Kevin Bronson on September 30th, 2008

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The collaboration that would become Look Daggers started with one of those typically SoCal conversations that rarely ever bear fruit. Mars Volta keyboardist Ikey Owens told his longtime friend 2Mex, “We should do some stuff.” “But everybody says that in L.A.,” the Visionaries rapper remembers. “Then one day I was on tour on the East Coast, Ikey said, ‘We gotta do this,’ so we blocked off three days and did it.”

The resulting album, “Suffer in Style” (part of a great DVD package titled “Alive for Now in Long Beach,” out today on Up Above Records) is an ear-bending broadside of hip-hop, avant-rock, psych-pop and nu-jazz, all recorded sampler- and sequencer-free with a coterie of musicians from some of L.A.’s most adventurous entities.

“I always wanted to do a hip-hop album with live musicians,” Owens says from Texas, where Mars Volta is touring en route to a date at Saturday’s Detour Festival in downtown L.A. “The recording sessions were easy and a lot of fun — it was a lot of my friends all getting together.”

Owens helmed the pre-production, so by the time his roster of accessories — including friends from the Long Beach Dub All-Stars, Soul Hustlers, the Breakestra, Thelonious Monster, Free Moral Agents and Shapeshifters, to name a few — came by, “I was able to sit back and listen and get a good perspective on what the music was doing,” Owens says.

Not that 2Mex had his game as quite together. “Ikey said, ‘You got anything written?’ and I said that I had some stuff, but I didn’t,” he confesses. “But once you get going and you see Ikey’s hard-core work ethic, I got going. Everybody knows that about Ikey — if you’re a musician and he calls, you’re gonna go.”

The adrenaline quickly got pumping. “It’s more exciting do rap with live musicians, but I didn’t quite know the power this would hold,” says 2Mex, born Alex Ocana. “With Ikey, it was the first time as a rapper I completely trusted anybody to do anything. With sample-based hip-hop, I’m always standing over the producer saying, “change this, change that.'”

The album even indulges 2Mex’s affection for L.A. pop icons the Eels, with a cover of “Beautiful Freak.” “I’m a monster Eels fan — I used to be a street promoter at Geffen and fell in love with them then,” he says. “When we were talking about doing a cover, the Eels came up, and I said, ‘Hang on, I’ve got it in my car.'”

As for Owens, he’s happy to have what he calls “a new outlet,” but 2Mex concedes that the effect of the Look Daggers material is a little more profound. “Working with Ikey has changed my whole musical direction,” he says. “I don’t want to make another record without live musicians.”

||| Download: Look Daggers’ cover of “Beautiful Freak.”

||| Watch: the video for the single “Call U Later:”