Interviews – Page 6 – Communiqué

King Gizzard on the Melbourne scene, their upcoming albums + the perfect vegemite sandwich

Screen Shot 2015-09-15 at 12.31.01 AM — *Cook + Eric enjoying cheesesteaks in Philly*

Screen Shot 2015-09-15 at 12.31.09 AM — *King Gizzard at Johnny Brenda’s 9/13/2015*

Photos from Pooneh Ghana (@poonehghana)

Before their show at Johnny Brenda’s, DJs Kirsten and Shannen caught up with Lucas Skinner (bass) and Eric Moore (drums/manager) of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to talk about everything from poisonous spiders and the Melbourne DIY scene to their new album, Paper Maché Dream Balloon (out November 13th).

First question, cup of blood or shot of shit?

Lucas: What?

If you had to drink one.

Eric: Is it my own or someone else’s?

Someone else’s.

E: I think definitely blood.

L: I think you’d get more sick if you eat shit.

E: If it was my own, I’d go with blood. I always just drink my own blood anyway, like when I get a cut.

Right, delicious. What are some of your favorite hair products?

E: I used to use Surf Paste in high school. That was a long time ago.

L: I use oils on my beard.

This is the second to last date of your US tour, which city has been your favorite?

L: We’ve done a few places we haven’t been before, New Orleans was one.

E: All the ones up the west coast were cool. Portland was my favorite place. The scenery is so beautiful and the drives are amazing up the coast.

Did you guys do any traveling before KGATLW?

L: We did a tour about three months ago in the states and Europe and most of us went home for a month but Stu and Ambrose and their girlfriends went traveling through Europe and Eric went to LA for a month.

E: Yeah I’ve been away for ages.

L: But before the band we did a US road trip up the east coast starting in Austin and going up to New York. That gave us a good idea of the landscape and how to get around.

What is your favorite thing to do on a date?

L: My girlfriend and I for our first date we went walking our dogs on the beach.

E: Luke is the sweetheart. Mine would just be something lame like going to a bar or a movie. But I haven’t been on a date in a very long time.

L: Eric’s the only one without a girlfriend in the band. Everyone else is kind of settled down. He’s the wild card.

So you work a lot with artist Jason Galea and your shows have such a strong visual component, is he going to be involved in music videos in the future?

E: Yeah Jason’s here on tour with us. He does the visuals and is working on heaps of stuff.

L: He’s the creative director, does all our visual stuff, artwork, t-shirts, videos. We’re actually making a video with another friend at the moment because Jason’s a bit busy, that’ll be the first one we’ve done without him. Continue reading “King Gizzard on the Melbourne scene, their upcoming albums + the perfect vegemite sandwich”

Making Time History with Dave P

Last week, we had the honor and pleasure of hosting the ever-RAD Dave P in our studios to help him celebrate FIFTEEN YEARS of legendary Making Time parties. Our station actually goes way back with Dave, as he made his FIRST EVER RADio appearance on WKDU to promote the VERY FIRST Making Time in 2000.

Continue reading “Making Time History with Dave P”

Pre-Record Store Day chat with Icebird (RJD2 & Aaron Livingston)

Everyday is Record Store Day for a lot of us, including RJD2 and Aaron Livingston, who recorded a brilliant album together in 2011 as Icebird. I had the privilege to sit down with them in our studio last week to chat and play some records ahead of the Record Store Day vinyl release of their album The Abandoned Lullaby.

“I feel weird saying I have a lot of records when I’m sitting next to RJ. I have a few records,” said Aaron.

RJ responded, “But I don’t have a lot of records, I don’t have records like Rich Medina. I have a modest record collection when I consider the heavy duty record collectors. I don’t have a storage unit -there’s a defining line and I’m a non-storage unit guy.”

Continue reading “Pre-Record Store Day chat with Icebird (RJD2 & Aaron Livingston)”

Natalia Zamilska: “All or Nothing”

by Maxwell Stetson

In this National Geographic article, neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor looks for answers about her personal, euphoric reaction to the Johannes Brhams’s song, “Hungarian Dance No. 5”. She wondered how and why this music moved her and the processes it took within her brain. These questions led her to Thalia Wheatley, a Dartmouth psychologist, who offered an explanation.

Thalia found “[that] every time you listen to music, you constantly activate [musical] templates that you’ve [created] that predict the reward you’ll feel from a given piece.”

In her opinion, “new music is presumably rewarding, not only because it fits implicitly learned patterns, but because it deviates from those patterns, however slightly.” I believe this constant template reformation and pattern shifting is an aspect to be loved, especially when it occurs organically. When this occurs, it can progress your tastes and emotions into a new and unknown fields, allowing you to think and feel differently.

I begin with this to highlight a similar joy I felt when listening to the pioneering artist we’re featuring today.

When I first heard the culturally shattering sounds of Natalia Zamilska, my musical template was completely rearranged in wonder. Her creation of raw and heavy techno, noise, electronica and modern world music was new, artistic and incredibly exciting to me.

“Duel 35” was the first track of Zamilska’s that made me a huge fan. It consists of the toughest booming techno sound, both danceable and sexy. The tribal chants and noisy pops later in the song add to its power. The sound, combined with an incredibly artistic and creative video, made me feel like Zamilska was creating art, not just music.

Natalia admitted she didn’t expect much to happen after releasing “Quarrel,” a 2014 single, yet the feedback was so affirmative that she felt like she had to finish an album as soon as possible. “Untune” was then created during live shows, as she used the audience members as her collaborators, testing various musical creations on them. Since then, her recognition has been accumulating worldwide. The Quietus, an art/culture online magazine out of London, rated “Untune” as one of the best tracks of 2014, while Vevo ranked “Duel 35” as #15 out of the top 100 songs from their “Other Side of Music” for 2014. She’s since accumulated 7,200 Facebook likes and 1,700 Soundcloud followers and was featured on Dior’s Toyko Fashion Show, 2015.

It’s an honor and a pleasure to share this amazing interview with you! Here’s Booty Shakers’ exclusive interview with the incredible talent that is Natalia Zamilska! Continue reading “Natalia Zamilska: “All or Nothing””

Dan Savage talks sex-positivity, his love of musical theater, and round two of his HUMP! tour (coming to Philly 2/21)

By Victoria Powell

I had the chance to speak with Dan Savage: activist, love & sex columnist extraordinaire, and host of America’s “best and dirtiest” amateur porn film festival, Hump! Dan will be bringing the film festival to Philly on Saturday, February 21st, with the first showing starting at 6:00 pm, followed by showings at 8:15 pm and 10:30 pm. It is an 18+ event and tickets are still available. We’ll also be giving away tickets on air during Raha World and The Stardust Revue.

Victoria: What was your college major?
Savage: I went to University of Illinois in Champagne Urbana and I majored in Theater.

Victoria: How did you realize you wanted to be a love advice columnist? And how did you come up with the idea for Hump!?
Savage: Well, I sort of accidentally became a sex advice columnist. I met someone who was starting a newspaper and he was telling me about it, and I said oh you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. You see that Q & A format – you can’t not read it. And he said “that’s good advice… why don’t you write the advice column?”

Even when I started writing the advice column I wasn’t really an advice columnist yet, at first the whole thing was just a joke. I was a gay guy writing an advice column for straight people about straight sex – the idea was I would jokingly treat straight sex and straight relationships with the same contempt and revulsion that straight advice columnists had always treated gay sex and gay relationships. And so for the first six months to a year I was just horsing around and I started getting so many letters and it kind of, without my ever really asking, turned into a real advice column against my will! That’s how I got to be a relationship columnist, by accident.

Hump! was an idea of a friend of mine who started The Stranger where my column originated; a friend of mine and I – we just started joking that we should put an ad in the paper that we’re doing a call for submissions for an amateur porn festival, to see what we’d get in the mail, or whether we’d get anything. It took a long time to convince the publisher to let us do this because he didn’t think it would work. And we got tons of really great and funny and weird submissions and really humane submissions, like really good, humanizing porn. And then we had to go through with it and have the festival so we announced we were having a porn film festival. The question then became: would people come and sit in a dark movie theater next to strangers and watch porn the way their grandparents did? The answer was yes! Tons of people came to the theaters. Hump! has never been people masturbating in their seats sort of a porn screening. More of a celebratory, diversity sex, “we’re all in this together” festival. People came and loved it and a lot of people who were out there this year made films for the next year and Hump! just kept growing and getting bigger. We took it to Portland and started doing it simultaneously in Portland and Seattle and people in other cities kept saying they wanted it to come to them. And so for the first time last year we took Hump! out on the road and this year will be the second time.

Continue reading “Dan Savage talks sex-positivity, his love of musical theater, and round two of his HUMP! tour (coming to Philly 2/21)”

Starkey & Dev79 on their “anti-genre” STREET BASS

Two of Philadelphia’s electronic music veterans, Starkey and Dev79, came to the WKDU studio and spun a killer guest mix last Thursday. We recorded the mix and the guys posted it up for you to listen back. In between turns mixing, I got a chance to chat with the DJ/producers/label bosses about their history in Philadelphia’s electronic music scene.

Continue reading “Starkey & Dev79 on their “anti-genre” STREET BASS”

Funkin’ It Up For A Good Cause

by Wil Schade // @wilschade

World Café Live will be the place to be tomorrow night when some of the east coast’s funkiest acts come together to put on a Thanksgiving Eve performance for charity. The show will be in support of Will Funk For Food, an organization that works in conjunction with Philabundance to benefit those less fortunate facing hunger especially during this holiday season. Food donations will be accepted at the show, so bring a canned item! The lineup features some great music so here’s some info on the incredible talent that will be present:

Brother Joscephus and The Love Revolution

Based in New York City, Brother Joscephus was formed in 2007 on a cruise ship by David Mendelsohn (aka Brother Joscephus) along with keyboardist and music director, the Right Reverend Dean Dawg. The band started out playing in NYC and eventually bought a van and made the pilgrimage to New Orleans, where they get much of their influence. They describe themselves as a combination of funk, jazz, and secular gospel.

“Brother Joscephus is a little bit of a music collective,” says Brother Joscephus, “We perform with a lot of different vocal artists from all over the country whenever we travel. We are a ten-piece band, almost like an orchestra. We like to get very over the top with our arrangements.” When asked about their creative process, he replied, “The music is very intricate and highly arranged. It becomes quite a process, but I think the end result is worth it.”

Over the years, their music has evolved to include more epic, nuanced, and grand-scale compositions. They released their third album “Revolution of Love” last year which highlighted their secular gospel side, which contains messages of acceptance and a broader, more inclusive message of gospel music.

“It’s going to be a really special night of music, all three bands are going to work great together, and it’s for a great cause.”

Swift Technique

Swift Technique is a group of Philly funksters that we’ve recently had here in the WKDU studios for a live session which can be heard here. Formed in 2007, they started out as a live hip-hop group. As they progressed (and the emcee left the band), they began to evolve into a funk powerhouse in the tradition of James Brown. Bassist, Jake Leschinsky, plays in Swift Technique and Brother Joscephus.

“Swift Tech is more of a straight-up funk band, and BroJo is a group that draws more from New Orleans jazz and funk influences, but the two groups together really complement each other well. I wouldn’t call them the same genre, but it’s the same spirit and creative energy that should make for a really compelling evening for people who want to dance and let loose,” says Leschinsky. They are a band that focuses on delivering high-energy live performances to get audiences on their feet.

“Songwriting has always been a pretty organic process. We never really try to force anything.” Leschinksy elaborates, “We really make a point of collaborating in the rehearsal setting on the material. Being a predominantly instrumental group it gives us a bit of a creative license to have some unusual arrangements that are really unique to Swift Technique.”

The group is about to release EP of a mix of various recordings over the past year recorded in Philly, New Hampshire, and live recordings from the Ardmore Music Hall.

Tickets for the show can be purchased here.

NOTE: Non-perishable food items will be collected on behalf of Will Funk For Food and Philabundance the night of the show!