WKNC 88.1 FM - North Carolina State University Student RadioThe top 10 hip hop albums played in our Underground format this past week:
1. J Cole – Lights Please
2. XV – Life Vs. Living
3. KRS – One and Buckshot – Survival Skills
4. Perfekt and Chance – She’s Dat Gurl
5. Saigon – “Believe It” [Single]
6. Slaughterhouse – The One
7 . Charlie Smarts – Bonanza
8. Dirty Money –Angels [Single]
9. So Supreme – Sha Stimuli
10. Pittsburgh Slim – “Girls Kiss Girls” [Single]
Here are the top 30 albums from the past week, compiled by Daytime Music Director Jenna St. Pierre:
1. Polvo – In Prism
2. Depreciation Guild – In Her Gentle Jaws
3. Port O’Brien – Threadbare
4. Fanfarlo – Reservoir
5. Royal Bands – Let It Beep
6. Still Life Still – Girls Come Too
7. Le Loup – Family
8. Fool’s Gold – Fool’s Gold
9. Ettes – Do You Want Power
10. Vivian Girls – Everything Goes Wrong
11. Fresh and Onlys – Grey-Eyed Girls
12. Darlings – Yeah, I Know
13. Antlers – Hospice
14. Various Artists – Hear Here: The Triangle
15. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs
16. Islands – Vapours
17. Cave Singers – Welcome Joy
18. The Clean – Mister Pop
19. YACHT – See Mystery Lights
20. Mumlers – Don’t Throw Me Away
21. Florence and the Machine – Lungs
22. Big Pink – A Brief History Of Love
23. Why? – Eskimo Snow
24. Dead Weather – Horehound
25. Health – Get Color
26. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar
27. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes – Up From Below
28. Quixote – Quixote
29. Slarafenland – We’re On Your Side
30. Motel Motel – New Denver
Albums recently added to our library:
1. XX – The Xx
2. No Age – Losing Feeling [EP]
3. Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Higher Than The Stars [EP]
4. Clientele – Bonfires On The Heath
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
Friday, Oct. 2:
SMNMNMN with Josh Drye Consortium and The Toddlers @ Nightlight
American Aquarium with Shawn Fisher and the Juke Box & Gabriel Kelly @ The Pour House
Saturday, Oct 3:
Hear Here Finale Show feat. The Love Language, Inflowential, and Motor Skills @ The Pour House
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!
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.
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 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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