Meet Jesta Pollard

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jesta Pollard. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jesta below.

Jesta, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I discovered my purpose at a very young age. My father passed when I was just a baby and I grew up with a hard-working single mother as an only child. This meant even at a young age I was often alone, as she would work long days. From watching movies getting inspiration from them, writing scripts around the age of eight or nine, creating stories and blocking them out with my action figures, I knew I was destined to be a filmmaker. I also developed skills and fine art by drawing my favorite comic book characters, drawing characters I was creating for my own stories. My mom got me a little tape camera and I started making my own homemade films. I had to be creative to entertain myself alone all the time and so I was able to find the inspiration to become a Visionary storyteller, and I knew that this was what I was going to be for the rest of my life. I thought from a very young age that I can maybe be the next George Lucas, and so that’s where my young life’s intentions began. Thankfully I had the most supportive mother any child could ask for and she nurtured my creative abilities to the fullest. I grew up in Orange County and my mother discovered Orange County High School of the Arts and I was accepted into the fine art program there in 7th grade, and sophomore year I switched into the film department and from sophomore year to senior year I was able to build up a film portfolio or the enough accepted into one of the top 10 design schools in the world that had a unique phone program, Pasadena art center called the design.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

My first year in art college my mother’s career was upended when her company was cheated out of all their money from a bad actor partner, sort of an outcome of the state of the economy following the 2008 financial crisis. We lost everything, and I was forced to drop out of school, we had to give up our cars, it was a traumatic moment in my life. After the devastation of closing the door to that dream I knew my creative passion still had a purpose and I was optimistic that I was going to go out into the world and find a way to present it against the stacked odds. If I couldn’t afford to be at the creative Institution that I was worthy enough to be accepted into, then I had to go out into the world and rebuild it for myself on my own terms, and that’s what I did. In 2012 myself and a few of my friends founded an art collective, production company, and music label called Noise Revolt. We found our inspiration from transformational music festivals, especially one called Lightning in a Bottle. We took that inspiration and started throwing our own monthly parties at a bar in Costa Mesa called Detroit bar at the time. We’d bring in live painters and vendors and have a curation of a range of different styles of music throughout the night, whether it be some live electronic act or house music DJ, or Bass music DJ, we wanted to provide our audience with the full spectrum.
Over the years our events got more notoriety and we decided to officially move our vision up to LA where we started throwing underground warehouse events. It was only within a few years that we were running a full-time music label, flying out popular DJs from around the world and bringing artists together from all over Southern California to make our warehouse festival-like events come to life. Our trajectory was on the up and up and with the help from one of our teammates who had the means we rented our own warehouse space to create a creative makerspace, studio, and event space in 2016. We built our own bedrooms upstairs and a bunch of us lived in it. I was the site manager. Over these years of producing these events and managing artists I got to bring my film skills back to the table and create narrative promo videos for our events , music video sequences and all sorts of other creative projects in the space. Those were some of the best of times and in some cases the worst of times. We were all pretty young when we got the warehouse around the age of 23, and being in an underground art, party culture, things can get pretty ungrounded pretty quick. Around 2018 there was a devastating fire in Oakland, in which a warehouse party up there burned down killing over 40 people instantly. When that happened authorities around the country started cracking down on the Underground. We had Fox News sending undercover reporters to our events, they interviewed our landlord, and spliced images from a very innocent house music party at our warehouse with the irrelevant story of a slain gangster rapper in Anaheim 45 minutes away from downtown Los Angeles to paint us as villains in the culture. We had to stop throwing events for a little while and find a new way to bring in income to the warehouse. After a few failed attempts to create different business avenues in the space we no longer had the means to pay the rent, relationships in the crew crumbled and our final year in the warehouse was a complete disaster. By 2019 some of the core members stepped away and we decided to take a bit of a break.
One great thing that came out of those years, I developed a passion for the genre of drum and bass and created a sub brand and event called Momentive. It was essentially the drum and bass version of what Noise Revolt was. During covid I had ambitions to focus solely on just momentive and in 2021 I threw the first post covid event as a test to myself to see if I still was called to throw these epic events. If the event was a bust I was going to focus on my film intentions again, specifically my passion project, a cyberpunk western story I’ve been writing since I dropped out of film school. However, if the event was successful it was a sign to keep pushing forward with them. It of course was a ranger, I packed out the warehouse event that ignited my inspiration yet again. By 2022 I turned Momentive into an official label, Momentive Recordings, and since then I’ve built a community of Southern California music producers, and continued these events and returned to booking my favorite artists from around the world. I’ve been grateful and lucky enough to have had the opportunity to debut artists like Alix Perez, Ewol, Monty, Overview Music, Flexout Audio, and returning other notable artists like DLR & Skeptical. The last two years I’ve been building out the team and we are on a steady upward trajectory of putting out amazing original music and bringing out more of these legends in the industry that we love. Next up June 28th, I’m bringing back out one of my favorite labels, Flexout Audio. With more future bookings, and a stream of new music in motion, there’s no end in sight to the impact we’re making in the culture.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Looking back I would say the three greatest qualities that have helped my journey are adaptiveness, empathy, and all of my artistic studies. With all of my education in the Arts I have forged myself to become quite the Swiss army knife of an artist. I have so many artistic ambitions that there’s not enough time in the day to really master any one of them quickly, which is also slightly a problem but I think it’s a good problem. I’ll never run out of options in my life of things I can do. I say empathy because I feel like it’s important to be able to relate to your peers, to be a good leader, role model, and truly be able to make your vision relatable to the masses.
I presume I developed this empathy, yes cuz in some ways I am a sensitive person, but also in my drive to create stories you have to make characters relatable and the only way to do that is to put yourself in the shoes of other human beings and how their life stories can emotionally impact others in profound ways. And it’s with all of that that I say adaptive, because if you put all of your eggs in one basket you limit the opportunities that present themselves along your path. From my life experience I feel I’ve become a bit of a survivalist, and while parts of that have been a stressful journey, it’s also built me to be stronger and to solidify my optimism that I will always be able to flow like the wind in any needed direction. The empathy ties into that because you need to be able to relate to all types of people to be able to attract many doors opening in your life. If you spend your career from a self-serving vantage point only, I feel that you risk not allowing yourself to be relatable. Not to say that determined self-serving entrepreneurs and visionaries can’t be successful in that way as well, but I think the relationships in the careers you build through being open to connecting with others and truly having the intentions to strive doing great things with other people will inevitably enhance your life’s paths.
So my advice to anybody on their Journey, remain willing to make time to build relationships and see how maybe a project or a field you’re interested in can tree branch out to other relationships or fields, so that you can leave doors unlocked to different potential paths in life. You have to make the time to put yourself out there and make connections, and say yes to as many things that come your way.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

Honestly I have built my whole career so far around collaboration. It was actually the core pillar to the foundation I built noise revolt on, it was our Creed the center point of our Manifesto. I like to think of myself as a futurist, I’m inspired by creatives pushing the envelope with technology. I’m constantly searching for artists doing things that we haven’t seen anybody do before, that really excites me, especially in this time where technology has made almost anything possible, it’s truly an amazing time to be alive in that sense. So I’m absolutely looking for more and more people to collaborate with all the time. I find that with my music label I’m starting to have more fun discovering other artists to present rather than my own pursuit of my own music career. Part of it is only having so much time in the day to lead a whole cultural movement AND be able to build your own solo artist career, but also how genuinely good and fun it feels to help others on their creative path and give them a platform to share what they got. So I’ve been on the quest the last few years searching for more music producers that are innovating the specific type of drum and bass that I like, which leans towards a deep minimal-tech sounding style of DnB that feels very innovative and futuristic.
My long-term goals with the events are also be able to book visual artists using technology to push boundaries, there’s some incredible people doing that around the world but it takes money to bring them out or even just hire somebody to bring out what they make or present, so I look forward to a forthcoming time or my brand has the means to be able to showcase the most Innovative art in the world alongside the music that we love that provides the soundtrack of the future. If any reader here is pushing boundaries with art and Technology or is making Innovative drum and bass music just reach out to Momentive Recordings, at @momentive.dnb on Instagram, or email us at momentive.dnb@gmail.com. For producers with demos, email demos.momentive@gmail.com. Thank you!

Contact Info:

Image Credits

On IG: @darkmatterphotographs, @underground.exposure_, @soodyodpanda

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