The Lijadu Sisters share crucial life lessons on the music industry, race, gender, and life. If you enjoyed the album Horizon Unlimited in our record collection, here is […]
Watch: Celia Hollander and Photay Tag-Team DJ Set

The musicians lost everything in the Eaton Fire. Support their brilliant work.
The musicians Celia Hollander and Evan Shornstein are among the thousands of people who have been displaced by the fires overwhelming Los Angeles County. As Shornstein, who performs as Photay, explained in a Facebook post, “100% of our home was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in Altadena.” They lost all of their possessions, including “the instruments we use to create music and art.”
Both artists are pillars of the music community that has been thriving in Northeast Los Angeles for the past decade, an area that includes Highland Park, Eagle Rock and Altadena. Each is a distinctive little burg that feels more like a midsized town than part of a giant cosmopolitan area. Because of this, an entire scene has been displaced.
The music that Shornstein and Hollander made in their Altadena home survives, and offers a profound glimpse into their world. There’s never been a better time to buy their catalogs. Last year Photay released Windswept, a gorgeous instrumental record about wind. As explained in release notes:
The project began with the producer designing a synth patch to, in his words, “mimic the ‘wind’ as a powerful, deep, unpredictable and at times overwhelming spirit.” So use of that “wind” patch became Windswept’s instrumental throughline, and the element became the album’s thematic maypole. The natural world had always been one of Photay’s calling cards, and now it had invaded the machine, and his writing.
Like Photay, Hollander has been releasing music for more than a decade, focusing on, as explained on her website, “themes such as shaping time through composition, surrendering to improvisation, and music as a natural phenomenon of dynamic systems.” She’s released music on labels including Leaving Records, Longform Editions, Recital and Noumenal Loom.
Her beautiful new album is called Perfect Conditions. According to notes, “Water / Fire” is “one of 16 pairings combining the elements earth, air, water and fire. ‘Water / Fire’ is water breaking into a boil: the moment when water starts alchemizing into air, bursting into bubbles, fully transformed from cold to hot.
After the fire, Shornstein described himself on Facebook as being “grateful for Altadena and its people, animals, magic and powerful mountains.” He added, “It’s hard to process the loss but I can feel the love and concern. I know that friends, love and music will continue .”
You can help that happen by buying their music and donating to their GoFundMe.