” Emond says, citing some of life’s most deeply challenging experiences as the push it took for him to fully commit. That’s why the sound of Panthers is so different — better according to Emond — because he was finally fully invested. “I really don’t have any other choice at this point. Damn, do I just get tatted all up my arms to ensure that I cannot get a corporate job,” he jokes.
“I need that off switch, and the off switch just happens to make me money, so it’s perfect.”
Emond works in day-long cycles. He’ll make a track or two or three in a day, and then goes blank for weeks. “I need that off switch, and the off switch just happens to make me money, so it’s perfect,” he says, describing the balance of the business and creative sides of his career. After releasing Panthers, for example, he put all his energy into other OL artists and various collaborations because he was sick of his own music; the album had been two years in the making. At the same time, he says, “I have to wake up every morning and email like twenty different people, and I’m like, ‘Look, I really don’t want to be doing this right now. I’d rather be making music.’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh that feels good, to have that feeling again.’ Because then there’s like a two week period where I’m like, ‘I hate making music.’”
The highlight of his career is all the support Emond has received from people in his life and outside it, which he has never experienced with anything else before. He’s still in disbelief. “People DM me, who I have no fucking clue, who they are,” he says. “I don’t have any connection. They don’t know any of my friends, and they’re like ‘Oh my God, X song off Panthers, that’s my favorite song!’ or ‘This is my favorite album!” He’s grateful for these interactions because they mean that people are purely listening to him for the music he makes, not anything else.
“I just wanna be that dude, you know?”
At the end of everything, Emond laughs, “I just wanna be that dude, you know?” And he is for a lot of people, already. He has supported numerous up-and-coming artists and given a voice to the youth of San Jose. FitzGerald describes him as one of the smartest and most hard-working people she’s ever known. “And that’s something that I’ve seen in him since he was like fifteen,” she says. “He just has such a passion to do something and make a difference and do his part, and it’s so easy to believe in him because you can see it when you talk to him about what he loves. What he wants to do with his life and what he wants to do with the music industry is unparalleled.”
