By Vivian Ponte-Fritz

If you happened to meander by the Walker Beach area of Pomona College’s campus, the many beautiful smells, sights and sounds that drifted about Claremont on that sunny saturday would have manifested themselves before your unsuspecting eyes.

If you made a concsious choice to attend the Pow Wow hosted by the Draper Center and the  community engagement and sustainability center more power to you.

If you were busy with other Saturday duties or were maybe attending the many festivities of the Edward Gordon Craig Conference, also occurring this past weekend, I will fill you in on what you missed out on.

Booths were set up to circumnavigate a wide lawn that hosted many dancing feet. The thumping drums that accompanied the dancing created a deep and driving sound that got into my bones as I walked around and looked at the beautiful jewelry and other wares for sale. The drum groups shown below were both featured among the many groups that played.

A dancer in the circle

A young dancer girl taking a break and chompin’ on some fry bread and mashed potatoes.

A fine, feathered friend

The other pretty darn tootin’ amazing cultural and musical event that happened this easter weekend was the Edward Gordon Craig conference that begun on Thursday and ended on Saturday. This event, sponsored by the department of theater and dance, was one that included events for all and events that had to be registered for. It brought all sorts of guests and speakers from around the globe. These included the performers for the Balinese music and puppetry rendition of Hamlet’s last act, directed by Samuel Gold of Los Angeles. The show held everyone’s attention tightly and was pulled off in a very creative and humorous way with dynamic gamelan orchestra, dramatic shakespearian readings and subtly moving shadow puppets called Wayang Kulit (shown below).

Here is a video I took of the festivities:

The show ended with a solo song of ancient korean meditation and an old korean opera song sung by a performer in a blinding blue wig and black robe. The voice rung out in the audience as the performer moved among us, entrancing us using sounds like rivers, that most of us could not understand, yet felt deeply connected to.

Over all this weekend was an amazing display of all that our community has to offer. It is encouraging to know that there is so much amazing and beautiful and and music out there. More to come soon I am sure.

This week’s featured artist is ARI SAPERSTEIN!

THANKS ARI!

If you have fan art that you want us to use in our publications, on our website or on the blog send them to:

promotions@kspc.org or blog@kspc.org

THANKS! and stay tuned…

This weekend on Saturday March 9th from 11 am to 6 pm the Mounds at Pitzer College were taken over by a time warp. The grassy hills were covered by booths and vendors and many friendly people and their cars. Thats right, their cars. All low and draggin on the ground, these old beauties rolled onto the college’s campus to celebrate and expose the revival culture of Rockabilly. The festival put on by Pitzer’s Latino Student Group featured bands all day long including Jonny Come Lately, The Moonlight Trio, The Wiseguys Big Band Machine, Los Bandits and Vicky Tafoya and the Big Beat. The sound was bumpin, tacos were consumes, hair was gelled, prizes were won.The sounds of the fifties rang out as engines roared and skeletons rattled.

Rockabilly is a movement that is mostly upheld by chicano and latin american people from Los Angeles. Their aesthetic is specific and finely tuned. Elvis-esque hair sculptures and Grease Lightning type cars are melded with the dark images of Dia De Los Muertos and gang tattoos. While not true rockabilly, many contemporary indie pop, blues-rock and country-rock groups from the US, like Kings of Leon, Black Keys, Blackfoot, Prima Donna, Kitty Daisy and Lewis or the White Stripes, were also heavily influenced by rock and roll from the early 1960s, prompting a resurgence of interest in early bands among their younger fans. Many of these bands and more legitimate Rockabilly crooners like Carl Perkins, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Bill Haley can be heard on KSPC so keep your ears perked for that swangin sound that swept the nation and seems to be sweeping again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVbl-ujcI4c

It was altogether one hell of a time. If you didn’t make it out this year I highly recommend swingin round next time.

Here are some photos I took of the beautiful madness:

This new year at KSPC will be filled with lots of excitement. You can expect:

more posts about upcoming bands

our awesome top 20 list of albums

more spotlight interviews and favorite songs and albums of our staff

concert reviews

in-studio performance alerts and

LOTS MORE!

If there is anything that you readers appreciated in last semester’s posts or that you have seen in the past please feel free to comment and share what you want to see in this beautiful blog of ours.

Furthermore, to get you all excited about events, music, culture, life and reading I will share a few things!

The Grove House, at Pitzer College had a stelar performance that was totally free last Friday! This is no new thing for the Grive House. Excellent Lunch spot by day, excellent venue by night. Keep your eyes and ears open for more announcements about shows that are happening there, they are open to all, you do not have to be a Claremont College Student, they usually serve beer, and they are always free!

Here’s a video of one of their stellar performances!

2012 BEST

BEST NEW SONG

“comfortable, happy, satisfied” by Body Parts

Code Orange Kids- “Flowermouth (The Leech)”

Belispeak – Purity Ring

Female Doctor by Miniature Tigers

Murder by Death – “Lost River”

good food by Ruddyp

feels like we’re only going backwards- tame impala

BEST NEW ALBUM

“Our House on the Hill” by the Babies

Swing Lo Magellan – Dirty Projectors

Gone by Vacationer

Tennis – Young and Old

Flume by Flume

The Crossing-Mehanan Street Band

BEST KSPC-PRESENTED SHOW

Plagues/Tiny Lungs/Dudes Night/Death’rection @ the SCC

Grass Widow/Cool Moms/Dunes

The Babies

BEST SHOW ELSEWHERE

FAUST @ Red Cat

PEC (on campus) The Babies show

Shannon and the Clams and Hunx and His Punks, the Glasshouse

Beach House w/Wild Nothing at the El Rey

BEST IN-STUDIO

No Paws – on Pep Rally with Ali

Ben Lear

L.A. Witch on Lost @ Sea

BEST NEW ARTIST

Cold Showers

Body Parts

Mac Demarco

Cerce (female-fronted feminist hardcore from Massachusetts)

King Tuff

Dana Falconberry

Electric Guest

ESTABLISHED ARTIST WHO JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER

DIRTY PROJECTORS

St Vincent

Fiona Apple

Flying Lotus

Emily Wells

Screaming Females

Starfucker

Night Control

FAVORITE MAINSTREAM HIT

1991 – Azealia Banks

Die Young by Ke$ha

Losing You by Solange

B***h Don’t Kill My Vibe- Kendrick Lemar

BEST BAND THAT’S ABOUT TO BLOW UP

SO MANY WIZARDS

The Babies

Lemolo

Twin Shadow

Kishi Bashi

Empire! Empire!

Joyce Manor

MUSIC BUZZWORD OF THE YEAR

grow-fi

“Ambient”

Seapunk

Gagnam Style

Neo-Soul

MISCELLANEOUS/WRITE-INS

Best Foreign-Language Album

Shintaro Sakamoto – How to Live with a Phantom

CREEPS!

best actor-inspired ep – bill murray- sweatshop union

Hey KSPC blog readers, site visitors and ever so wonderful listeners!

Maybe you think that the only cool thing about Tuesday, October 2nd is that it is the start of the month of Halloween (!!!) or that it is National Custodial Worker’s Day or that it is also the day to eat fried scallops and give your car a name. But you would be wrong in thinking that, my friend. October 2nd is ALSO College Radio Day!

So lets all give thanks to KSPC for being around our ears, in our cars and on our computers for easy listening and enjoyment for so long. What college radio day really means is that on this day all the college radio stations world wide are banding together to acknowledge that we have not been bought out by large broadcasting corporations. So that is just so great!

This wonderful day is not only a day for us to pat our selves on the backs and say “hooray!”. You can join us and say “hooray!” too because we will be celebrating the holiday by giving away lots of concert tickets and basement tape bundles on air! So stay tuned you mighty supporters you. Keep listening, and you will be rewarded.

Visit the College Radio Day Website for more information about the organization and how other college stations are celebrating!

For this installment of The Spin Doctors, we decided to each review a different song on the same album. This week’s album- “Long Live the Pelican Express” by Kleenex Girl Wonder.

I’m Racing Isaiah by Joseph

I’m not good with lyrics. I don’t remember them. Anybody who’s ridden in my car knows that. I sing loudly and I sing wrongly. I should be stopped. I’m a bad music listener in a lot of ways. I often listen to music while I’m on the computer, which is maybe one of the worst ways to listen to music. My atom-sized brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time and, look, lyrics are great and all, but browsing some girl-I-don’t-know’s Facebook profile pictures is gonna take precedence EVERY TIME.

Basically, the thing at which I’m trying to get is that lyrics, in which people very accurately locate a lot of meaning, do not always factor into my music listening. At least, not at first. That’s not to say that I don’t love and obsess over good lyrics. Recently, for example, Yo La Tengo’s “A Shy Dog” have been simultaneously inspiring and crushing me, but that’s a story more fit for Live Journal or a diary.

Anyway, because lyrics are so important and because I often don’t often pick ‘em up until I’ve been listening to a song for quite some time, music with difficult-to-discern lyrics intrigues me. Why write lyrics when you’re gonna bury them in fuzz and distortion? That’s a question that came up when I listened to “I’m Racing Isaiah,” the opening track off of Kleenex Girl Wonder’s Long Live the Pelican Express 7″ (fucking fantastic band name, by the way). It’s not hard to make out some of the lines frontman Graham Smith is singing, but a line will get mumbled here and a word slurred there.

I’m Racing Isaiah

This throws the focus on the rapid-fire drum line, warm distorted guitar and essential enthusiasm of Smith’s vocals. And really, even with my lyrics-deafness, I can hear the emotions expressed in the song, even if I can’t make out all the lyrics. It does help that variations of the phrase, “Everything’s gonna be alright” are among the discernible lyrics, but you get that just from the music (assuming Smith isn’t pulling some devastating Heaven-Knows-I’m-Miserable-Now shit). The human voice (and dogs’ howls and, because this is KSPC, cats’ meows) can really pack it in emotionally, even without proper enunciation. And, speaking for us robot-voiced individuals, the opposite is true as well. Ask my girlfriend.

Mystic Pizza by Winona

In these few short weeks as half of the powerhouse team that is The Spin Doctors I’ve learned just how calculated our ‘randomness’ is. We choose music because it somehow captures our interest, it can be anything from the name of an album and its wacky cover art to some previous knowledge that what we are looking at is obscure, silly, or just plain weird.

So today’s foray into the vinyl library was interesting. The first 3 albums we chose were very good, relatively normal pieces of music. A lot of the music we have at KSPC is like that. Well, maybe not ‘normal’ by common standards but it’s certainly (mostly?) inoffensive.

When my co-worker/life partner/cookie consultant (seriously the boy polished off a bag of Milano’s today) Joseph suggested we take a listen to a band called “Kleenex Girl Wonder,” I was expecting something as weird as the name. I’d never heard of them before, though they seem to be pretty prolific and respected. I have to admit though, when I saw that the second track on the B side was called “Mystic Pizza,” this was the first thing that popped into my head:

Maybe I expected the song to be more about pizza than it was. Perhaps I was looking for my weekly dose of screeching instruments and a particular brand of music that I’d want to listen to once, write about for the blog, and probably not bother listening to when I got home and was sitting in my room.

But this song was something else, it was soaring… and faintly Scottish sounding.

Mystic Pizza

If I were on a surfboard with Mel Gibson circa Braveheart and craving a slice of pizza this might be the song that came to mind. It ha’s lots of elements that range from fuzzy guitar and banging drums to an actual chorus that reference “mystic pizza,” whatever that may be. No definitely lyrics appear online and it’s kind of hard for me to tell what the singer is actually saying. Joseph just walked into my office and together we determined that this is a rollicking bar song, it’s swinging your arm back and forth with a pint in hand, maybe drunkenly slobbering on one or two of your buddies who are right by your side and have been for year upon year. It’s a song that makes you f eel like your stomach really doesn’t hurt as badly as you think it does from those 2 dozen wings you ate. It’s a song that makes me think…. Budweiser.

This music is emotive, catchy and fun. It’s not at all what I was expecting because it’s good, and I don’t know what I was expecting it to be. Maybe weird, maybe a novelty. But really, what is “weird?” Is it something I wouldn’t play on my show, or something I can’t imagine listening to in my own free time? That’s too hard of a thing to classify, and sometimes I like listening to music and thinking only about how it makes me feel, even if it does bring up sentiments relating to a classic film about 13th century Scots.

Their newest album Checkognize was recorded from January 2008 to January 2012 and mastered in Tempe, Arizona. Visually, the album is stunning. With an abstract rainbow drawing (pictured just below this paragraph), I opened the album sleeve to reveal an earthy green, opaque,  tie-dyed beauty of an album. T-Mam certainly didn’t skimp on the aesthetics here.

Photo courtesy of Treasure Mammal

     Short of giving a track by track review, I’ll let you in on some of the highlights of this tour de force of an album.

     Treasure Mammal dives right in to the zaniness with a tribal chant on the first track on Side A, “Dikembe Mutumbo.” The frantic drums continue for quite a while before a voice is heard…. “Dikembe! Mutumbo! Dikembe! Mutumbo!” It continues for a while, losing no strength or bewilderment along the way. Now, that was strange and glorious enough for my ears to behold so early in the day, but little did I know what would follow it on the second track, “Real Talk.” Demanding “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” this song covers everything from Dr. Phil to God to patriarchy to UFC steel cage matches. And not to mention it’s all done in a glitchy, house-influenced rap style. Yeah, I know!

     Other highlights on side A include “Bromance” (title self-explanatory) and Maverick, a frantic and very much after 10 ode to mavericks everywhere.

     Side B is not without its share of strange brilliance. A personal favorite of mine, perhaps due to my inexplicable interest in Billy Joel, is Treasure Mammal’s soul shaking, nearly 8-bit cover of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” I have no way to describe it other than it takes the classic song, inverts it, adds way too much synth (which is just what I prefer), and delivers it to your heart in a way that has you wondering how you ever listened to this song any other way before. Though this was definitely the highlight for me, the album again picks up satirical speed with tracks like “Stevie Wonder to the Bulls***” and “Dream Girl,” which was reminiscent to me of the Flight of the Conchord’s song “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room,” to give you an idea of which direction T-Mam is working in.

     As a final comment on this groundbreaking LP, I’d like to look to the very last song on side B, and incidentally the title track, “Checkognize.” Since this track does follow the ominously named “Stevie Wonder to the Bulls***,” I was expecting something silly, light, upbeat…. heck, at this point tribal chants wouldn’t even surprise me much. What I got however was something that was thoughtful, purposeful, and most of all… dare I say…. beautiful. With inspiring lines like, “And now it’s time, and now it’s time to look around you right now. The people in this place won’t last forever… live for now- check your life. Recognize,” a slow tear almost rolled down my cheek. This album, while definitely silly and parodic, is incredibly thoughtful and connected with me through its humor and creativity. I could say more, but this is long enough, and rather than reading you should go out and listen to this. I’d highly recommend buying the LP, everything about it is beautiful.

Winona Bechtle

Summer MD

p.s. if you’re in LA, catch Treasure Mammal at the Smell on 5/18 starting at 8:30 pm. Tickets are $5 at the door.

The visual incarnation of Tennis' pretty, carefree, and slightly wistful sonic stylings

Hello from your friendly DJ Rubix! A little-known fact about me is that I love to create artwork inspired by my favorite music. Recently, the overwhelming popularity of Young & Old around KSPC inspired me to paint a piece specifically dedicated to this chart-topping album, and to usher in a new brand of blog post!

The piece you see above is my visual interpretation of the colorful, “beach-poppy” music of Tennis. The girl, abstract in her lack of name and permanent place, represents their pretty, carefree, and slightly wistful sonic stylings. She is surrounded by soothing waters of harmony that ebb and flow with the beat, and all appears serene.

The album title Young & Old, however, suggests deeper concerns with aging and mortality – motifs that run counter to the sense of innocence conveyed by the music. Tennis typically bathes their tracks in the warm glow of nostalgia, but the lyrics on this album deal with issues of identity and personal legacy. When Alaina Moore sings “Take Me To Heaven,” for example, her vocals are sweet, but the content of the song is more melancholy in nature: “When I pass away, this will fade away; what promises I make, I know I may not stay.” I portrayed this awareness of the passage of time through the subtly fading ends of the girl’s cascading hair.

Perhaps Tennis’ underlying message is that time inevitably marches on, so we should remember to appreciate each fleeting moment, and do our best to make a positive difference in the lives of those around us.

Young & Old is a gorgeous, uplifting album. If you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check it out, and when you do, I hope my artwork helps you to consider it in a different light. Thanks for stopping by, and stay tuned for the next edition of Animated Albums!

Art and review by Rachel Davidson. Tune in to Your Next Favorite Thing with DJ Rubix every Friday from 4-6!