LEVEL UNLOCKED

In the far recesses of the Internet is a place they call The Backrooms. It’s an extradimensional space made of impossibly large, impossibly empty, and completely fictional rooms and spaces. People around the world traffic these spaces. They contribute to its lore. 

It is a place of liminal places.

And there are levels to it. 

Level 33 is an empty shopping mall, 1,000 miles long. One in a state of corrosion. The walls are molding. Plants grow wild through the storefront grates. 

“The mall will progressively become more worn down the further you travel,” reads the description of Level 33. 

On Old Mammoth Road, next to Dan McConnell’s TV office, is Lucas Dutton’s recording studio. It’s called L33. Named for the space, and from, what Dutton says, is “a lifetime of nerdiness.

Located 300 miles away from the city home to the most recording studios in the world, Dutton’s venture is, quite literally, in a league of its own in Mammoth Lakes.

I asked Dutton if it was hard—hanging a shingle in a town without a roof.

But he says he likes having to do everything, himself. There are no quick cheats. No cut-throughs. That actually, he wishes there was stiffer competition in town, citing the theory that the best thing for a busy restaurant is to have another busy restaurant open up across the street.

But absent a challenger, Dutton knows he’s attending to a need in town.

“We actually have a pretty good per capita ratio of musicians, creative types,” he says. “If I go ask 10 people about their creative projects in Mammoth, I’ll probably get 4 or 5 decent answers. Back in San Diego, it’s 2 or 3.”

Why? I ask him.

“It’s just the place. Geography. A lot of people run to or from here for some reason. A lot of those people are dealing with emotions. Emotional people make stuff,” Dutton says. “We’ve both met them—the Peter Pans. The Tinkerbells.”

But Dutton, himself, is no Peter Pan.

He got his start in music early, learning to play the guitar at 10. Taught himself music production in the software he uses to this day, Ableton. By 15, he’d grown into a working artist producing his own house music from a laptop at home in San Diego. 

Then, it was vocational school to learn computer programming before the usual malaise of one’s 20s—waiting tables, washing dishes, prepping tomatoes, slinging hamburgers. But always, with music on the side.

At 18, he joined his first band. They played the blues, but the name eludes Dutton now. 

“Joseph Lloyd and something something…” he says. “The first band I ever had, and the best mechanical musicians I’ve ever played with.”

I ask him what makes a mechanical musician.

“Their muscles and brain are really well connected,” he says. “It’s all one piece.”

The bassist, he recalls, was 350 pounds, an Ambien addict, and could play his instrument behind his head for the majority of a gig. The drummer could get up to 180 BPMs. And they were all young kids. Dutton’s parents had to accompany him to many of the venues the band booked—being, as they were, under the legal drinking age. 

Dutton’s family made the move to Mammoth about 15 years ago when his father, Grady Dutton, took a job with the Town. Dutton moved up when his mom got sick. The distance from San Diego to Mammoth, and all that space between, no longer made sense.

L33 was started, then, in April of 2021. On the website, it is self-described as a recording service with “the express goal of providing access to great musical hardware, education on how it works, and the support to get your project finished.”

Duttton, though, describes the endeavor as selfish—”somewhere to go at 3 a.m., play music, and not be bothered.”

Still, the LA clientele does help keep the lights on. Dutton estimates that the out-of-towners comprise 30% of his business and generously pay the full price of $75 an hour for a full day of studio time. 

But for any local musician worth his salt and a guitar lick or two, L33 is essential—especially when it comes at a cut price. Mammoth, as a town notorious for its housing shortage, is unsurprisingly short on practice space, sound-proof walls, and an absence of roommates getting up at 5 in the morning to brew coffee or bomb the mountain. 

“Bands die if they have nowhere to play,” says Dutton. “That kills me.”

So, when musicians come to L33—which is to say, to Dutton, who manages the studio and its business alone—a few things might happen. Some groups just need the space to rehearse, and the amps, axes, and drum sets that come with it. If a client contacts Dutton looking to record, passes the sniff test for musicianship and overall likability, and can swing the cost for studio time, Dutton can bang out a project in a sitting. If it’s some kid with 4 songs half done, and less than 2 nickels to rub together, it’s a different story.

“I don’t want to work on stuff that’s undeveloped unless [someone] has the compensation for it,” says Dutton. “I don’t think that’s me being a fool. I don’t think that that’s bad for business… I have a respect for what they’re doing. When that’s not there, good music doesn’t get made.”

And that, for Dutton, is the bottom line of this whole thing. Practicing good music. And then, as a person with the know-how, making that good music alongside the creatives that might not.

I ask Dutton why, in shouting distance from Los Angeles, he’s set up shop in Mammoth. If he’s hoping for some big break from The Felt Cutouts, or Pidder Padder (bands that have worked with Dutton, and recorded at the ‘old mall,’ as he calls it) so he can cash out on the royalties and the merch commission.

In asking though—in searching for the terminus, or the definition to a space like Dutton’s—is to miss the point entirely. 

“I don’t know. It would be nice if it happened, I guess,” Dutton says, before trailing off. 

“You ever heard of StarCraft?” he asks me. He’s a lifelong, career videogamer. 

“The point [of the game] is you collect resources. You build some units. You fight the other guy. If you win or lose the game with extra resources it doesn’t give you any more points. You don’t get anything—nothing that carries over. You simply won or lost what you had,” he explains. “I’m not trying to go out with anything beyond zero. I just want to be happy with what I made, before I do.”