Last week, the Sajhammer and I were joined by some local guests to promote the Do Itcha Damn Self show at the Pinhook last Friday night. The premise for the event entailed taking some of your favorite local musicians and allowing them to perform on stage by themselves. Vocals, instruments, and abundant creativity were needed in order to play in sync and pull everything together.

Phil Cook and Catherine Edgerton. Photo by Elyse Hopple.

Phil Cook of Megafaun and Catherine Edgerton of Midtown Dickens were two major proponents in starting the inaugural event. We asked them various questions, such as the types of instruments they planned to use as well as the ideas that jump started Do Itcha Damn Self. Check out the full interview below:

Part I:

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Part II:

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Take a few of your favorite local artists and stick them on stage by themselves to perform songs both familiar and original. Essentially, that’s what Do Itcha Damn Self aims to accomplish. The event at the Pinhook marks Durham’s inaugural one-man-band jubilee and art fair, which will feature select band members from Triangle favorites like Megafaun and Midtown Dickens. In order to promote the event a bit further, Phil Cook of Megafaun and Catherine Edgerton of Midtown Dickens will come chat with DJ Special K and DJ Sajhammer at 11 a.m. this Friday morning (July 16).

If you have questions you’d like to ask our guests, be sure to tweet at us at: wknc881. Listen only on 88.1FM or streaming online.

The Hopscotch Music Festival has now become synonymous with headliners: Broken Social Scene, Public Enemy, and Panda Bear. However, the Triangle’s largest music festival features plenty of local acts. That’s why every Friday for the next few weeks, Special K will be getting back to North Carolina’s musical roots by keeping spins local and giving away Hopscotch festival wristbands to lucky callers during the Local Lunch (12pm-1pm).

Listen only on 88.1FM or streaming online during Local Lunch for your favorite local Hopscotch bands like The Rosebuds, Bowerbirds, The Love Language and many more! For the full line-up of Hopscotch bands, visit their website here.

A few hours before Kooley High performs at the Pour House for their farewell Raleigh show, Foolery and Charlie Smarts wanted to come in and chat about their hip-hop legacy in North Carolina as well as their expectations for their futures in New York. The band plans to continue to make new music up north, but not before they have a great send-off tonight which will include classic Kooley High tracks mixed in with some new surprises.

Kooley High's Charlie Smarts and Foolery with Special K and the Sajhammer

Listen to part of the interview here:

Part 1: Introductions

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Part 2: A Changing Environment

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Join Special K and the Sajhammer this Friday at 11 a.m. as they will be talking to local hip-hop band, Kooley High. The band plans to discuss their upcoming performance with Carlitta Durand at the Pour House, May 28.

Kooley High

During the show, Kooley High will also be giving away tickets to their show. Be sure to tweet questions you’d like the WKNC deejays to ask the band. Listen only on 88.1FM or streaming online.

With only a few days left before the Krispy Kreme Challenge, many of the deejays are beginning to mentally prepare for the arduous task. The benefit for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital has two physical challenges that competitors must overcome. The first is the two mile run from the NC State Bell Tower to the Krispy Kreme Store on Peace St. and then the two mile run back to the Bell Tower.

The second is the overwhelming 12doughnuts each runner must eat before returning back to the starting line, all within the hour. Over the past weeks, many deejays have been spending time outside the studio and on the track, building their frail skinny deejay bodies into lean athletic beasts. Others have taken more unconventional approaches such as avoiding physical exercise altogether and have just been binge eating. (For many this hasn’t been much of a lifestyle change.) With fighting style will win out? One can only wait to see the results this upcoming Saturday.

Now to meet the brave deejays willing to take on the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Each has selected a top playlist of songs they will wield to push them to the brink during the race.

Agent “Glazed and Confused” Orange

• Death From Above 1979 - “My Love Is Shared”
• Mindless Self Indulgence – “Tom Sawyer”
• Muse - “Knights of Cydonia”

May “Hot and Ready” Day

• Jay Z- “Run this Town”
• Muse- “Time is Running Out”
• Florence & the Machine- “Dog Days are Over”

DJ Audity

• Metric – “Satellite Mind”
• Metric- “Help, I’m Alive”
• Cut Copy- “Hearts on Fire”

DJ Jenna

DJ Hot Tamale

• Drake- “Best I Ever Had”
• Coldplay- “Life in Technicolor ii”
• The Who- “Baba O’Riley”
• The Killers- “Mr. Brightside”

DJ “Original Glazed” MICK

• Dan Deacon - “Build Voice
• Akron/Family- “MBF”
• My Morning Jacket- “Anytime”

DJ Two “Baker’s Dozen” Sheds

ASH “Gotta Eat’em All” G.

• The Juliana Theory- ”We’re at the top of the World”
• Kid Cudi- ”Day ‘N’ Night”
• Linkin Park- ”New Divide”

DJ “Doughtnut Hole” Nicole

• Amanda Blank- “Make It, Take It”
• Duck Sauce- “Anyway (Armand Van Helden and A-Trak Remix)”
• Thieves Like Us- “Fass”

Mz “Hot-N-Now” Kelly

• Thin Lizzy – “Cowboy”
• Built to Spill- “Goin Against My Mind”
• Anything from LCD Soundsystem
• Anything from The Light Pines

DJ “Donuts and Coffee” Cioffi

DJ Riff “Ka-Tose Intolerant” Raff

• DeadMau5- “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff “
• Kanye West- “Stronger”
• Vampire Weekend- “Run”

DJ Special “Tasty Fingers” K

• Animal Collective - “What Would I Want? Sky
• Gray Young- “Tilling the Wind”
• Flo Ride- “Sugar”

Eye on the Triangle’s own Saja “It’s Fresh” Hindi will be doing live air breaks on site during the race periodically through La Barba Rossa’s Mystery Roach show. The race is this Saturday (February 6) on Double Barrel Benefit 7 weekend. This year the challenge will boast 6,000 eager competitors. Be sure to check for the WKNC banner at the finish line this year as WKNC is partnering with the Krispy Kreme Challenge as a Silver Level Sponsor.

Be sure to listen only on 88.1FM or streaming online.

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.

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