I’m sometimes more impressed with music
curators than I am with music-makers themselves. I’m referring to those
semi-selfless, only partially ego-driven individuals who make it their life’s
work to bring the best in neglected sounds and buried musical gems to the
people. Having spent a good portion of my own life trying to be one of those curators, of course I’d say that. I have
my own curators as well that I rely on to stay with-it in the NOW scene – and the most impressive one
this past year by a mile has been ERIKA
ELIZABETH, a college radio DJ on Amherst, MA’s WMUA. She hosts a weekly Tuesday night show
called “EXPRESSWAY TO YR SKULL”,
and I won’t miss a week of it lest I also miss several important new musical
discoveries.
Erika, whom I discovered via a variety of
chance links on the internet, is one of those people who just flat-out knows more than you and I do. My kind of
person. Her record collection, and her ability to wield it like a weapon of
knowledge and truth on-air, is phenomenal – and it’s all employed at a perfect
intersection of deep-underground pop; 70s-80s British DIY and postpunk; 90s
shoegaze and twee (stuff from lost 45s and cassettes that no one’s heard for
two decades, I’m serious); garage punk; and a lot of noisy girl-helmed bands
that had been lost in a patriarchal fog of several decades of disregard.
I had this notion for a few weeks of starting
a print fanzine called The Hedonist
Jive, and I asked Erika if she’d wanna do an email interview for it, as a means
of getting a pulse on what it’s like in
2012 to do a traditional, button-pushing two-hour college radio program in an
age of Internet insta-mixes, Spotify and the like. When my own sanity prevailed
and I decided to stay digital, Erika was still kind enough to agree to the
interview. We talked via type about her “journey”, her past, her present, her
records and her fantastic radio show – among other things. Take a gander here,
and definitely head over to her web
site and start downloading a few of those shows. I assure you, you’ll find
3 or 4 things every week that’ll knock your shoes off your ass.
Hedonist Jive: Let's start with some basics about the show you're doing
on WMUA. How long have you been doing it; is it your first stint in college
radio or have you done more; and how has the show changed or morphed in the
years since you started it?
Erika
Elizabeth: WMUA has been my first/only stint in college
radio. I started doing a show there in the winter of 2005 & it's definitely
morphed quite a few times since then. Initially, I did a show all by myself,
but a few semesters later, I met a new DJ-in-training named Sam (he was wearing
a Black Flag shirt) & we hit it off right away, so I asked him to co-DJ a
show with me. That incarnation was called Awkward Noise - it was an interesting
balance between my love for lo-fi indie pop/fuzzy garage rock & Sam's love
of the Melvins/the '80s SST Records catalog. We did that for around a year, but
then Sam left to study abroad in Argentina (and never came back to Western
Mass, which was a little heartbreaking), so I went back to doing the show solo
for a few months before teaming up with my friend Eric, who had been doing his
own show at the station. That's when the show became Expressway To Yr Skull
& we kept that up for another year, until Eric moved to Providence, Rhode
Island. I decided to keep the name after he left & the show has been in its
current form (back to me doing it solo, minus the occasional guest) since 2008
or so.
Hedonist Jive: Where do your musical interests start and end; in other
words, I've heard you play a bunch of 70s UK DIY of the "Messthetics"
ilk; 60s girl group garage and stretched-out noisy pop from all eras. Do you
have a set of "anchor" bands that would help us understand where your
tastes lie & what your show seeks to expose?
Erika
Elizabeth: Those are definitely three genres that I
lean on fairly heavily, in addition to the minimal/angular '70s post-punk,
Nuggets-style garage rock, C86/C86-worshipping bands, jangle pop in the Flying
Nun Records school, French ye-ye, fuzzed-out shoegaze, scrappy power-pop &
lo-fi indie rock that I love. In terms of "anchor" bands, it gets a
little more complicated. I try not to play the same bands too often on the show
(to the point where if I noticed that I played a certain band a few months
back, I'll probably hold off on playing them again for at least another couple
of months), but if you look through my playlists, there's definitely some
staples that I like to revisit - The
Fall, The Wipers, Yo La Tengo, The Clean, Husker Du, Beat Happening, The Monks,
My Bloody Valentine, to name just a few.
Hedonist Jive: You've obviously got a pretty deep affection for lost
and/or unheralded pop and noise from the 1990s, with a perceived (mine)
emphasis on shoegaze, C-86 freaks and general independent 45s that most folks
have never heard. Is this when you "came of age" musically, and how
did your journey into these sounds start?
Erika
Elizabeth: I'm definitely a child of the '90s. When I
first started listening to music with any sort of seriousness, I was probably
around ten or eleven, which would have been in 1995 or so. I was listening to
the generic "alternative rock" radio station in Houston a lot, but the
bands that I ultimately gravitated toward tended to be on the weirder end of
the spectrum & luckily, the mid-'90s were a pretty amazing time when it
came to being able to hear challenging, interesting music on mainstream
alternative rock radio - I remember talking to my friend my friend Charlie, who
is the same age as me, about our shared musical upbringing & the point we
both used to illustrate how weird & wonderful the '90s were for budding
music geeks like us was that Shudder To Think had a hit single a year before
either of us were in junior high. In particular, there was a show that would
air really late on Sunday nights called Lunar Rotations & it was basically
devoted to playing things that you would rarely, if ever, hear in regular
rotation at the station - that's how I was introduced to things like Nick Cave
& the Bad Seeds, Sebadoh, Helium, etc. So you could say that was my gateway
drug. Pretty soon, I stumbled on the local college radio station (all love in
the world to KTRU at Rice University) while
twisting the dial at random & you could say that it was all over after
that. I would stay up until 4am with a stack of blank cassettes, taping as many
shows as I could & transcribing the set lists into a series of notebooks.
Pretty much every spare waking hour I had was spent listening to KTRU - on my
Walkman, on the junky little stereo in my bedroom, in my car once I got my
driver's license... my life's goal for years was basically to be a KTRU DJ. My
current tastes have definitely been influenced in a major way by what was in
heavy rotation on KTRU in the mid-to-late '90s - obscure pop, shoegaze,
post-punk.
Hedonist Jive: When did you leave Houston for Amherst, and why?
Erika
Elizabeth: I moved to Northampton, MA in the summer of
2005. I had lived in Houston for my whole life at that point (twenty years)
& was feeling really unhappy with the city, feeling like I had accomplished
as much as I was ever going to there. Houston has a lot of great things going
for it, but it's also a huge, sprawling mess of a city, which has a way of
making you feel very isolated from other people, even when you're a part of a
relatively small underground/DIY community like I had been. Someone put out a
compilation of Houston bands not long before I left called I Hate It Here, I Never
Want To Leave, which as a phrase is really a perfect encapsulation of life
in Houston. You operate for a while under the mentality that the best thing you
can do is stick around in this weird, fucked up city & try to do things to
make it more tolerable - in my case, I booked shows for touring bands who might
not have ever wanted to step foot in Houston & put out records for my
friends in local bands who were kind of shut out by the Austin-centric view of
the Texas music community - instead of bailing out for someplace more
"established". But eventually, it got to the point where I was really
depressed & I knew I needed to uproot myself to make a change, but I really
had no idea where I wanted to go, so deciding on Western Mass after some
encouragement from a few friends I knew there was pretty spontaneous. Despite
being a relatively small town, Northampton had the benefits of living in a city
(independent record stores, a strong DIY community, good vegan restaurants)
without the things I had grown to hate about living in Houston. It also felt
like less of a cop-out to me than just moving to Austin or Brooklyn or
something, because I definitely wanted to be someplace where I could still feel
like I was making a needed contribution to the local scene. I figured if I was
still miserable after being there for a few years, I could always move
someplace else, but I've been here for seven years now & it seems to be
working out.
Hedonist Jive: Besides your Tuesday night radio programme, what else
defines Erika Elizabeth's life? Work, school, other music-related activities?
Erika
Elizabeth: In terms of defining my life, my other
music-related activities are definitely the most important to me. I work at an
incredible record store in Amherst (shout out to Mystery Train Records), I book shows
& serve on the board at a local non-profit DIY space (shout out to Flywheel Arts Collective) & I play
bass in a couple of bands. In terms of what seems to take up most of my
non-radio time, I have two other part-time jobs (at a vintage clothing store
& a library) & I'm a few months shy of finishing grad school for my
masters degree in library science. Also, sometimes I sleep.
Hedonist Jive: How do you gather material to play on your show, given
how deep and obscure most of what you play is? Are you a fanatical music
accumulator, and are you partial to vinyl or digital at this point?
Erika
Elizabeth: Vinyl all the way - working at a record
store helps in that department. My record collection is very close to taking
over my bedroom & no matter how many times I try to thin it out, it just
keeps regenerating. I've gotten more comfortable with tracking things down
digitally, though - there's a handful of blogs that I follow that post lots of
great rare singles or tracks from new bands, so I make a point of keeping tabs
on that stuff & if it's something that turns out to be up my alley, I try
to get my hands on it in a physical format (money permitting). When I'm trying
to pull together material for a show, my methods can be pretty diverse. I'll
flip through my records, obviously, but I'll also comb through things I've
downloaded from blogs recently, I'll dig out some of my old music zines &
get ideas from the review sections (the copies of the Big Takeover that I
bought in high school have been particularly good for this), I'll remember
something that someone put on a mixtape for me a few years ago & I actually
still have notebooks of handwritten playlists that I copied down while
listening to KTRU as a teenager, which I reference sometimes for ideas for my
show now... basically, yeah, I'm totally a fanatical music accumulator (and
retainer of arcane music knowledge).
Hedonist Jive: Is most of what you play from your collection or the
station's?
Erika
Elizabeth: I'd say that 95% of it is mine, but the
station's collection has been really important, too. When I first got involved
at WMUA, I spent hours digging through the stacks, pulling out copies of albums
I had tried to track down for years or things that I was curious about &
I've gotten ahold of a lot of those albums for my own collection now. I was
also music director at the station for a year, so I got to know the library
well (probably too well) as a result of that. The station's collection does
have two major drawbacks, though - it's limited to what labels send us as
promos (which excludes a lot of smaller/more obscure labels) & it's taken a
few hits over the years by less than insightful weeding decisions (sometimes I
don't want to even think about all of the great discarded records with WMUA
scrawled on the cover that turn up at the record store). But really, doing a
radio show helps me rationalize buying so many records, which may or may not be
a good thing.
Hedonist Jive: WMUA for years has been known as one of the US's best
stations for uprooting weird and new music. I've never been to Western Mass but
even I'd heard of its greatness back in the 1980s. How did the station earn
this reputation and how does your show fit into its lineage?
Erika
Elizabeth: I wish I knew more about WMUA's history & its role in the American
underground music community throughout the years. Honestly, when I moved to Western
Mass, I knew nothing about WMUA, but sought it out specifically because I had
wanted to be involved in college radio so badly, but didn't stick around in
Houston long enough to do it at KTRU. Actually, the reason I wound up going to
UMass had less to do with academics & more to do with the fact that they
had the most prominent college radio station in the area. I think in general,
Western Mass has always been a fertile ground for people doing creative things
in the DIY scene - Dinosaur Jr.
& Sebadoh started out here, Byron Coley & Thurston Moore run Ecstatic
Yod/Ecstatic Peace here, etc. - so I think WMUA has been able to attract
some really amazing DJs who have been a part of that scene. When I first
started doing a show there, things had definitely become less focused on
"underground rock" (broadly speaking) & a lot of student DJs were
coming in looking to play fairly mainstream music (most of them were
communications majors who you could tell just wanted to get their feet in the
doors at commercial radio stations), so I felt a little out of place doing a
show that was so unapologetically clinging to college radio from the Bill
Clinton era. But the longer I did the show, I was able to meet some former WMUA
DJs still in the area who did shows in the late '80s/early '90s who have told
me how much my show reminds them of WMUA "back in the day", which was
a really high compliment & made me feel a lot better about my show's place
in the greater WMUA lineage.
Hedonist Jive: OK, so I haven't done a college radio show myself since
1991, when CDs were not even part of my repertoire yet. Please walk those of us
who don't understand how it works these days how your college radio set-up
works. Are you running turntables, CD player, cassette player and a laptop? Does
a "cart machine" exist anymore for playing station promos? How do you
transition, say, from playing a vinyl 45 to playing an mp3 from Bandcamp?
Erika
Elizabeth: Honestly, I'm a fairly recent convert to
using computer-based resources during my show. I used to rely strictly on LPs,
CDs & the occasional cassette, but it got to the point where I was coming
across a lot of material in a digital format that I wanted to play on the show
- bands sending me mp3 files, stumbling across demos on Bandcamp pages, finding
digital conversions of super-out-of-print records, etc. So I had to stop being
such a Luddite. I do a lot of transitioning between all of those formats in any
given show - I'll be playing a 7" on one of the station's turntables, then
cue up something in a CD player, then maybe play an mp3 from my laptop.
Luckily, we have enough channels on our sound board that it's relatively easy
to do that. We don't have the fabled "cart machine" at the station
anymore; it's all digital now. All of the PSAs & station IDs are stored in
mp3 format on the computer in the studio, so all I have to do is click a few
buttons to cue something up.
Hedonist Jive: What do you say to folks who see traditional linear
radio as anachronistic, in an age of programmed playlists (a la 8Tracks), podcasts and 1-click
downloadable mixes?
Erika
Elizabeth: I think linear radio can exist side-by-side
with podcasts & digital playlists - I definitely find out about a lot of
music through those formats, even though I'm a hardcore college/non-commercial
radio supporter. Personally, I think that radio has a human element that just
can't be replicated in a downloadable mix hosted on someone's blog. When I
started getting really deeply into college radio, there were certain DJs who I
would go out of my way to catch on the air because I felt a connection to them
based on their shows & part of that was the feeling of spontaneity you get
from a really good radio show. Online playlists are so rigid & you're not
going to have a DJ blow your mind when they decide at the last-minute to throw
on some single that you become obsessed with. The pressure of being in a tiny
basement studio surrounded by stacks of records, trying to decide what to play
next based on what record you have playing on the turntable at the moment - you
just can't replicate that when you're dragging mp3 files into a digital mix.
Hedonist Jive: With the guarantee that this number will easily quintuple after publication of this
interview, do you know how many people download the show every week? How does
this compare to your number of real-time listeners? And would you still be
doing the show if it couldn't be heard by people outside of Amherst?
Erika
Elizabeth: I wish I knew! The way I have the show sound
files embedded in my blog, I
think they get "downloaded" any time someone opens the webpage, so
it's hard to tell how many people have actually downloaded or streamed the
shows for the purposes of listening to them. Based on feedback I've gotten from
people via email, the number of people following the blog & my own
completely unscientific guesses, I'd say there's maybe fifteen or twenty people
who regularly download the shows every week. Real-time listener counts are sort
of unpredictable, too - I have the ability to see how many people are listening
to WMUA online while I'm actually doing the show & that number usually
hovers somewhere between two to eight people. I'd like to believe that there's
more people than that who are listening in their cars or on actual radios in
their homes - I know one of the local liquor stores in Amherst tunes in every
week & plays the show in the store! They're single-handedly responsible for
all of those requests for the Kinks & Devo that show up on my playlists. I
really enjoy getting to share the shows with people outside of Western Mass,
though & it definitely motivates me to keep doing the show, even if it
doesn't seem like anyone is tuned in when the show is live on the air.
Hedonist Jive: You're always asking for requests on your show, but how
do you deal with "bad" requests? I was college DJ-ing in an era when
speed metal was ascendant, and got more requests for Anthrax and Megadeth than
anything else. It was usually, "Yep, I'll see what I can do", and
then of course never play it.
Erika
Elizabeth: I get plenty of "bad requests"
& I'm a little embarrassed to say that I resort to the same response you
just mentioned. I do end up playing certain things that people request that I'm
not super into, but that I can at least tolerate - the Dead Kennedys don't
really fit into what I usually play on the show, but I appreciated that someone
was both 1) listening & 2) cared enough to call me to request them, so I
threw them on a few weeks ago for a regular listener. If it's something really
unsuitable (like the call I got for My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult -
really?), I'm just going to "forget" to play it.
Hedonist Jive: Finally, please provide a snapshot of what you're
listening to now, particularly new bands/artists and or things you've recently
discovered, as a means of illustrating what all your soon-to-be-new listeners
can expect each week.
Erika
Elizabeth: Yikes, let's see. Lots of recent '80s
post-punk reissues at the moment, actually - the reissue of Tronics'
Love Backed By Force LP on What's Your Rupture?, the Oh-OK anthology
that Happy Happy Birthday to Me just put out on vinyl & the Trypes collection that
Acute Records just released, for starters.
As far as things that are actually new go, there's this band called the Maxines
who are from Olympia & put out a really great single on K Records not too
long ago - their guitarist was in some of my absolute favorite Houston bands
back in the storied '90s/early '00s (Junior Varsity & the Ka-Nives) &
it totally picks up from that lineage of wild, fun-as-hell girl
group-influenced garage rock. Other newer things getting love from my turntable
lately - Sourpatch's Stagger &
Fade LP, the Grass
Widow/Nature split 7" & Brute Heart 7" that
M'Lady's Records recently put out, the new LP (All Day, Alright) that my local
friends Bunny's A Swine
released not too long ago & this new album by an Italian shoegaze band
called Sea Dweller.