LEVEL Venue Noise on Pico Blvd: The Outdoor DJ Problem, Explained

Residents of Pico-Robertson are not strangers to noise. We live on and around one of Los Angeles's busiest boulevards. Buses, sirens, deliveries and traffic are part of the deal, and nobody on our street is complaining about them.

What we are complaining about is something different: amplified music, performed on purpose, outdoors, pointed at our homes, by a business that has a perfectly good ballroom inside.

Where the sound comes from

LEVEL Venue sits at 9320 W Pico Blvd. Its open-air patio does not face the boulevard. It backs onto the alley behind the building, and across that alley are apartment buildings, on both sides of Rexford and Glenville and down past Alcott.

When LEVEL stages a DJ, a singer or a band on that patio, nothing stands between the speakers and our bedroom windows except a strip of asphalt.

Why “just close your windows” does not work

Amplified event music is built around bass and vocals through a microphone. Low frequencies travel through glass, stucco and drywall with very little loss. Residents here hear the music inside, with the windows shut.

One neighbor put it plainly: it was 10:17 on a Sunday night, a first grader had school in the morning, and the DJ was still screaming into the microphone.

The fix costs LEVEL nothing

Music played indoors would still carry a little. We could live with that. What we cannot live with is a business choosing, again and again, to put its loudest product in the one place guaranteed to reach the most homes.

Move the DJs, live singers and amplified music inside. Keep the patio for cocktails, dinner and conversation. That is the entire request, and it is the subject of our petition to bring LEVEL down. The volume, that is.