There are always lots of awesome shows going on in the Triangle, but October seems to be just stuffed full of them. Below is a limited preview of some of the hippest, hottest acts to catch this month.

WKNC gets a lot of praise for our weekly Local Beer Local Band series at Tir Na Nog, but a good chunk of the credit belongs to Chris Tamplin. Help thank Chris for putting up with us Thursday, Oct. 1 as Local Beer Local Band doubles as Chris’s Birthday Local Band Bash. Prabir and The Substitutes and Goner are on the bill and rumor has it there may be a magician.

The much anticipated Hear Here finale show is Saturday, Oct. 3 at The Pour House. Motorskills opens, followed by Inflowential and The Love Language. Tickets are not available in advance so be sure to get there when doors open at 8 p.m. Once inside $5 will get you a copy of the Hear Here CD; there are less than 90 shopping days before Christmas so feel free to stock up.

St. Vincent was one of the hottest groups on 88.1 this summer. They open for Andrew Bird Wednesday, Oct. 7 and Thursday, Oct. 8. at the Cat’s Cradle. Both nights are sold out. If you aren’t one of the lucky ticket holders, personal favorites Everclear play Oct. 8 at the Lincoln Theatre.

Saturday, Oct. 10 is I Was Totally Destroying It’s release party for Horror Vacui at the Cat’s Cradle. The $7 advance and $10 door prices include a copy of the CD. If that isn’t enough to get you there, how about supporting bands Lonnie Walker, Des Ark, Rat Jackson and Lake Inferior?

Baltimore-based J. Roddy Walston and the Business is one of those bands you love as though they were native sons. Mike Roy joins them for their CD release party Wednesday, Oct. 14 at The Pour House.

Berkley Café hosts Lonnie Walker, Goner and Gray Young on Friday, Oct. 16. Try not to rock so hard you miss Luego’s CD release party Saturday, Oct. 17 at the Local 506. The Tomahawks and The Huguenots will be there too.

Raleigh’s Cherry Bounce Music Festival starts Sunday, Oct. 18 and runs throughout the week at various local venues. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the line-up, but I can tell you to tune in to Local Lunch on Thursday to find out more.

Experimental prog rockers The Mars Volta invade the Disco Rodeo on Friday, Oct. 23. They’ll be in Charlotte the day before if you’re a really big fan.

A bunch of KNC staff saw Charlotte’s Benji Hughes in April and they’re still talking about it. See him for yourself as he performs with The Light Pines Saturday, Oct. 24 at the Local 506.

Fridays on the Lawn continue Friday, Oct. 30 with Max Indian and Schooner. It’s a totally free show on Harris Field, right in front of our radio home in the Witherspoon Student Center (corner of Cates Ave and Dan Allen Drive) at N.C. State. WKNC and the Union Activities Board put on the show with support from Student Government and the Inter-residence Council.

Check out WKNC’s Rock Report for more shows and feel free to leave comments about who’s on your to see list for October.

Here are the great shows happening this week to which WKNC is giving away tickets:

Wednesday, Sept. 30:

Ra Ra Riot with Maps and Atlases and Princeton @ Cat’s Cradle

Ra Ra Riot photo by Sarah Cass

Friday, Oct. 2:

SMNMNMN with Josh Drye Consortium and The Toddlers @ Nightlight

SMNMNMN

American Aquarium with Shawn Fisher and the Juke Box & Gabriel Kelly @ The Pour House

American Aquarium photo by Amy Schlatter

Saturday, Oct 3:

Hear Here Finale Show feat. The Love Language, Inflowential, and Motor Skills @ The Pour House

Hear Here

This is the second and final Hear Here show to promote the all-local and all-amazing tunes of some great artists from the area. The first show of the two part series was sold out and presented at Cat’s Cradle. If you weren’t able to attend the first show be sure to get your tickets now or listen to WKNC for your chance to win tickets!

This week’s top 10 comes from local hip-hop group The Beast. They are mixing it up a little and giving us their top 10 albums, instead of tracks, they are currently listing to.

From Pierce, emcee

“Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Part 2″ by Raekwon

“Brazilian Girls” by Brazilian Girls

From Eric, piano

“Infernal Machines” by Darcy James Argue’s Secrety Society

“Bring Me The Workhorse” by My Brightest Diamond

From Stephen, drums

“Such Fun” by Annuals

“Wildnerness” by Josh Mease

From Pete, bass

“Funeral” by The Arcade Fire

“Voodoo” by D’angelo

From the band

“Double Booked” by Robert Glasper

“Leave it all Behind” by The Foreign Exchange

The Beast’s album release party at the Duke Coffeehouse on October 16. Kooley High, Carlitta Durand and Freebass 808 will also be performing. Doors open at 8 p.m. See you there!

Daytrotter illustration of The Bowerbirds

As I heard the The Bowerbird’s play the opening notes of “House of Diamonds” at Double Barrel Benefit 6, I asked myself where I had heard the song before. It wasn’t on Hymns for a Dark Horse, the album I had been playing on repeat, and wouldn’t be released on an album until Upper Air several months later.

I soon realized I had downloaded the then untitled track from Daytrotter, a site dedicated to hosting bands at its studios in Rock Island, Illinois, and posting the resulting interview transcripts and audio recordings for all to enjoy.

Just this week, Daytrotter posted tracks from some fantastic bands, Bombadil, Dead Confederate and Cursive.

Local artists Annuals, The Physics of Meaning, Avett Brothers, and Birds of Avalon, among others, have recorded in the Daytrotter studios and have tracks available for download on the site. The illustrators there create original artwork to accompany tracks from each artist, as seen above.

Daytrotter seems too good to keep a secret!

After a much needed week off from DJing and blogging I am back on the mic tonight for another round of the Local Beat (special props to Stevo for filling in at the last minute last week).

Tonight’s show is going to be a bit special, in that the program is only lasting for an hour with no guests (due to a cancellation).  Then, starting at 6 p.m., WKNC will be broadcasting LIVE from Fridays on the Lawn here at N.C. State (which due to weather has been moved to the Wolves Den in Talley Student Center).  Tonight’s show is bound to be one of the best of this fall with Luego and I Was Totally Destroying It taking over the stage.  Both bands should be playing some brand new material as Luego is releasing their first full-length “Taped-together Stories” on October 17 (now being played on WKNC) and IWTDI is also coming out with a new album titled “Horror Vacui” October 10.

Also, IWTDI will be coming aboard the Local Beat on October 9 and Luego will be on the Local Beat Friday October 16.

See you tonight on N.C. State’s campus!

As per mother nature’s likely agenda, the first installment of “Fridays on the Lawn” will take place at Talley Student Center, just down the road from Harris Field and Witherspoon Student center (the previous location).  I Was Totally Destroying It and Luego will be performing in the Wolves’ Den this Friday, Sept 25, at 6pm.  The show is still FREE and open to the public.

Campus Map

Dry Heathens will start the night out with a friendly reminder that whiskey and rock and roll still go hand in hand. Then to end the night, Chapel Hill’s own Future Kings of Nowhere will excite you with there angst driven acousticore.

Thursday at 7 p.m. you can get a preview of what to expect on 88.1 FM. I will be playing some new Future Kings songs, and rockin’ faces with some Dry Heathens.

Hope to see you there!

With a busy schedule of new concerts this year such as the Hear Here Compilation shows and the new Fridays on the Lawn Series, WKNC was unsure that it’s now three year old shack would stand again in the Brickyard for Habitat for Humanity’s yearly Shack-a-thon. However, after combating a plethora of disgusting (and probably undiscovered) spiders who had taken up residence in the structure as it sat in DJ Mystery Roach’s backyard, WKNC’s leading team of engineers (consisting of three humanities majors and two actual engineers) managed to bring the beloved Shack back to N.C. State (in quite a few pieces).

Here are some of the pictures of the building process:

The actual brains behind the operation: John and Austin direct the reconstruction of the shack

Taking A Break Before The Actual Assembly

She lives!

The conception of the shack’s design and actual construction came from, NC State graduate student and WKNC engineer, John Jernigan. The shack itself is constructed to look like a giant boom box, complete with it’s own retractable cassesst door that opens automatically when you hit a built in eject button. One of the new and most popular features this year for the shack, however, was the addition of a roof. As I had experienced last year, Shack-a-thon always seems to conjure up the monsoon rain storms which can catch a very cold and tired deejay by surprise in the middle of the night. Needless to say, we were glad to have it when flash flood rains hit the Triangle late Tuesday night.

Although the shack building officially started for student organizations on Sunday, overnight participants weren’t required to spend the night in the shack until Monday. WKNC, however, was the exception. With a booming new set of trainees eager to jump into the fray, staff members manned the shack on Sunday night and have been alternating two hour shifts all week.

During the day, WKNC deejays asked (and sometimes begged) for donations to support the Habitat for Humanity cause. Donors received various KNC apparel like WKNC koozies, stickers, cds, and WKNC t-shirts. One of the new features this year was wireless live broadcasting from the Brickyard, which aired in the early hours of Wednesday morning.  Eye on the Triangle’s own Saja Hindi and myself walked the bricks to speak with the various organizations who were participating this year, including Men Against Rape, Caldwell Fellows, and Inter-residence Council.

Now with only two days left of Shack-a-thon, WKNC looks forward to the Shack-a-thon live music performance by local band, The Pneurotics. Show begins at 7 p.m. and is open to public. The Pneurotics will be performing right next to WKNC shack and will hopefully be giving a live wireless broadcast interview to yours truly, DJ Special K, before the show.

Click here to listen streaming live

Since President Barack Obama’s election into office, health care reform has been a topic of heated debate among Democrats and Republicans. So this week’s Eye on the Triangle focused on this issue in several of our segments, giving both the Democratic and Republican perspective, as well as opinions from around the University and opinions from locals. If you missed the show, you can listen to the clips below, and you can also get more information on our interviewees and topics here. And if you are tired of hearing about the health care debate (though our segments are unique and a must-hear!), be sure to at least check out our Wolfpacker of the Week segment.

VIP:
Thanks to some of our friends’ connections in the political scene, Eye on the Triangle’s Adam Compton and Saja Hindi spoke to U.S. Congressman David Price (D), serving N.C. district 4, and the spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party Jordan Shaw by phone about each of the party’s stances on the proposed health care reforms.

N.C. GOP Chairman Tom Fetzer was scheduled to do an interview but canceled at the last minute due to a pending knee surgery.

You can watch a N.C. GOP video here on criticisms of the proposed reforms. You can also read a response from the N.C. Democratic Party on the president’s health insurance reform speech here.

Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs Steven Greene also gave his Eye on the Triangle his own analysis of the health care debate, a topic he has been discussing in his classes this semester. You can listen to the full segment from the show here:

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We also replayed Soundbytes from Sept. 7’s EOT about students’ opinions on health care reform, which you can access here.

COMMUNITY CANVAS
EOT’s Kelly Reid talked to local musician and licensed insurance holder Alex Maiolo about his role in leading HINT, Health Insurance Navigational Tool, which is part of the Future of Music Coalition, where according to Maiolo, “policy and law and music all sort of intersect — that’s where we are. Things that happen on Capitol Hill that affect musicians, that’s what we’re interested in.” Maiolo said his focus is on the health care crisis in the musicians’ community. To hear more about HINT, listen to what Maiolo told EOT:

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HEAR THIS
This segment was not free of a health care reform spin either. EOT’s Jacob Downey interviewed Mike McDonald, organizer of the Tom Cushman benefit concert scheduled for Sept. 27, from 3 p.m. to about 2 a.m. at White Collar Crime . Cushman, a local musician and veteran of the first Gulf War, was hospitalized for pneumonia a few months ago,  two weeks later hospitalized again due to lung failure and was admitted once again to the hospital last week. Eleven bands will be playing at the benefit concert to raise money for Cushman, who doesn’t have health insurance, to pay his bills. Read the Indy’s article for more.

The song clips played in between segments of the show all came from songs from bands playing at the concert.

You can listen to Jacob’s interview here:

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WOLFPACKER OF THE WEEK

Wolfpacker of the Week, 2005 alumnus in English Language, Writing and Rhetoric Ben McNeely talked to us by phone about his new project, Modern Film Fest taking place Sept. 25 to 27. You can follow @modernfilmfest on Twitter for more information. Attached are some photos of the venue (courtesy Creative Commons, Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic) as well as the co-directors.

You can listen to Ben’s segment from the show here:

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Check back for updates about next week’s show. Send your ideas, comments, questions, suggestions and complaints to publicaffairs@wknc.org.

Local folk duo Boylion will be on WKNC tomorrow afternoon at 4:30 pm for an interview and performance of a few songs off their upcoming, debut full-length. They’re one of the Triangle’s most promising young bands, so be sure to tune in!

The duo will be playing alongside another, albeit better-known, folk duo by the name of Paleface this Sunday, September 27, at the Halle Cultural Arts Center in Apex. The show is all ages with doors at 6:30 p.m. and Boylion starting the show off at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available at the door or online here.

Getting geared up for Shakori Hills? Yeah, us too.

Holy Ghost Tent Revival, courtesy of the band's Myspace page

Well, today we’re either whetting your appetite or tantalizing you…it’s up to you to decide which one.  Holy Ghost Tent Revival, who is playing more than one show at the Shakori Hill Grassroots Festival this fall, will be stopping by the station today (Wednesday 9/23) at 11am for an interview with yours truly, DJ Mick.

We’ll be talking all things Shakori, and a little bit about their show at the Pour House tonight with fellow Greensboro-based band House of Fools.

Be sure to tune in at 88.1 FM or at wknc.org/listen!

WKNC, along with our friends at the Union Activities Board, the Inter-Residence Council, and Student Government, will be presenting three nights of concerts on State’s campus this fall!  “Fridays on the Lawn” will take place on Harris Field in front of Witherspoon Student Center,  and each night will feature two local acts.  All shows are FREE and open to the public, and will start at 6pm.  If you cannot make it out, don’t fret!  The shows will be aired LIVE during the Local Beat starting at 6pm!

There will be FREE pizza and a limited supply of FREE T-shirts, as well.

The first date of the series is Friday September 25th,  and will feature I Was Totally Destroying It and Luego.

Check ‘em out here.

Friday October 30th will feature Schooner and Max Indian.

Local hip-hop acts The Beast and Kooley High will round out the series on Friday, November 20th.

In the event of adverse weather conditions, the shows will be held in the Wolves’ Den in the basement of Talley Student Center, with convenient parking at the Reynolds Coliseum Deck.   Click on the map below for a larger version.  (Full disclosure: this image was created by an engineering student.)

NC State Campus

The Shack is back and the first days of Shack-a-Thon have been great so far! WKNC will continue to be out on the brickyard for the rest of the week raising money with other student organizations for Habitat for Humanity. Come out and support a great cause and visit the WKNC shack! There will be corn hole games, merch to buy and prizes to win!

With all this Shack-a-Thon fun, you might ask yourself, “How can this get any better?!”  Well get excited because on Thursday, September 24, the Triangle’s own  Pneurotics are coming out to N.C. State’s brickyard to play an acoustic set for the volunteers, students, and any one else who wants to come check out this awesome event! The show will be starting at 7 p.m. on Thursday and will be right in front of Harrelson Hall by the WKNC shack.

The Pneurotics

Come check out the great tunes of The Pneurotics and don’t forget to stop by the WKNC shack during the rest of the week to help us raise money for Habitat for Humanity.

Sunn O)))

For the past few weeks, I have been playing a set that is quite different from normal metal. Don’t be fooled, it is indeed metal, but it is a thinking man’s metal.

There are so many bands out there in the metal scene all playing the same music that it sometimes makes me lose hope in the metal scene.  Yet there are always those few bands who are bold enough and crazy enough to push not only the metal genre itself forward, but question what it truly means to make music.

I am, of course, talking about the subset of metal including Drone, Doom, Shoegaze, Avant-Garde, and Noise. While these genre names may seem crazy, boring, or downright depressing, they also help push us and question the music. These bands that play these styles are actually one of the few innovators in the metal scene. Where everyone else is trying to sound more brutal with breakdowns and blast beats, these guys achieve true brutality and even evilness with their music. With intricate harmonies layered over feedback, and deep moving lyrics superimposed upon a mournful guitar and lone drum, one can lose themselves in the music. All it takes is some patience and expanding of one’s mind.

And that is what I do during that segment. I force you to open your mind, and to truly question what you know about not just metal, but music in general. For I believe, that to truly be a metal-head, you need not only listen to metal and enjoy the music, but to really embrace it and appreciate all forms of it. For there is so much more out in the metal scene than breakdowns, blast beats, cookie monster growls, and dragons. There is actually true art to be found, and you only need to expand your mind to find it.

Notable Bands:

• Sunn O)))
• Boris
• Rosetta
• Jesu
• Ahab
• My Dying Bride
• Swallow The Sun
• Anathema
• Isis
• Pelican
• The Angelic Process
• Nadja