Bend it like Beck

Beck's rented recording studio is a tiny, vault-like cell set in the core of a Fairfax-area office building. It's one of the last vestiges of a hotbed of musical production in the 1960s and '70s -- the headquarters of the ABC-Dunhill record label, where some seven studios hummed around the clock, turning out records by such hit makers as the Mamas and the Papas, Steppenwolf, Steely Dan, Dusty Springfield, Three Dog Night and more.

That history, and its burial in waves of redevelopment, has a real immediacy these days for Beck, a Los Angeles native whose music always has reflected the psychic and geographic contours of his hometown, a place where he's suddenly feeling like a stranger.

"What do you think about how the city's changing?" the 38-year-old musician asked on a recent evening, sitting in an Italian restaurant down the street from the studio. "It's weird how we do that here. Before this decade it felt like the city sat still since about 1980. It seemed like there was a good 20 years where there was stuff left over. And then it feels like in the last five, six years, every time I'm driving down Wilshire or somewhere, half the block's torn down, and all of a sudden there's a building that wasn't there two months ago.

"There's all this cool stuff that's just fading . . .," he continued. "Ed Ruscha did a piece where he went and took photographs of every building on the Sunset Strip. I think it's almost time to do that again."

Or, maybe, make an album that conjures that sense of displacement. That wasn't the goal when Beck started recording his newest collection, "Modern Guilt." Going in, it was shaped by his recent immersion in obscure, exotic psych-rock records, by his desire to be economical and focus on electric guitar, and by his studio partnership with a new co-producer, Danger Mouse.

But when Beck gets to work, things tend to take on a life of their own. With the music forming as they went, and with many of the lyrics sprouting as last-minute improvisations, "Modern Guilt" took shape as a focused 30 minutes of less-is-more rock with a disquieting tone of alienation.

"I think I'm stranded, but I don't know where," he sings in "Orphans," the first song they did. On the closing track, "Volcano," he amplifies the feeling: "I've been walking on these streets so long I don't know where they're going to lead anymore."