From beat creator to bass player, Chico-based artist MJ Ortiz is slowly laying the foundation for his career.
Choosing an artist name is never easy, but Ortiz found his while camping in Humboldt County and seeing the boxes where campers hide food from bears.
He settled on BeaarBox after a friend suggested the name for a project.
From the town of Brawley, Calif. in Imperial Valley near the Mexicali border, Ortiz brought his musical ambitions north, graduating from Chico State with a bachelor’s in journalism and a minor in music.
“I just wanted to leave my small town in Southern California, my small border town, and just go do music somewhere,” Ortiz explained.
Ortiz’s musical foundation began early through his family, who exposed him to various genres of music, from hip-hop to Americana and Mexican banda.
“Just being from the West Coast and growing up on G-Funk stuff, like I listened to Snoop Dogg, there's a lot of Ice Cube,” Ortiz said.
His desire for creation stemmed from his high school years. He would eventually leave his small town and move to Santa Barbara, where, for the first time, being alone prompted him to start making music and sampling sounds on his iPad with GarageBand.
He eventually switched to tools like the Roland SP-404MKII, a portable sampler popular in lo-fi and hip-hop for quick beatmaking and sound design.
This past year, he released two albums.
The first, titled “Magic,” is a 22-track collection that pays tribute to his late father and celebrates their mutual admiration for Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Passing that down to me and it was just like a real connection that we always had,” Ortiz said.
Later in the year, he released his second project, a sonically infused journey where he is in life right now.
“A rush of this emotion that I was feeling of missing my dad and also trying to be a young adult and trying to do the right things in life,” Ortiz said.
The collection yielded an 8-minute wave of soul-inspired electronic sounds titled “Recent Memory.”
Ortiz has quickly established himself in various parts of the local art scene.
He’s also in the Chico DJ collective Modern Girl Media, and mixes his own music.
“Sometimes I just let the sample kind of take me, like the BPM too, and like wherever the sample kind of goes and where the chops fill naturally, or how fast I'm playing the chord progression, from there it just kind of manifests,” Ortiz said.
Band members either graduate and leave or simply move on to pursue other aspects of life.
“I think like the idea of having, like, your last show as a band, and those are just always kind of make me sad,” Ortiz said.
He’s also a member of the Chico rock-alt band Phantom Falls.
“We say we're your second favorite Chico band,” Ortiz said, laughing. “And we've just been playing shows.”
