Written by SOAP STUDIOS
Photography SAM DAMESHEK
Graphic Design SARAH SMITH
For SOAP MAGAZINE
It’s easy to misread the studio. At first glance, it looks like any other creative space in Los Angeles sunlit, spare, lined with the expected markers of taste. Vinyl records. A drum machine. Canvases in progress. But sit with it for a while, and something else comes through. The room isn’t decorated. It’s built. Slowly, piece by piece, by someone who needs to remember.
“This isn’t about making it look cool,” Jacob Rochester says, not defensively but plainly. “It’s about surrounding myself with what keeps me in it.”
Rochester paints and makes music, often at the same time. For him, there’s no meaningful distinction. Raised in Connecticut, he grew up steeped in Black culture filtered through memory games on the blacktop, tapes in the deck, the heat and heaviness of late summer afternoons. That’s what you see in his work. Not recreations, but impressions. His canvases read like moments you think you lived. A flash of a Knicks jersey. The light through a kitchen window. The grain of something worn in.
Rochester in his Los Angeles studio
His music, equally personal, follows the same logic. Soulful loops. Stripped back beats. The feeling of something passed down, not polished up. “It’s all feel,” he says. “Music, painting it’s the same.”
This isn’t some aesthetic fusion. It’s not branding. It’s survival. The studio functions as a kind of buffer. Between then and now. Between culture consumed and culture made. Rochester doesn’t need inspiration. He needs reminders. That’s what the room gives him. A lived-in record collection. A sketchbook he started five years ago. A busted keyboard he refuses to replace.
There’s no performance in the space. And that’s intentional. “I don’t want the studio to feel like a gallery,” he says. “I want it to feel like me.”
And what that “me” is what it contains isn’t simple. Rochester navigates between two modes, two mediums, two markets. He sells paintings to collectors but makes beats like he’s still in his bedroom. He builds his practice on memory, but nothing about it is nostalgic. Even the objects in the room the ones that hint at a past are there because they still serve a function.
The studio is not a statement. It’s a system. For staying connected to the work. For not getting lost in what’s expected. For holding onto the part of himself that doesn’t need to explain.
There’s a quiet tension in that. Not conflict, exactly. But friction. Between the world outside the room and the world inside it. Between what people want to see and what Rochester needs to make. You can feel that when you’re there. And maybe that’s the point.
If you want to understand the work, don’t ask him what he’s making.
Ask him why he stays in the room.
