WPRB Membership Drive Starts This Thursday, 10/13

WPRB Pyramids
Dear Gentle Listeners,

This year’s membership drive starts on Thursday, October 13th, 7pm and ends on Thursday, October 20th, 10pm.

Around this time last year, we were preparing to celebrate 75 years of WPRB, one of New Jersey’s most precious cultural phenomena, with our most ambitious membership drive to date. The response to our celebration was incredible and heartwarming. We are so grateful to have struck a chord in our community and to be the recipient of such generosity from donors. In every sense of the phrase, we could not have done it without you.

The drive’s success has allowed us to work more effectively to create the kind of broadcasting that our community needs and deserves. We have updated necessary equipment, including our emergency alert system, our CD playing equipment, and our computer in the on-air studio. We’re moving towards broadcasting our unique content on a professional platform.

We’re capturing this momentum and propelling forward, taking WPRB’s sense of history into the modern age. This year, we hope to fulfill a long-term goal of remote broadcasting capabilities. Purchasing the equipment necessary to broadcast outside of our main studio would open up a new world of sounds to put on your dial, including live concerts and interviews.

So once again, we need your help to celebrate another year of WPRB.

Our annual fall membership drive will take place from Thursday, October 13th, 7pm – Thursday, October 20th, 2016, 10 pm. We hope that you’ll tune in during that time for our favorite on-air party of the year. We’ll bring the entertainment, while you give us a ring on the phone or visit our donation page. As always, we’ll say thank you with great swag and awesome giveaways. Stay tuned to our social media for behind-the-scenes action!

Love and radio,

Zena Kesselman ‘17
WPRB 103.3FM

Station Manager

Wed 9/21, 8PM: Thalia Zedek live on Jon Solomon’s show

One of music’s great, distinctive voices shall be heard on WPRB this Wednesday night at 8:00 pm ET when the remarkable Thalia Zedek joins Jon Solomon on his program for a live session.

Last month Thrill Jockey released “Eve,” Zedek’s sixth solo album after a career fronting iconic independent acts like Dangerous Birds, Uzi, Live Skull and Come the past three decades. It is a gorgeous, gritty and deeply personal record which Bandcamp called “thrilling” and The Quietus described as “[a]n almost unbearably poignant, diamond-hard bolt of blue beauty, red-white pupils, brown-black irises.”

Prior to Wednesday’s broadcast, listen to “Eve” in full below.

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Joe from Don Giovanni talks New Alternative Music Festival on WPRB!

This weekend Don Giovanni Records presents the New Alternative Music Festival at Convention Hall in Asbury Park.

On Friday, September 16 and Saturday the 17th, 40+ truly independent bands from all over North America – groups such as Screaming Females, Ought, Radiator Hospital, California X, Fake Limbs, Downtown Boys and Rye Coalition – will unite for a one-time only all-ages event that is not beholden to any major labels or corporate interests.

Don Giovanni founder, proud New Jerseyan and former WPRB DJ Joe Steinhart will be calling in to Jon Solomon’s show on Wednesday, September 14th at 8:00 pm ET to talk about this incredible undertaking and to play music from a cross-section of acts that will be performing. They’ll be giving away a pair of tickets to each day’s show too!

For the full New Alternative Music Festival line-up and to purchase tickets, head here.

Summer Emo’s Queered Cartographies

by Max Grear

https://thehotelier.bandcamp.com/album/goodness

 

The Hotelier’s Goodness and Pinegrove’s Cardinal hit Bandcamp a couple weeks apart at the beginning of the summer, and both of these loosely emo releases have become soundtracks to the warm and woozy months since. Both bands have mastered the formula of melodic guitars and wordy, sentimental lyrics (complete with emotionally direct confessions and geographic signifiers) that has propelled the emo genre for decades, but the Hotelier’s and Pinegrove’s latest share a few more unique characteristics.
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Deep Minimalism @ Saint John Smith's Square, London

DEEP∞MINIMALISM Friday 24 June 2016 – Sunday 26 June 2016

I managed to surprise myself as a person who is unhealthy obsessed with the preservation of experience: While I was amidst the music of this festival, it felt so wrong to take my camera out that I ended up taking zero photos.

I only had enough money to expend for two days of the festival: Friday and Sunday. On Friday, I had the pleasure of witnessing the world premiere of Daphne Oram’s once lost 1949 composition ‘Still Point’. The pieces laid claim to significance lies in its use of recorded sound as an instrument in its own right. The orchestra is in dynamic play with the turntablist, who records the orchestra and plays back the recorded product with the added color of some limited remixing and the inevitable fuzz of vinyl.

Oram writing a score. See: Oramics

Daphne Oram was an active musician at around the same time as electronic experimentalists like John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Music experienced a revolution when the recording had realized its plasticity. Early manifestations of electronic music had much to do with the manipulation of records and tape; pitch and timbre reigned free from the conventional musical instrument and was now under direction control of the artist, who could alter speeds, cut tape, and shift playback directions to achieve a desired sound.  However understudied the legacy of British post-war electronic music is in contrast to its German and French contemporaries, Daphne Oram stood in the thick of it all. Daphne Orram and her peer, Desmond Briscoe, founded the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, the equivalent of France’s Radio Television Francaise and Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk. British electronic music’s academic impoverishment had much to do with the operations of the nation’s only electronic studio, which functioned more as service wing to the BBC than a department to be seriously respected. The workshop did important work for radical radio plays in its early years, but the majority of its output consisted of jingles and sound for television programs. The first serious book on the BBC radiophonic work shop and Britain’s post war electronic music was released just in 2010 under the title ‘Special Sound’. And so I felt air of rightful justice as I heard Daphne Oram’s Still Point debut perhaps sixty years too late in the respectful and reverent confines of Saint John Smith’s square.

The referendum results / Brexit fall out happened that week. After I left the concert, I came across a group of protesters in front of Parliament

Sunday was a truly glorious day. And I wonder what my life would be like if I bled the extra thirty dollars I needed to attend the Saturday performances. I wish I wrote down this article earlier, because my memories of Sunday are a bit fuzzy. Everything on the program was great, but Pauline Oliveros has stood the test of time – I remember everything relating to her. Pauline sat 5 seats away from me during the entire festival. I glanced at her head of white hair very frequently. Her rock piece was delightful. Musicians, about a group of twenty, were each tasked to beat two rocks against each other with the conscious decision of perpetuating an arhythm and a lack of syncopation. It was mesmerizing to hear certain resonances spring up, but fade away just as quickly as they occurred.

Another piece I liked very much required the participation of the audience – I recorded the entire thing. We were all tasked to make sounds with our mouths, and while doing so, to try to either replicate the pitch of the person nearest us or to produce a totally unique pitch within one’s audible proximity. I never felt so happy. I’m not musically gifted and I’ve never been part of a symphony or orchestra, but it overwhelmed me to be a part of a biosystem of music, and I want to emphasize the word biosystem, because what Pauline had us do couldn’t be approximated by rehearsed performance. I was a part of a living and breathing network of sound. And for some miraculous reason, our collective consciousness stopped us all from continuing the exercise at about the same time. The piece ended like the resonance of a body of water perturbed by a small rock; like a chain, a group of people went quiet as the next group became quiet and the group after that until Saint John Smith’s Square became a vacuum of silence. I can’t put into words the beauty of this exercise, so I encourage all, if they ever have a chance, to experience this for themselves.

Pauline also gave a speech, but I can’t remember for the life of me what she said. I managed to approach her after the festival, and she was more than willing to give me a station ID. Laurie Spiegel’s presentation of selected works was also fantastic, as was Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM 1 and Meredith Monk’s Dawn from Book of Days. The festival led me to affirm the premonition I’ve always held: radical, challenging music need not be cerebral; electronic music of this vein has the ability to provide impact by pure, meditative feeling. Throughout the day I was impressed by my level of concentration. I thought at some point I would hit a wall, that I would be incapable of sustaining my attention to the concert for the entire eight hours, but that was not at all the case. As time progressed, I found myself further entrenched in a meditative state. The more I listened, the more my patience, my joy, and my love for music strengthened.

8-27-2016 ater midnight – Bernhard Wöstheinrich – Live on Music With Space

Friday, 8/26/2016, after midnight (technically this is Saturday morning) Bernhard Wöstheinrich (aka the Redundant Rocker) will be performing on the WPRB program Music With Space.

“The alter ego The Redundant Rocker was created around 2002, and it finally established itself with the release of “Collider“. Since then, the moniker somehow co-existed with and influenced Bernhard’s other diverse projects; the realm of The Redundant Rocker and all the rest (which actually don’t have dedicated names) just mutually enhanced each other, there is no cusp between his projects, and you may find Redundant Rocker music under the names “Bernhard” and “Bernhard Wöstheinrich” as well, and the other way around.

The name The Redundant Rocker ironically alludes to a certain kind of replace-ability in modern art and music: with today’s technology, anyone could easily be replaced with a drum (or coffee) machine.

The person behind The Redundant Rocker, Bernhard Wöstheinrich, is a composer, painter, graphic designer, performer, small town bohemian, failed control freak, and, finally, even a record label owner in Germany. His projects and albums have been released on a variety of labels and span different fields of electronic and ambient music.

Bernhard started in about 1987 to intensely experiment with his own sounds and tunes after he found out that drawing and painting simply weren’t enough to adequately express himself. He went about to find something that might had a more “performing” approach. Inspired by the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten and other informal and experimental music, he finally began to work in a very personal way to compose and record some early tapes. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Have a Good Season Live at WPRB

Have a Good Season is a mathy emo rock band from Eatontown, New Jersey. They’ve been playing together for four years, and have two brilliant EPs to show for it, as well as a new project on the way. The boys from HAGS were kind enough to stop by WPRB for a live session and an interview, in which they discussed songwriting, Asbury Lanes, secret shows, hypothermia, and everything in between. 

 

WPRB: I’m here with Have a Good Season from Eatontown. How are you guys doing?

 

Nic Palermo: I’m good.

 

Dan Sakumoto: I’m good as well.

 

Dan Stattner: Excellent.

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Seth Chrisman & Nathan McLaughlin Live on WPRB

This Friday, just after midnight (technically Saturday morning), tune into the WPRB program Music With Space for a live on air concert y Seth Chrisman and Nathan McLaughlin

Seth Chrisman is a musician based in the Hudson Valley, New York. Extended techniques, location recordings, and radio receptions are woven together to create undulating sonic environments. He has performed live at festivals such as Goldrush and Substrata and his recordings have found a home on labels including Full Spectrum Records and Constellation Tatsu.

Hudson, NY resident Nathan McLaughlin explores sound with a focus on acoustic instruments and reel to reel. He views the reel to reel as not just a source of effect and texture, but as its own instrument. Acoustic instruments serve as a companion to the reel to reel, with studies being carried out on the philosophical idea of going to the center. Nathan’s music has been released on a variety of labels such as Senufo Editions, Eilean Records and Scissor Tail Editions.

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WPRB Presents: Sumac @ the Boot and Saddle 8/19

We are proud to present the American/Canadian post-metal group Sumac, live at the Boot and Saddle. We’ll be giving away pairs of tickets on air in the coming days, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. Sumac’s latest album ‘What one Becomes’ has been charting at WPRB for the last couple of weeks–give it a listen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8GadjOYlOw

If you miss the giveaways, don’t despair, tickets are still available here!

Friday, August 19, 2016
Doors: 7:30 pm / Show: 8:00 pm
21 and over

Hodera Interview at WPRB Studio

Hodera is an indie rock band from Little Falls, New Jersey. Currently touring their album “United By Birdcalls”, released in 2015, Hodera emerged from the churning indie music scene in Montclair. The band is led by Matthew Smith, the lead singer and one of the guitarists, and WPRB was lucky enough to have Matthew into the studio for an interview and a few songs. In the interview, Matthew discusses couches, songwriting, Kansas, The Front Bottoms, and some other stuff too.

 

WPRB: I’m here with Matthew from Hodera. How’s it going, Matthew?

 

Matthew: I’m doing alright, I just got off work. I’m tired. But I’m sitting on a comfy couch so it’s kinda nice.

 

WPRB: This is actually not one of our comfy-est couches.

 

Matthew: Yeah, it’s not. I think it’s a futon. I don’t know what defines a couch from a futon.

 

WPRB: I think it’s the foldage going up here [gesturing to back of futon].

 

Matthew: I think it’s still a futon. It’s lying about being a couch pretty much.

 

WPRB: Yeah, we have some better couches that we could’ve brought in.

 

Matthew: No, no! It’s fine! I’m just saying, let’s call it what it is.

 

WPRB: I appreciate you honesty, that’s very important to us here at WPRB. So Hodera just finished a music video? Is that right?

 

Matthew: Yeah, for lack of a better word. We did one before for a song called “Reset to Default” so we kind of just did the same thing, we just threw a party and told a bunch of people to come. Our friend Brian filmed it, hopefully he’s going to send us something soon. I was just thinking about that today, like “Brian hasn’t sent me anything, I wonder how that’s going.”

 

WPRB: Come on, Brian.

 

Matthew: Oh no, he’s a really renowned cinematographer. Last summer he toured with Mumford and Sons when they were in the U.S., and he just does us a favor, I can’t really complain about anything.

 

WPRB: I always wonder about those music videos where it’s just a party and everyone’s having an awesome time. Did you just play that song 50 times in a row? Was that what the party was?

 

Matthew: No, we got to the house like an hour or two early, and he didn’t bring his whole crew because he’s just doing it for free, so we’ll play the song four times, one for each member of the band. Like we’ll play the song once and he’ll film just the guitar player, and the next time just the bassist, so we have all those up-close shots so when the video comes out it looks like there were ten cameras. Then when we play the song live, we know what the tempo was and my drummer will just put the tempo in his ear, click it off, and then we’ll just play the song and we’ll have a camera in the back rolling the whole time and then he and his friend filming, and then we have those plus the earlier up-close stuff and we’ll just mix it together, plus some B-roll stuff. I went to a Phish concert the week before, not really my scene but I’m just dabbling, and everyone was throwing glow sticks everywhere, it was just a glow stick party, and that just inspired me. So I got like 500 glow sticks and brought them to the show, so we just have a lot of B-roll of people messing around and breaking glow sticks.

 

WPRB: That sounds like a party.

 

Matthew: Yeah, so I don’t know what the music video is going to be. We didn’t do any—I guess we should have—any other scenes of us playing in different areas or the storyline. We didn’t do that.

 

WPRB: On the rooftop with the fan and the hair blowing and all that stuff, that’s not in it?

 

Matthew: Well actually, I brought seven fans to this show, not for hair blowing or music video stuff, but just because it was our album anniversary show too, and our album release show last year was also in a basement, and it got so hot that one person fainted, and we ended up only playing five songs because it was that ridiculously hot. The cymbals were condensating, the cameras that we had were fogging up, we just had to stop playing. But the fans didn’t do anything, for the record. They just moved around hot air.

 

WPRB: Well it’s the effort that counts. I’ve been in basements where the condensation has actually made it rain on the people.


Matthew: You know what it’s like. We mustered through it and played like eight or nine songs. But most of our shows in New Jersey are really crazy, people throwing each other around, but the July / August shows are just so hot that people can’t, they’re just done.

 

If there’s one thing I know in my life will stay constant, it’s creating.

 

WPRB: That sounds about right. You kind of touched on it, but in New Jersey in general, you’ve definitely noticed there’s a different vibe around the music scene in New Jersey as opposed to anywhere else you’ve been on tour. Can you talk about if there is a difference that you’ve noticed that’s tangible or if it’s just location.

 

Matthew: Every scene around the country—and we’re talking local scenes that are just completely run by whoever wants to be a part it— is always different. You go down south, like Georgia, Florida, they don’t even have basements, it’s just living rooms so they do what they can. And in terms of friend groups, everyone’s different, everyone forms their own sub cultures. You’re a show-goer in New Jersey, you see all the same people there. They form a community, they form their own kind of ethics and ideas, based off of the whole global scene. But everyone has their own thing. Just take New Jersey, in the North Jersey scene everyone stands pretty still. They’ll have like one beer, it’s just very quiet, listening to the music. In New Brunswick, people want to get drunk, they want to move around, it’s a lot dirtier. And even just within a scene, like I’ve seen New Brunswick change in the past few years, slightly genre wise, the newer younger kids are coming in, bringing their own kind of energy, and you can take that anywhere around the country. I’ve seen music scenes all over the world, and everyone has their own way of doing it. Some are a little better, some they just want to party, and some of them they’re really just there for the music, they’re going to buy merch. Everywhere’s different. I do very much like the New Brunswick scene, and the Montclair scene.

 

WPRB: You’re more into the dirty, getting into it kind of thing?

 

Matthew: I like both, Montclair is also really tight. Every scene ebbs and flows, and right now Montclair’s really only got the Meat Locker. And I support the place but it’s not really my scene. A couple of the house venues closed there, there’s an art space that they’re trying to work with. And then a lot of the bands that were there a few years ago either got big, like Pinegrove got big, or just fizzled out. That’s how it works with every scene.

 

WPRB: Is there one specific scene that you’ve seen going around on tour that has been particularly stuck in your mind as odd or weirdly good and you weren’t expecting it somewhere in the country?

 

Matthew: You know where it gets weird is the places in the middle of nowhere. They have these small scenes where these people are super secluded. They have access to the internet, but then at the same time they’re in the middle of nowhere. I think we played this spot in Kansas, a few bands that we knew had played there, and we had an off day, it was like a Sunday, so we were like “Yeah, let’s hit them up and pick up a show.” So we’re on our way there and we’re pulling up this long driveway and this dude runs out. He seemed weird on the internet, and it’s him and this girl running up the driveway, and he jokingly hip-checks her into a bush. And he’s laughing and I’m like, “What did he just do?” And she’s just limping and laughing, and we get in there and he says, “You’re playing in our garage,” and I’m like, “Cool,” and I thought no one was going to show up, we’re in the middle of nowhere, this is crazy. And then like 50 kids showed up because, I guess, there’s just nothing else to do. I don’t even remember the name of the town. It wasn’t even near a major city. And then it ended up being really cool, we just totally didn’t expect it. They were a little off, but who isn’t? They probably thought we were a little off.

 

WPRB: You guys put on a kind of unique show, you have those lights. That’s really cool, I’ve seen that played around with in a few different ways before, but the foot pedal with the lights was really cool. Where did you get that from?

 

Matthew: I had seen this band OWEL, you guys should check them out, they’re a New Jersey band. Kind of a different genre, a lot more polished pop rock, but it’s a great band, they’re amazing. They have a huge light show and they all do different parts, like they have the Edison light bulbs up front that they fade in and out, I think one of them does it with their foot. The drummer has like stacks of three lights on each side of his drums that go on and off, they have flood lights on the guitar amps. I saw them up in New York, we played a show with them and I had no clue who they were, and they just blew me away. I was like, “I want to do that, but I can’t do that much,” so I just went to Home Depot and bought three lights and a Christmas Tree footswitch, like the kind that you can only buy at Home Depot in the winter. So I brought them to band practice and the guys were like “No. No. We’re not that cheesy band.” but I said, “Just try it.” And we’ve been doing it ever since.

 

WPRB: Nice. Has that been new or…?

 

Matthew: No, that’s been around for like a year and a half, two years now. Pretty consistent.

 

WPRB: You were telling me before that you were working on some new stuff, and this is a question that I have for all songwriters. As long as it’s not too intrusive-

 

Matthew: No, be intrusive!

 

WPRB: Nice. Could you take me through your process for how a song comes from where it is at literally nothing to being an actual song? What’s the full process? Because I feel like everyone’s different.


Matthew: Yeah you’re right, everyone’s different. My father is a songwriter, and I started writing songs just how he did, and now we’re on completely different spectrums to the point where it’s really hard for us to share songs with each other without the other one trying to nitpick it and try to make it how we want it. I just wrote a few songs this past week, and for me, it comes out really quickly, and then it’s polished over time. I mean, I mainly write on the guitar, which I’m trying not to anymore, but it usually starts with a nice chord progression and a melody off of it, or if I have a melody in my head, I’ll use the voice notes on my phone a lot and I’ll just sing it into my phone. If I’m at work, I’ll go outside and do it. Especially if a band I love does something I really think is cool, I’ll eventually rotate that and try to make something similar to it. However the inspiration starts, once I get into that zone, where I’m like, “Okay, I’m creating, here we go,” the structure of the whole song and even sometimes the majority of the lyrics, if not all of it, just comes out at once. And then it’s stepping out of that zone and coming back to reality and then looking at it from a different perspective and being like, “Alright, how do I now shape this and make it a final product?”

 

WPRB: Do you step away from it for a few days and then come back to it?

 

Matthew: I don’t know, like last night, I was really inspired by my friend’s band’s performance, they’re from Boston and I saw them in Manhattan the other night, and I was just really inspired by the sort of sound they had, and I went home and started writing a song, and I just completely finished it. And now I’m listening to it today, and I’m just realizing that I need to support the melody of the chorus a little better, but all the lyrics are written, the song structure is written, so now over the next however long it takes I’ll probably mess around with it and move some parts around, but for the most part, I’ve got the bread and butter.

 

WPRB: And then from there, you’ll just show it to your band and they’ll kind of find their own niche in the song?

 

Matthew: I guess, that’s what kinda sucks, I mean we just finished a new record, and that’s not even going to come out for a really long time, and even that, I had like 30 songs and we cut it down to like a third of that, so it’s really hard. I’m trying not to write right now, but I can’t help it. So I’ll show them a few voice notes of what I’m working on, but it’s pointless right now to bring anything to the table and say, “Hey, let’s start rounding this out,” because we have a bunch of tours coming up off of the album that’s already released, and we can’t even play the new songs that have been written for like eight months.

 

WPRB: Yeah, I mean that new song—I guess it wasn’t just put out—but that song “North Dakota”, were you sitting on that for a while?

 

Matthew: That’s been written since April of 2015.

 

WPRB: Okay, so that’s been around for a while.

 

Matthew: A long time.

 

WPRB: And even that was something that you were itching to get out there?

 

Matthew: Yeah, I mean it was even a risky move putting out an acoustic video of a new song, but then we did another new song on our Audiotree session, but yeah, we’ve just been sitting on them for so long. We’re really trying to take our time with this record and find the best way to put it out, and trying to seek out as many opportunities as we can instead of just rushing to put it out by ourselves, and then it maybe not reaching as many people as it could. But yeah, we’ve just been sitting on it for so long, and it’s not fun. Especially because I’m already over it, I’m writing new songs now.

 

WPRB: Yeah, I can totally relate to that. It’s the lament of the songwriter, you’re writing new stuff and always can’t wait to show people new stuff.

 

Matthew: Well it’s different for every writer. Some people put out a record every three years because they’re just not writing that much, and my vision would be to be one of those bands that puts out a solid full length every two years that’s different from the next one, like a Radiohead sort of thing. But I feel like it’s leaning more towards a Neil Young thing where he puts out a record every year for like 30 years.


WPRB: Right, and everything you write you can’t wait to share with people, I guess that makes sense.

 

Matthew: We’ll see. I’m also 22 and we’ve only put out one full length so life changes.

 

WPRB: I’m noticing—and you told me to be intrusive—I’m always curious about people’s tattoos. Could you tell me about your favorite tattoo?

 

Matthew: Okay, I don’t have many just because I don’t have any money. This one, ‘TFB’, was my first one, I did it with a safety pin when I was 15, it’s for the Front Bottoms. I think I was the first or second person to ever get a Front Bottoms tattoo. They were the band that introduced me to the music scene when I was 15. They were the first local band, before that I was listening to Coldplay and Mumford & Sons. Without them I really wouldn’t be here, and it’s just crazy, everyone has their first band that introduces them to the local scene, and it’s crazy that my first band was them, and just to see where they went from to where they are now. And they did it the most honest way, like one fan at a time, not selling out, it’s just extremely inspiring. That summer, 2010, all the friends that I had then, all the music. This one on my ankle, it was supposed to be an eyeball, also done with a sewing needle, it turned into a leaf, drunkenly in a dorm room. The dot right below it, another stick-and-poke that I did with my friend when she graduated high school. She’s my longest lasting friend, she lives in Colorado now, and me and her, we both did it. I have two that were done with a gun, both on my left arm. One is a Hebrew tattoo that I got done in the Negev Desert in Israel, it says “hope” in Hebrew. That was just a really inspiring trip with a really great group of people, and we just spent a night out in the desert, and it was such a crazy experience, that whole trip, and seeing the lives that certain people live, and that we just have such privilege living here. I could say a lot about that, it was a really inspiring trip, and hope was really what most of those people living there are living on. And then my biggest one is on my left arm up top, it’s a blank notebook page, it looks like it was ripped out of a book. When I was writing “United By Birdcalls”, the record we released a year ago, it was based off of notebooks that I had been writing in religiously when I was like 11 or 12, when I first became creative, and became a real person, I guess. This was just my first notebook ever, and I would write all my thoughts in it, and there was one page left in it that wasn’t written in, that had been accidentally torn out. So I guess this is just basically saying that there’s always going to be a continuation. If there’s one thing I know in my life will stay constant, it’s creating.


WPRB: That’s awesome, thanks. I guess we’ll finish it up. Is there anything you wanted to add?

 

Matthew: Anything you’re willing to. I’m just happy to be conversing in friendship.

 

WPRB: I’m gonna do a few quickfire questions.

 

Matthew: Do it.

 

WPRB: Favorite book?

 

Matthew: Favorite book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

 

WPRB: Favorite New Jersey beach?

 

Matthew: Asbury Park.

 

WPRB: Pork Roll or Taylor Ham?

 

Matthew: I am a vegetarian, but Pork Roll, straight up, come on.

 

WPRB: Favorite Front Bottoms song? Since you brought it up.

 

Matthew: I’m sorry, Front Bottoms, but I don’t like any of your new music.

 

WPRB: Me neither.

 

Matthew: “Slow Dance to Soft Rock”, the EP that came out right before they got signed and put out their full length, is by far my favorite songs that they’ve ever put out, which is half of the full length. I’d say “Swimming Pool” or “The Beers” are my two favorite Front Bottoms songs. And I will just say, I’m not really allowed to announce it, but we’re opening for the Front Bottoms soon, and I’m just ecstatic about it. It’s probably the biggest honor I’ve ever been granted.

 

WPRB: Wow, are we allowed to put that on air?

 

Matthew: I mean I guess so, no offense but it’s college radio. I don’t think their agent is listening. Plus I’m not saying when it is, where it is, or why it is, so I don’t know.

 

WPRB: I’ll most definitely be there, as long as it’s in New Jersey or near New Jersey.

 

Matthew: New York?

 

WPRB: You’re revealing a lot, here, Matthew [laughs].

 

Matthew: [laughs] Alright well thank you for having me.

 

WPRB: Yeah, thanks so much for coming in.

 

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