Helix Collective are classical musicians busting out of the traditional mold. From crossover dance music, to storytelling, to film, television, and video game music, the Los Angeles-based ensemble takes the best of classical chamber music and makes it the life of the party.
Variety Magazine praised Helix Collective’s musical range moving from “moody urgency and edgy chamber-music sound” to the “sweetly romantic evoking wide-open spaces.”
Helix “has a little something for everyone: those who like their classics straight up, with a contemporary edge to it, or with populist appeal.” Called “dizzyingly virtuosic with exquisite musicianship and world-class range” by The Free Times and praised for “beyond-the-ordinary programming.”
Like the double helix, the ensemble is rearrangeable, flexible, and fuses the DNA of classical music into worlds where it’s never gone before.
After years as a straight-up classical ensemble, we took our virtuoso musicians to play in bars and we’ve never looked back - the energy, the immediacy...the fun! We commissioned the first classical dance party - World Dance Club. We taught new dances to the crowd and they were up and dancing in no time. Then we took things further with the Cocktail Stories - narrating the best drinking stories to an electro-acoustic blend, where the audience chooses which drink to hear next.
Playing in casual spaces with a laid back vibe became essential to who we are as an ensemble and we bring that party feeling to every performance.
Helix has collaborated with many EMMY and GRAMMY winning film, t.v., and video game composers. Our collaborations include concerts with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Abels (Get Out, Nope), Jongnic Bontemps (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), Winifred Phillips (Assassin’s Creed: Liberation), Jeff Beal (House of Cards), Jeff Cardoni (Silicon Valley), Heather McIntosh (The L Word: Generation Q), Laura Karpman (Ms. Marvel, Lovecraft Country), Dara Taylor (The Tender Bar), Sherri Chung (Riverdale), Jeff Russo (Fargo), George S. Clinton (Mortal Kombat), Eimear Noone (Video Games Live), Julia Newman (BONES), and many more.
In 2012 we founded the Los Angeles Live Score Film Festival, a live score-to-screen film festival that pairs film composers and indie filmmakers. Helix Collective produces Film Music Connect with SAGindie, providing independent filmmakers with original scores recorded by the ensemble. Helix Collective produces concerts featuring media composers like Pulling Back the Curtain and our 2022 and 2023 collaborations with the Composers Diversity Collective, SPOTLIGHT! and LEVEL UP! These concerts give media composers the chance to stretch their musical wings on the concert stage and connect with creative communities here in L.A.
Helix Collective is dedicated to creating a sustainable community of multi-disciplinary, multi-genre artists working together to create accessible, immersive works of art in order to bring joy, connection, solace, and understanding to a wide and diverse audience.
Working as a collective of musicians, Helix Collective partners with filmmakers, authors, storytellers, and dancers to present multimedia works of art that reflect individual artists' experiences and the broader culture.