Zine #3

WYBZine Editorial 03–14

What Just Happened?: Creator’s Project New York Creator’s Project London Going Live @ Siren Fest Folks Is Just A Four-Letter Word Whatsa Wassaic?

Filmmkaing in Prague

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Music: Interview with The Blow DJ by DJ Quick Questsions From the Vault

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News: Making Sausage Upcoming Shows

No.3

Fall 2010 wybcx.com Fanzine of WYBC Yale Radio

Editorial

03–14

Globalization has caught up with Zine. We are now WYBZINTERNATIONAL. Not only have we covered international happenings this summer, but the new Zine team is 100% international—Farah Al-Qasimi, our Creative Director, is from the UAE, I am from Kenya, Chloé Rossetti is from Australia and our new Graphic Designer, Andrew Lister, is from the UK. How about that for diversity? We even have a map of the world at the back with dots showing where each of us are from. (jk…but you wish we did.) I am tempted to ramble on about the new Zine team and the overflowing nature of our awesomeness, but that is not on the agenda…

Media has changed faces in many ways and the means of delivering and receiving media has also changed. With everything going digital, there is a temptation to hop on the proverbial bandwagon. Do fewer people read print media because they have laptops, iPads, Kindles, iPhones, Droids, T.Vs, radio, Droid Xs (not to be confused with Droid incredible or other android phones out there), iPhone 4s (not to be confused with iPhone), Blackberries and other fancy gadgets that want to save the trees?

We here at WYBZINE are also keen on regularly servicing you with coverage of events, both on-campus and beyond, but in a different way. It’s coverage with a twist: not by us, but by you. If I am to employ an analogy, I’d compare our readers to Beyonce, when Destiny’s Child was still relevant.

We all knew that Kelly, Michelle and that other girl that quit were important, but sans B, we would be no ill-fated progeny at all. As a result, we are indebted to our consumer who doubles as our supplier.

This summer, WYBC DJs were scattered across the globe. They did some great things, and came back with great pictures, which the Zine team saw on Facebook…and consequently requested that these wonderful experiences be written about for our publication. On a more local level, reading some of these articles made me realize how little I know of the events happening off-campus and in the greater CT, NY and New England areas, that I may have the time in my life to go to but do not always find out about. Once I realized this, I asked our Events Treasurer, Carl Chen, for directions to the one-stop source of local event info and he directed me to: www.facebook.com/yaleradio, where you can keep up with all that is happening within and with-out the station!

Enjoy Zine #3 and see you on the Zine #4! (Get it? Scene…Zine?

No?) Brian Waswani Odhiambo Yale ‘12 Editor-in-Chief

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What Just Happened?: Creator’s Project New York Creator’s Project London Going Live @ Siren Fest Folks Is Just A Four-Letter Word Whatsa Wassaic?

Filmmkaing in Prague

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decorated by some of his iconic on-the-road photography. Hardly the Yeah Yeah Yeah context that I knew him for, this piece was much more of an intriguing “Maybe,” and definitely put me in a new place for the day.

Interpol were great too, laying down what was arguably one of their best sets in years. Even without Carlos Dengler, the band managed to rock the loading dock and surrounds that served as their stage. Sleigh Bells were a fortunate gimmick—the studio being too packed during their performance on account of their recent fad-like popularity, I felt grateful to have snuck into that space earlier in the day to watch them do their sound-check. An odd sight for 2 p.m.—one boy, one girl, and 20 mega-speakers without an audience.

There were other acts too—M.I.A. was terrible, Neon Indian were average and Mark Ronson was fantastic—but by far the greatest thing on display, apart from Josh Hartnett’s pseudo-mythical nouveau-hipster physique, were two pieces by the United Visual Artists.The first, Hereafter, was a video installation that used a high-speed camera to record every interaction between a large screen and the eager Narcissus of the moment, watching their image played back to themselves, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes from two days ago, creating a perpetual history of the space. The second, entitled, Triptych, comprised three large LED-filled screens that reacted to participants’ movements with sound

Walking into the Creators Project was sort of like walking down Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, you know? No? Shit. Well, walking into the Creators Project was sort of like taking in dozens of burstingly creative folk teeming up to your teeth; replete with arcane references casually floating past your ears and floppy-locked half-shaven heads bopping around every corner. The event took place on the last Saturday of July within a large warehouse-esque building on Southampton Row, Central London and frankly, all of the space was needed to contain the sheer volume of…well…artsyness.

Further wandering around the art space was any technophile’s wet dream. Once you descended the stairs past the skinny smiling white men in H & M v-necks, you could take a left and enter the largest room in the space. This room held United Visual Artists’ sculpture Triptych. Giant LED structures reminiscent of Arther C. Clarke’s

by Christina Wakefield

Creator’s Project London

and light. At the end of one saturated day, after a bedraggled socialite trash-talked Taja when she politely asked her to put out her indoor-cigarette, we stayed in this Triptych room, Taja steaming, M.I.A. thumping in the distance, and cooled off by running up to these monoliths and saturating ourselves in sound and light.

forward to a day of free entertainment and mixing with celebrities. As soon as I am on the eighth floor, Taja whisks me back out of the building with her and some other Vice interns, haggardly complaining about how one of their bosses has kindly requested that they go to the nearest drug store and procure two tylenol and inserts for her high heels. “We’re fucking people, you know?!”

The Creators Project, up until that day, was a wing-and-a-prayer stunt by Vice Magazine and Intel to gain themselves some philanthrocapitalistic street cred among the 18-25 age bracket of New York City. Touting itself as a “new network dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media, and around the world” (creatorsproject.com), one only had to look at Taja’s worn-out face, and hear tales of the absurd hours she’d worked that week, to see the extent to which the Creators Project was a corporate lie.

Until it started.

Creator’s Project New York At 2 p.m. on June 26th, 2010, Milk Studios

by Chloe Rosetti revealed, to a very select New York City community, the jewels of new media and technology, Milk Studios, Chelsea Village, opposite Chelsea along with a heavy-hitting line-up of musicians Markets, deep in the Meatpacking District, noon. and artists, all in the name of becoming “an arts A security guard looms over the glass entrance to foundation of sorts that will facilitate the produca particularly shi-shi looking building, even for the tion and dissemination of new work with these area. I casually introduce myself as a “Volunteer artists and their collaborators” (creatorsproject. for the Creators Project,” cutting a huge line, and com). My first moment of genuine awe and surescort myself up to the top floor where my friend prise occurred when I tripped over Nick ZinTaja is waiting. Unlike the actual volunteers for ner on my way to his sound installation—a 3D the Creators Project, I am relaxed and looking sculpted sound environment of one of his pieces,

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vestment in the game, but it was still surprising to see person after person enjoying such an unfulfilling game, without victory.

Of all the varying art media and forms present at Creators’ Project, one of the most riveting was the video portion. Several of the short animated films presented memorable, violent, (political?) mini-plots—in one, a tall Mickey Mouse sort of character decapitates a man in an alley while drum and bass music synthesizes the grimy scene; he then licks the man’s dripping blood, bounces his head like a basketball toward a comfy chair, and uses the guy’s tooth as a beer bottle opener. He settles in, and turns on a TV only to watch a flickering skull with dozens of diagonally-arranged knives superimposed over the skull. A message about the negative effects of TV violence? Shock value? An attempt to gauge the effect of actual TV violence on an audience, perhaps predictive of our apathy? Not sure.

The airing of Spike Jonze’ short film I’m Here, was by large one of the main events. It features a lovingly pathetic he-robot and a thrill-seeking she-robot, both living marginalized existences in modern day L.A. It’s a sympathetic love story— extroverted girl eases sheltered boy out of his shell, boy falls for girl, boy sacrifices limbs (literally; she’s kind of a klutz) and ultimately, life as he knows it to save girl. The social marginalization and actual dangers of being a robot in a world prioritizing humans is always lurking in the background. This may have been made most evident

schisms between individuals, but creating a world that invites people of all ages and backgrounds to reflect on their pasts together. Orrrr perhaps we can glean that we there is a new way to play practical jokes on our dates when we bring them back to our rooms.

Whatever the viewer’s interpretation of the Creators’ Project, one must come away with the impression that the advent of fresh technology necessitates the advent of fresh artistic avenues— which, it must be noted, offers longer forays into other artists’ minds. Since one of the easiest ways to distinguish contemporary art often seems to be its focus on perceived subjectivity—it is created on the basis of what the artist sees, regardless of whether the viewer may see something different, and of course sells on the basis of what the viewer thinks he or she sees, regardless of whether the artist sees something different—it’s simple to imagine a technological art world increasingly isolating its consumers from its cutting-edge materials. But just the same, all of the art at Creator’s Project engaged its viewers in far more depth than anyone could have imagined in previous years. Where pencil, paint and paper once reigned, a new artistic frontier seems to be emerging—perhaps for the better.

monoliths loomed over the visitors, electronically glittering and shifting in response to touch.

Their language was comprised of changing bars, speckles, and sometimes entire blocks of light flashing across their surface, changing colors according to…mood? Not only did they speak, they also sung—a variety of electronic notes were emitted from the installation, humming with each shift in color and shape.

A few steps from the monolith’s watchful eyes was a small corner holding a TV and one of those 80s style game consoles your older siblings spent too much time playing in the early 1990s.

Mark Essen, the creator, presented a couple of very minimalist, very violent, and very awesome 8-bit games for the visitors’ enjoyment. The game in this particular sub-room was Jetpack Basketball, which involved one player trying to shoot baskets before being stabbed in the throat by the other player. The other two games, NIDHOGG and The Thrill of Combat were similarly simple games set up in another side room: each basically involved staying alive long enough to withstand either dying in a swordfight or simply running out of time. Interestingly, the games typically were so short that no one really had a chance to “win, “or even take a stab at getting a decent score. All of the people I watched play the game seemed to like it, and some even took multiple turns, notwithstanding the obvious disappointment. Of course, the novelty of trying an art exhibit’s video game would seem to preclude a huge sense of in-

in a particularly sensitive scene as she asks him what he dreams about. He responds, “What do you mean? We can’t dream.” She responds, of course, that she pretends, and continues to tell him a simplistic, though emotional dream she “had” last night, conveying a sense of pathos that the creatively minded human machines are relegated to second-class citizen while living and feeling just like humans. The real gem in Jonze’s film is how well it communicates affection with such beautifully naïve characters, effectively reminding every watcher of his or her first experiences with love.

An equally sensitive moment came when a lady and her toddler (at least, I hope it was her toddler) experimented with the Hereafter installation by United Visual Artists, a large portrait frame holding what seemed to be a mirror. The kid waved a friendly hello at himself, hopped up and down experimentally, and decided enough was enough; fortunately not without some big smiles. It was somewhat unclear whether the kid realized all of his actions were taking place on the pseudo-mirror a few seconds after he made them, but that was definitely the killer angle of this art piece. Using a high-speed camera to “create a perpetual history of space,” the sepia-toned portrait manages to wow and thoroughly creep out its beholders by reflecting them…in the past.

Perhaps the wisdom we can glean from this moment is that despite technology’s ever increasing complexity, it is not creating larger and larger

Going Live @ Siren Fest

experiments and the lead singer’s floorwrithing finish. Experiencing them live was definitely not the revelation I would have if On a hot saturday this past July, Taja I only ever listened to them on recording.

Cheek and I met up in the city for the anBut I couldn’t dwell on my experience nual Siren Music Festival put on by the Vil- with the Fems too much, because Surfer lage Voice. I had been wanting to go since Blood was up next and I was ready. Taja the beginning of the summer, because for and I had weaved our way into the crowd a one-day free festival with a line-up that in between acts, finding a place right in stacked it was too good to pass up. I had the centre of the stage, just behind the also never been to Coney Island before, VIP area. We even saw Taja’s boss in the and I thought it would be fun to have a naVIP area and waved and yelled to get her tive Brooklynite show me around. The day attention, but she never saw us. Everyone was a tie-dye of people, colour, and sound, else on the whole of Coney Island proband it was not only a reminder of why I love ably did though. live music, but also of why I think it is cruWe weren’t too worried either way, becially important to experience the music cause Surfer Blood was just starting their we listen to live, and not just on recording. set. I started off excited, but about halfway I took the train down that morning, through ‘Floating Vibes’ I began to notice hoping to get there early and snag a place the actual mess I was listening to. The balfor Surfer Blood. I had started listening ance was all off: the song’s iconic bass line to them at the end of last year, and really was barely half there, and the vocals were liked Astro Coast, so I was pretty pumped too soft as well. I thought it must just be to hear them live. When I got to the stage, the levels and that sound tech would corit was still pretty early, so I ended up rect them soon. They didn’t. After a couple catching the end of DOM. I had listened songs I started to notice it wasn’t just that to them a little previously, but never rethe vocals were quiet; they were noticeably ally got too into them. Hearing them live, out of tune, and his tone was nothing like though, even for just the brief end of their that on the album. I was quick to forgive: set, really turned me onto them again in “it’s an outdoor concert, they’re probably a refreshing way. They were talented and not used to it,” I said to Taja. “And maybe energetic performers, and it was a great the lead singer’s having an off day.” But way to start off the afternoon. that wasn’t the worst thing. What drove Taja arrived during the next set by Taja and I to uncontrollable laughter was Screaming Females, which was interesthow awkward they were onstage—and ing but not really my cup of whiskey. Even I’m not one to use the word ‘awkward’ for though they might not be the most palatevery quotidian occurrence. They spent able for kids/elderly people (Siren Fest just as much time playing songs as they advertises itself as an event ‘for all ages’), did bantering about no-one’s-quite-surethey certainly added their own flair to what, saying how excited they were to be the mix, which was valuable in itself. And playing Siren Fest, and bestowing random I have to admit that while they aren’t the exclamations of “Brooklyn!” and “Coney type of music I would listen to on recordIsland!” upon the significantly bewildered ing—my threshold for screaming, howling, crowd. That, plus their general lack of enand feral growling in general is surprisergy and the lead singer/guitarist’s bizarre ingly low—I was able to appreciate them dance moves that looked like a PG-rated live because of how much energy they burlesque (oxymoronic, I know) pushed put into the show. I enjoyed it as a spectaTaja and I over the edge to rolling fits of cle, replete with category-busting vocal laughter at how ridiculous and disappointby Josh Evans

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ing the whole spectacle was. Even though they did reminded me of a mediocre teen twee band that I should support for the sake of supporting, I couldn’t help but feel let down as we made our way to the other stage midway through their set.

On the way there, we grabbed a mango piña colada in a three-foot-tall plastic goblet, and made it to the main stage while Ponytail was still early in their set. I had listened to Ponytail a little bit earlier in the year, when they were making the rounds as the E-board’s flavour of the week, but, like with DOM, I didn’t really get that into them at first. Well, that changed pretty quickly once I saw them live. They had such great energy, a full, confident sound, and were actually interesting to listen to and danceable at the same time. They were a much needed afternoon pick-me-up. The whole crowd was freaking out too, with multiple people surfing at any one time, and a bestially large near-naked guy who apparently, Taja told me, is a glorious fixture of many NYC concerts, spilling general rowdy amusement into the audience.

After Ponytail, we were pretty beat from dncing in the heat, so we went for a wander through the midway to try and cool off. After some quick air-conditioned rounds of DDR and playing in a kiddie sprinkler on the overrun beach, we headed back to the stage for Harlem, whom I had also been looking forward to seeing for a while. We arrived just after they had started, and they sounded pretty good, at least more on top of their material than Surfer Blood. They played a nice afternoon set with some energy and decent skill, but they too were possessed by this ubiquitous chattiness that, since it was not especially clever or interesting, was very distracting as an audience member. I was again underwhelmed, and a little irritated that otherwise good bands seemed to be succumbing to a laziness in live performance that is so often associated with having garnered buzzworthiness. Aside

from a proficient and invested performance of ‘Gay Human Bones’ and another few of their best from Hippies, their set left me with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction, and moved me to pour all of my remaining brio for the day into the prospect that Holy Fuck would deliver supremely and utterly, and render the entire day as revelatory as I had hoped.

Which they did. They were that awesome. They saved the day. Even as the festival staff were setting up the stage, I could tell we were in for something spectacular.

They brought five potted palms onto stage, setting them in a ring around the instruments. A breeze was coming up from the ocean, and the setting sun cast long shadows of the fronds across the stage.

When the band finally came on, I could tell from when the first beat dropped that this was going to be a set to remember.

The most remarkable and awe-inspiring thing throughout was the tightness of their sound, balanced with the relaxedness of their vibe. More than any other group I’d seen that day, they played truly as a band, not just a group of musicians who happened to be on the same stage together; they really felt their music as a unit, and it was impressive to behold. And their music itself is so well conceived, it makes me want to both dance along in a crowd, and also sit down with my headphones and appreciate it by myself. They are undeniably masters of their craft, and were the perfect last act of the festival.

To say the least, it was a full day. Even as I was taking our beloved Metro North home that night, I was thinking back on all the different performances I had heard. I had been able to appreciate Screaming Females live in a way I never would have on recording. I had been looking most forward to hearing Surfer Blood and Harlem, but ended up disappointed most by their live acts. I had been impressed by DOM and Ponytail, groups I had known about but only really got into after hearing them live. And I was so fulfilled hearing

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Holy Fuck, a band I know now is talented and entertaining not only on their album, but also in real life. I was able to develop and complexify my opinions about all the bands I saw beyond just what I can get from their recorded albums and the internet. It is this sort of experience that reminds me how valuable and invaluable the immediate, live performance is, and why I’m sure it will always have a place in music culture. People talk of the woes of digitalisation and abstraction of media from the original object, but I think most people who loves music will believe that since live performance is the origin of music, it is, in many ways, the most valuable element of it.

At least that’s what lingered on my mind as I fell asleep that night, after an incredible day full of reasons to think it’s true.

with its neglected alleyways of Technicolor bungalows too quickly passed over in favor of the main attractions: the coastal mansions, the nauseatingly quaint storefronts, the boardwalks, the sailboats, and, once each summer, the Newport Folk Festival at Fort Adams State Park. It follows, then, that Newport’s tourists look an awfully lot like the Disneyworld set: mostly families, occasionally with a couple of grandparents attached, mostly white, too often struggling with too many bags, too many strollers, too many children.

Folk Is Just A Four-Letter Word Or, How The Newport Folk Festival Looks Just A Bit Too Much Like It Always Has, And Why That’s Fine By Me

by Samuel Huber

Stepping out of the car at Fort Adams State Park after the two-hour crawl through Newport, I took a moment to stretch my legs and consider what the generations of soldiers who had defended the site would think of the town that has since sprung up around it. Newport, Rhode Island, hovers somewhere between Key West and Disneyworld on the saturated-tourist-destination spectrum,

The Folk Festival crowd was much the same, if a bit more Key West than Disney —more old people; more of them showing too much skin, toughened and wrinkled by years of excessive sun exposure; less anxiety; fewer children—and still mostly white, still weighed down with baggage.

This was charming, at first, in that many of these people had been coming to the festival since it’s inception, had seen Bob Dylan take its stage before the rest of the country knew to care. They would know, I assumed on the first day of the festival, what it meant to be nineteen and feel as though this place and this music were the only things in the whole sprawling universe that mattered, at least for the weekend.

It soon became obvious, though, that at some point in the intervening halfcentury that reverence had faded, either from age or habit or simple unfamiliarity with the more recent lineups. Bob Dylan was not playing this year, had not taken this stage in over forty, and there they still

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sat, leathery and inert on their fold-up camping chairs, fanning themselves with crumpled performance schedules, resigned to whichever artist popped up on whichever stage they happened to be in front of, while the newcomers—while I, for whom Newport has always been (and continues to be, leathery inertia be damned) the Holy Land—scurried around them, sniffing out the music like starved mutts, offended by their well-fed passivity.

In spite of the masses of undiscerning festivalgoers between us and the front of each stage, we had no trouble finding the acts worth seeing, and there were many.

Jim James of My Morning Jacket was a recurring figure throughout the weekend, appearing on stage with other artists on both days of the festival and performing a hauntingly powerful solo set. Andrew Bird took the main stage with just a violin and a spinning Siamese gramophone, and O’Death’s distinct blend of punk and bluegrass gave the festival a refreshing shot of adrenaline. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore, Levon Helm, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band all delivered memorable performances as well, but it was Elvis Perkins in Dearland’s set at the end of the second day, on the small stage erected inside the fort itself, that felt most urgent and essential, reaffirming all of the hopes and convictions about the enduring magic of Newport and the festival’s continued relevance that I had walked into the park with the previous morning.

Elvis Perkins’s story is a terrible one, so sad that it feels sadistic to relay it here. His first album, Ash Wednesday, was a heavy and heartbreaking reflection on loss recorded in the wake of his mother’s death in the September 11th attacks in 2001 (his father, the actor Anthony Perkins, had died a decade earlier from AIDS). For his second album, recorded under the name Elvis Perkins in Dearland, Perkins picked up a band and headed for new territory, exploring the subtler emotional terrain of a rebuilt life.

This band was on stage with him at Newport, and they performed with perfect coordination, clear in their single vision and precise in their execution. The set culminated with an extended rendition of “Doomsday”, the spiraling, brassy anthem at the center of Perkins’s second album, for which the band was joined on stage

by What Cheer? Brigade (abbreviated on their embroidered patches as “WC?B”), a nineteen-piece marching band with an aggressive stage presence and DIY aesthetic. As the song reached its peak, Perkins paraded off the stage, through the crowd, and out into the center of the fort, marching band in tow, quickly followed by a flock of disbelieving fans, each of whose faces registered the distinct expression of one who knows himself to be witnessing something uniquely historical and never to be replicated.

Captain John Henry, Fort Adams’s founding commander, may be turning in his grave at the thought of his fort blanketed in beach towels and lawn chairs, and he most certainly would have objected to the barefooted, skinny-jeaned, cigarettesmoking Edward Sharpe groupies—hell, he may even have had some reservations about the crowd’s glaring age and race disparities. But there wasn’t a doubt in my mind as I tumbled out of the inner quad, lost and disoriented, trying to follow WC?B’s bombast through the dispersing crowd but too slap-happy, sun-drenched, and battle-weary to impose any kind of

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order on my movements, that Elvis and the Captain would have gotten along just fine.

Whatsa Wassaic?

by Jesse Bradford

Wassaic, New York is not nowhere, but it’s close. A twohour drive from the city, it makes you think that the whole world must be a four hour trip around. When my friends and I decided to attend the Wassaic Project Summer Festival, we knew nothing about this place, or the festival we were attending, so we packed for survival: tents, sleeping bags, quinoa, applesauce, instruments, drugs, slack-line, bartering goods, mojo. Turns out we’d packed for success.

The Wassaic Project is “an artist-run sustainable, multidisciplinary arts organization” that runs numerous festivals, gallery showings, residence programs, and fundraisers. With a intro like that, and that fact that it was founded just three years ago by a group of artists from Brooklyn, we expected a level of pretension, self-involvement, and irrelevant artistry which was, to our overjoyed surprise, almost completely lacking.

The Project is cradled in the one-intersection hamlettown of Wassaic, where a seven-story renovated grain elevator serves as art gallery and concert venue. It’s the first thing you see when you roll into town, overshadowing the well-kept lawns, barbeques, and patriotic flags of this allAmerican blast from the past. A one-room church, kids selling lemonade, and a free-flowing creek all added to our suspicion that this was not going to be like any ‘music festival’ we’d been to before. We checked in, got our camping pass, and settled in.

During the day we sat or stood or rolled around on the mill porch under a large white awning, or picnicked on the grass with visitors and residents. A constant stream of musicians, dancers, and poets performed to the waxing and waning crowd, accompanied at regular intervals by the metro north train that screamed past.

The amazing thing was that the festival was completely free: in more ways than one. There were no fences, no walls, checkpoints or boundaries of any kind. New York hipsters mingled with train-hopping punks around a raging bonfire, an old lady in a pearl necklace listened to a noise band in an abandoned livestock auction ring, and children played with strangers’ dogs in a creek. By the end of the third day I could recognize every other festivalgoer, and had talked or sung or danced with many of them.

The art was consistently above average. The music was

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impeccably curated, and kept us (and scads of limb-flailing children) grooving all through the day and night. Favorite acts included The Luyas (whiney light-showing polyrhythmic Montrealers), Pearl and the Beard (sexy grunt bluesy rocking twee), and Spirit Family Reunion (American teeshirt cigarette troubles). And none of this invisible whisking away of talent. The bands and artists composed probably half the crowd, and walked and camped, and fucked around with the rest of us.

There are a spare number of times I’ve felt quite like I did that weekend: the first page of a book, jumping into a pool (when you go from dry to wet), the instant after the starter’s gun fires, the night your candidate wins the race.

You’re not just at the start of something, but you’re at the start of something with possibilities abounding.

As we drove away we stuttered and smiled; hard to say anything at all. We knew that we’d come back next year, and that we’d bring friends. And we knew that it was exactly this that would destroy our dream. The largest corporate high-security festival-machines no doubt started with this same kind of joy. At a certain point you’ve just got to control it: too many people feeling good must be stopped, stay off the grass, don’t touch the art or the artists.

A slight murmur overheard amongst the tents confirmed my joys and fears “Yeah, we’ve just got this beer.

Where’s the wine set up?………What?.........oh, there was free wine last year…”

Filmmaking in Prague

by Rachel Kempf

By March of last year the threat of an empty summer haunted every casual conversation. My roommate was heading off to Africa, my best friend would be in Japan on a Light Fellowship, and it seemed that everyone else I knew had somehow landed an awesome internship in New York. I scoured the Summer Session website searching for something in which I would not be penalized for my sub-par language skills or my inability to do much of anything else. As a film studies major, I really just wanted to make something, and the Yale Summer Session in Prague offered the opportunity to travel to a foreign place and shoot a movie on film. I had never worked with actual film before, and

I wanted to hold a real movie camera on my shoulder and hear the click-clacking of the film spinning on the reel. Instead of being able to instantly replay my footage, I wanted the thrill of having to get each scene right the first time and to wait until after development to see how it had turned out. Anyone could use a digital camera (or so I thought), but learning how to use film was a skill that few could boast.

So I set off with fifteen other Yalies to study film production at FAMU, a renowned film school in Prague. Not one of us could speak more than a few words of Czech, and we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. According to the syllabus, learning film production would be easy enough. Each day we would attend several lectures on different aspects of film production; there would be every-

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thing from acting workshops to soundquickly learning that in a country where we editing lectures to a screening of Casadidn’t speak the language or understand blanca. It seemed there would be plenty of the customs, we were going to have to do time to work on our own films and explore everything ourselves. We were a herd of the city, but we soon discovered that there American teenagers trying to figure out was a lot more to making a movie than letboth a foreign city and our cameras. ting a camera roll, and editing would take Shooting on film was more difficult more than three hours of lecture to master. than I had imagined; it multiplies the stress A good movie should be a seamless of waiting for a photograph to develop by transition from reality – every physical twenty-four frames per second, as every object and spoken word is a believable and frame could be an error. But the magic of even inevitable part of the constructed using a wind-up Bolex camera and editworld. A viewer should have the feeling ing 16mm film by hand more than made that they are seeing a few hours or days of up for the stress of not knowing whether a world that exists even when they aren’t I’d just shot a masterpiece or a blank roll viewing it. Like the customs of a foreign of film. On grainy, silent black-and-white, city, the viewer should believe that every Prague’s Old Town Square looks more part of a film has a purpose, however authentic than it does in real life. The film unconventional. The viewer should never can’t record the sound of tourists shouting know that each line of a film that appears in English and lends an ironic elegance to to fall naturally into place is in fact carethe commercial signs hanging on fourfully constructed. hundred-year-old buildings. The film, like The average moviegoer considers only the city itself, was foreign and new to me, a fraction of the skill that goes into makyet on a broader scale already well known ing a film. Most think only of the actors and loved, its secrets documented and giving life to lines written by some invisible explored by filmmakers past. screenwriter, while more creative types Like music or any other art form, a might consider the construction of the good movie hides the amount of time scene, the lights and sound that are careand effort it took to create, presenting fully added to give the illusion of reality the viewer with an alternate reality whose to a set of three blank walls. But even the existence seems inevitable and seamless. most active viewer would probably fail to This summer has shown me that behind consider the work of the editors, splicing the perfect illusions of movie fantasy there together each shot to create the mood are teams of architects. Viewers of my final and pacing of every scene, manipulating project would never guess that I wrote the audience members’ emotions Most twelve drafts of a screenplay that even now, people forget the sound editors who two months after the end of the program, engineer the sonic ambiance that works is not finished. Even to me, it is unbelievon the audience’s subconscious. Watchable that my final ten-minute movie is the ing the credits roll at the end of a movie, result of almost thirty-six hours of shootesoteric job titles scroll past – what is a ing and twenty additional hours of careful “Key Grip” anyway? Working in groups of video and sound editing. More important four, we soon found out what it was like than learning how to run a film camera or to play every part in the production of a use FinalCut Pro is the realization of just movie. During the first week, we shot our how much happens behind the scenes of first three two minute movies on digital, any film, from a low budget indie flick to a with two of us acting, one directing, and blockbuster hit. Prague has shown me how one shooting. We did location scouting, difficult it is to create a film that appears to shooting, and editing in just a few hours, have been discovered, not constructed.

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Music: Interview with The Blow DJ by DJ Quick Questsions From the Vault

Interviews

working on it. And that all of the songs fit with the show, it’s exciting, and it’s definitely coming.

situation in my life right now.

CH: Are there any bands you’ve been listening to lately that you’ve been enjoying? Or influences?

CH: It seemed like a lot of your older songs were about relationships, would you say that’s still true of your newer work?

Khaela Maricich, of The Blow

by Christian Hilton

Christian Hilton: So your group The Blow has released a few albums, the last one in 2007, but I haven’t heard much about the group since then, so could you catch us up on what you’ve been up to?

Khaela Maricich: Sure. Well, there was a lot of touring, which happens after an album comes out, and I toured The Blow all of 2007 and half of 2008, and after that I stopped touring because I was tired, and I feel like after touring a record at a certain point it’s kind of nice to give it a rest, because you need space to make new stuff in order to have new things to show. So then I moved to New York with my girlfriend, who is Melissa Dyne, and then started doing performances in end of 2009 with Melissa.

Melissa is a conceptual artist and installation artist, and she’s been collaborating with me on the new shows.

CH: Cool, that’s interesting. … I’ve noticed that the band’s lineup has changed, The Blow used to have another member, Jona

[Bechtolt, of YACHT]? I haven’t heard much about how you separated, or how that’s changed your life performances or songwriting, so could you tell me about that?

KM: In the history of The Blow, I was performing solo for some years before I was working with Jonah, I put out a couple of records before that, two EP’s and a full length. And then in 2004, Jona joined the band, as a little fusion, and we made Poor Aim and Paper Television together. So it isn’t so much like the band broke apart, he joined it for a couple of records, he was already doing YACHT before that, and just kept on doing YACHT afterwards. For a long time, it’s just been me on stage… steering my own little boat.

CH: OK. … So you have been writing new songs now? What can you tell me about the new record?

KM: Um, just that it’s happening, that we’re

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KM: Good question. I kind of can’t ever get over The Knife, I really love them and their music videos. … Other times, when I’m driving my car in New York to park it, then I always need to hear that Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind”. I’m not giving you very underground, cool answers [laughs].

We’re going to see Goldfrapp soon. I like La Roux, I dig her pretty good. Yeah, those are all girls… oh, we saw that girl who drums and sings at the same time, tUnEyArDs, she’s amazing live.

KM: Yeah, I think the things that I tend to think about most in my life are people, and how they relate to each other, and how I’m relating in my relationships and watching other people and my friends and thinking about the relationships they have in their lives. So the songs end up being about that. In some cases I’m imagining a fictional relationship, writing about heartbreak when it’s not actually my own

DJ by DJ Anya van Wagtendonk, a.k.a. DJ VDubz, DJ of Aural Fixations (Wed, 6-7:30pm), interviewed by Chloé Rossetti, a.k.a. Miss Chloé, DJ of WTF Weekly (Wednesdays, 11 p.m. to midnight) CR: Tell me a little about your show - what kind of music do you play, who features heavily, what kind of people listen to you...

lot of people would like, so if you can deal with my inane between-song banter, you should listen!

AVW: My show is mainly pop and rock, some older, some newer, and I try to balance the totally obscure with the very well-known.

I’ll usually center the show around songs or artists I’ve just discovered and am really loving at the moment, and then pick other songs that I think go with them. It’s generally a pretty eclectic mix, but it’s all just stuff that I really like and want to share.

As for my audience, it tends to consist of people who live with me or contributed to my birth… but I do think it’s music that a

CR: What do you think has been your most shining moment as a DJ so far?

AVW: For my Valentine’s Day show, which was centered around a theme of Adorable, I got to play a dedication from a girl Buffalo, NY to her boyfriend at Yale. She had gotten his roommates to make him listen, and then had me play a mash-up of the Counting Crows’ Accidentally in Love and Mr. Jones that he had put together and performed. It was a really cute idea, and I

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was really happy to do it.

CR: Who would be your dream in-studio session?

I was supposed to, so there were a lot of long moments of silence, and I wouldn’t necessarily know that something was wrong for thirty seconds until someone sent me a confused text.

AVW: The Polyphonic Spree. They’re crazy. And there are so many of them!

CR: What is a youtube link that accurately describes you/your show?

CR: What is the most hardcore fuck-up you have done as a DJ so far?

AVW: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h7pvA4EHi08

AVW: My first show was just pretty much a disaster – I didn’t turn on most of the switches

CR: What do you want to be when you grow up?

AVW: Ugh. Young?

Quick Questions to our DJs

to tell anyone...

Katherine Seggerman Circa 2000? gotta be Third Eye Blind.

erwise my significant other would end up smothering me with a pillow at night.

Hannah Shimabukuro: BE YODA (and laugh at science for the rest of my life).

Kalli Angel: Darth Vader, definitely. Just exercise and have sex all the time, and no one will notice! Also, you’d have to stay away from libraries.

Dilan Gomih: Talk like Yoda because everyone will think I’m a bad ass.

Kathering Seggerman: I’d rather breathe like Darth Vader cuz it’s sexii.

Chloe Rosetti: Would you rather talk like Yoda or breathe like Darth Vader for the rest of your life?

Sam Huber: Talk like Yoda - Darth Vader can’t sneak up on people.

Salvador Fernandez: Talk like yoda! So my words are out order, big deal!

Stephen Watty: Talk like yoda most definitely because oth-

From The Vault

by Chloe Rosetti

Chloe Rosetti: If someone played your show backwards, what Satanic message could they expect to hear?

Sam Huber: Never trust a guitar solo, or anyone who beatboxes.

Salvador Fernandez: Take over Canada in the name of Mexico so we have America surrounded. Mwahahah...

Kendra Dawson: Get emo bangs. Don’t listen to your mom.

You’d look SO CUTE in them...

Stephen Watty: Played backwards it would be the michael jackson song from Free Willy.

Dilan Gomih: Miley Cyrus is the anti-Christ and possibly a a man.

Katherine Seggerman: SARAH PALIN 2012 SARAH PALIN 2012 SARAH PALIN 2012!

Chloe Rosetti: Who was your music idol, circa 2000?

Sam Huber: Nelly. But we don’t talk about that...

Salvador Fernandez: Vicente Fernández, cuz it was the first cd I bought, which happened around that time (mariachi never dies for me) Kendra Dawson: Eiffel 65 Stephen Watty: My music idols circa 2000 were definitely the guys from the boy band 5ive...haha just kidding (No, sadly I’m really not...)

Hannah Shimabukuro: Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations!! Not that I knew it at the time. He was just “the cute one.”

Kalli Angel: Probably Nickel Creek, or maybe Jesse Cook.

Dilan Gomih John Mayer, but you have to promise not

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Kona Triangle, Sing a New Sapling Into Existence (2009, Porter Records)

by Chloe Rosetti

For two semesters, I had a show called Parenthesis the Night, on which I explored the darker, more meditative, more demented side of the electronic spectrum.

Now I have a new show with WYBC’s lovely and talented Music Director, Taja Cheek.

Our jam is called WTF Weekly, where

we explore the “WTF” music genre now available at WYBC’s newly re-shelved and re-organized music library. This genre encompasses everything that doesn’t fit nicely into other, more standard musical classifications, bringing us many an indescribable gem during our weekly musical

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wanderings. One such evening we happened upon the majestic Kona Triangle, love-child of electronic veterans Keaver & Brause and Lone (Matt Cutler).

If you’re a musical anarchist like Taja and myself, then nothing should make your ears prick up more than the phrase “side-project”—perhaps a one-time thing, Kona Triangle is everything too synthesizer for Keaver & Brause and everything too musique-concrète for Lone, all the while retaining the hiphoptronic influences of both. The album begins in a peacefully unsettling way with the tracks “Heavens Gate” and “Shine A Light,” creating an atmosphere characteristic of both artists’ work. Heading into the third track, “Pinchbeck,” it should come as no surprise that Lone lists Boards of Canada as one of his major influences. Hauntingly beautiful in the vein of some of the most uncanny physical deformations, lovers of Amon Tobin should pick this up straighta-

22 This summer I learned what it means when a reporter signs off his or her broadcast with the tagline “NPR News.”

KUT, the NPR station in Austin, Texas, has the first daily newsroom I’ve worked in. The longform expository writing I’d done in the past was completely different from situations like “this beloved restaurant owner died yesterday; call the shop to find out about funeral arrangements.”

And then press record and get a quote from his wife about all the musicians who have played there, while staying sensitive to the situation.

How do you filter a phone recording to improve the sound? What details are important enough to include in an online text version of the piece? When pitching longer-term pieces, important considerations turned to what was “new” about stories and why they mattered in the long run. And above all, how to report them fairly and accurately.

Subtle differences in the way you phrase things can make a huge difference, as anyone who’s read about themselves in a news story knows well. I’ve never felt so much like a reporter as when I had interviewed six different parties about a city housing development that had not gone as planned and was trying to describe what went wrong…in two sentences. The piece was capped at two and half minutes. Going to say the

city made a mistake? You’d better tell them and give them a chance to respond.

I knew I would have good editors at KUT, but I didn’t realize how much care they would take to walk interns through every step of the reporting process. This included audio production as well as keeping stories balanced: advising on how to capture good natural sound on site to set the scene later. Another skill entirely is how to edit people’s speech well, because some people you interview are just better talkers than others. I’ve heard a reporter literally sing when he was doing a story on the BP oil spill and he got someone on mic who described, in rapture, birds taking flight off the Texas coast after getting oil cleaned off their wings. I also now recognize the groan of reporters who get a stuttering protagonist. But wait—those “ums” can be removed seamlessly by editing! And those boring, middle parts of run-on sentences, deleted! As my Radio Journalism professor Jake Halpern says, “you wouldn’t believe what goes into making a sausage.”

I could go on with lessons from the summer: learning to keep the listener first, being clear, double checking facts (just because something is on the Associated Press wire doesn’t mean it’s true). I learned a ton about how the city of Austin works, just as reporting for WYBC has taught me more about New Haven. But the biggest takea-

by Catherine Osborn

Making Sausage

way, and play it over and over. Imagine Mr Tobin smoothed out by a big tongue, and then, over the course of the album, fused with cLOUDDEAD, as the artists’ early hiphop influences begin to shine through on tracks such as “Lone Mountain,” and “Signs and Wonders” (“It’s all goddamned money,” a sample says, “money and drugs.”). The album ends in a fit of strange delight with the track “Toybox (Kona Remix),” before resolving with “Mauna Loa,” heavily reminiscent of New Orleans outfit Belong, and a fitting end to a light-bending and heaving tale.

I understand that lovers of stave- and circuit-bending genres are a minority on the music- and sound-loving spectrum, but it is rare that an album will come along where pre-determined taste is irrelevant.

This album is so well-crafter, so pristine, that I’m sure anyone will be seduced by it.

Let it put its fuzzy, fluffy, bass-ridden limbs all over you.

News

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way was how special it can be when a team cares so much about making their final product engaging.

That’s what we’re shooting for this semester at WYBC news. We’re keeping our format of a new thirty-minute show each week, but it will be tighter, more diverse, more edited, and—we hope— more fun to listen to. We’ll be adding some satire pieces and student art, such as spoken-word poetry. Let us know what you’d like to hear.

WYBC Yale Radio Executive Board General Manager: Sean Owczarek Comptroller: Carl Chen Station Manager: Samuel Huber Office Manager: Nick Dyen Program Director: Jesse Bradford Operations Board Music Director: Taja Cheek News Director: Catherin Osborn Public Affairs Dir: Simon Chaffetz Sports Director: LeRoy Cole Production Dir: Max Hendrickson Engineering Director: Sherwin Soltani Public Relations Dir: Raquel Guarino Marketing Director: Chloé Rossetti Zine Editor-in-Chief: Brian Waswani Zine Creative Dir: Farah Al-Qasimi

WYBZine is the radio-culture-centric print production of WYBC Yale Radio.

It is designed and disseminated to spread the word about cultural happenings and musical miscellany for your cerebral and visual pleasure.

WYBZine does not, in any way, reflect the views of Yale University wybcx.com For more information email zine@wybc.com Editor-in-Chief: Brian Odhiambo Senior Editor: Chloé Rossetti Creative Director: Farah Al-Qasimi Contributors: Christina Wakefield, Josh Evans, Samuel Huber, Jesse Bradford, Rachel Kempf, Christian Hilton, Catherine Osborn Graphic Design: Andrew Lister Printing: Alex Damianos

Events Listing The Cavity, 216 Dwight Street

Fri 9/3, 9pm Modern Rivals / Magic Man

Fri 10/15, 9pm Barkev / Andy + Adam MFA ‘11 / Dog Days / Boveda

Fri 9/10, 9pm Female / D. Gookin / Sewn Leather / 2 Ton Bug

Fri 10/29, 9pm 2 Ton Bug / Many Mansions / Lord Jeff

Fri 9/17, 9pm Laurelin Kruse / BOY / Even Artichokes Have Hearts

Sat 10/30, 9pm Sister Helen / HALLOWEEN SPECTACULAR

Sat 9/25, 9pm Titans Take Olympus / Elison Jackson / Spirit Family Reunion

Fri 11/5, 9pm Plume Giant album release! (@ Dwight Hall Chapel) / Two Out Rally

Fri 10/1, 9pm CAVITY SEARCH

Sat 11/13, 9pm FOURTH ANNUAL DRAG BALL

Fri 10/8, 9pm YV and Brother K / Laura Zax / Thomas Wesley Stern

Fri 11/19–11/28 Fall Recess

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