Article By: Lisa Occhino

Relieve your finals-week stress and come party with us one last time before the semester ends! On Wednesday, April 27^th from 5:30-7:30pm, we’re going to have tons of free food, a live DJ, and prize giveaways in the SAC lounge (921 Uchida building, 3^rd floor). It’s open to everyone, so bring as many friends as you want!

Article By: Lisa Occhino

In response to the recent tragedy in Japan, several concerned Berklee students have jumped to organize projects that will raise money to help the victims and their families in this desperate time of need. Two of the most ambitious projects have been spearheaded by Kylie Rothfield and Julian Weisser, who are both working tirelessly to organize, oversee, and promote their fundraising efforts to members of the Berklee community, Boston, and beyond.

STAND WITH JAPAN: A BENEFIT CONCERT

Kylie Rothfield assembled a team of five Berklee student volunteers to help her put together a benefit concert titled “Stand with Japan.” Rothfield has put on six benefit concerts since middle school, so organizing an event to fundraise for Japan just felt natural to her. “When I heard about what happened in Japan, I was like, ‘I’m at Berklee, we could do something huge.’ I really believe that music and benefits go together,” says Rothfield.

Rothfield and her team were able to spread the word about the concert so widely that over 60 artists and bands auditioned for it. “I was expecting 15 or 20 people to audition, tops,” she explains. “We spent five or six hours reviewing the [audition] tapes because every single band was so good, and making the decisions killed us.”

I was personally very impressed with how well Rothfield managed to overcome some huge obstacles. “The most difficult thing was finding the venue,” she expresses. “We called about 120 venues – pretty much every place you can think of in Boston. Getting the cafeteria was the best thing that’s happened, because we were on our last string and didn’t know how we were going to have the concert.” For a while, she also found it difficult to manage the event planning along with classes, homework, and other commitments: “I canceled all my work shifts for a week, and I had to miss quite a few classes, but I’m back on track now and everything’s fine.”

Stand with Japan will be held on Sunday, May 1 in the Berklee cafeteria and is open to everyone. The festival will take place from noon to 7pm, where there will be food, live music, and various booths set up selling T-shirts and other items to boost the fundraising efforts. Then, from 9pm to 11pm, eight bands will be performing in the formal concert. While the day festivities are free admission, the concert at night costs $7 for college students and $10 for everyone else (in advance or at the door).

In addition, Boloco will be donating 15% of everything they make on Thursday, April 21 to the benefit concert.

All of the proceeds from the event will be donated to the Japan Society of Boston. According to Rothfield, the charity sends their money directly to communities in Japan. She’s hoping to raise between $1,000 and $5,000, so please come out and support this great cause in any way you can!

LOVE CONQUERS ALL: MUSIC FOR JAPAN BY THE BERKLEE COMMUNITY

Julian Weisser has also decided to pull from the vast pool of musical talent at Berklee to raise money for Japan, but instead of a benefit concert, he’s using it to put together a compilation. “Everybody is reading about what’s happening [in Japan] and watching it on the news, and it’s just a tragic and horrifying thing,” Weisser says. “Everybody wants to do something about it, but sometimes it’s hard if you really don’t know how you can help.”

Weisser and his team put out a request to all Berklee students and faculty to submit original songs for his compilation, Love Conquers All: Music for Japan. “The hardest part was just getting people to realize that it wasn’t a competition,” Weisser explains. “We just wanted to get people to submit something that they cared about to help raise money for Japan.”

According to Weisser, many artists responded to the project with the utmost enthusiasm. This sentiment is definitely reflected in the fact that over 35 artists and bands from the Berklee community will be featured on the release, and every one of them is doing their part to help promote it as much as possible. “Helicopria will be promoting the release at their caf show on Wednesday, [April 13], and Pinn Panelle will be doing the same at Club Church on Wednesday,” says Weisser. “We’re going to be at both shows – as well as Robert Gillies’ show at Wellesley College on Thursday and SpringFest on Saturday – selling the Bandcamp download codes for the compilation.”

With so many different states and countries being represented on this release, Weisser hopes that the artists spread the word not only in Boston, but also to their families, friends, and fans in their own hometowns. “When fundraising happens, it’s usually those strong connections that are the most influential in helping to raise money for charity,” Weisser explains. “As an artist, you have a fanbase, but as a group of artists, we have a big fanbase and we can spread the word better.”

The compilation is going to be released on Thursday, April 14 at 12:00am (midnight) on www.musicforjapan.org. 100% of the funds will be donated to Save the Children’s relief efforts in Japan. Save the Children is among the highest ranking charities for financial responsibility in the world.

Dayramir Gonzalez is one of the featured performers in the JRR concert.

Press Release By: Olivia Fortunato

Berklee’s student-run label, Jazz Revelation Records, is proud to present artists from their eighth compilation album, OCTAVE, in concert on Wednesday, April, 20^th, 2011 at 8:15 PM. The concert features top performers Dayramir y Habana enTRANCE, Lee Dynes and the Jazz Tellers, Concetta Donato, Zac Zinger Group, and Felix Peikli Quartet.

The concert will be held at the Berklee Performance Center.  Tickets are $10 and are available through the box office and Ticketmaster.

The scope of the CD is wide-ranging, with artists performing styles including traditional and contemporary jazz, nu-jazz, fusion, and jazz with experimental, classical, world, electronica, ambient, and funk influences.

The album showcases some of Berklee’s top jazz players from around the world, with artists hailing from Turkey, Puerto Rico, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Brazil, Japan, India, Israel, Greece, and the United States, each bringing a unique perspective to their compositions.

OCTAVE will be available on May 1, 2011 on CDBaby and iTunes.

by Katy Eggleton
Heavy Rotation Records, Artists & Repertoire

Berklee’s student-run record label Heavy Rotation Records is making a bold move this year in an unprecedented direction. As we recently announced, Heavy Rotation is producing an album of cover songs in partnership with digital rights organization RightsFlow. Once the student artists and bands have been chosen for this year’s album, recording will take place at a local studio off-campus. RightsFlow will be licensing the songs on the album using their licensing program, Limelight.

Our A&R team has been in hot pursuit of an all-star lineup of bands. If you passed through the lobby of 150 Mass. Ave. at all last week, you probably saw a few smiling faces from the Heavy Rotation team handing out flyers and providing information about our new project. To help out those who are interested, we would like to share a bit more of the plan for this release.

Even though this is a cover album, we embrace creativity! We’re looking for interesting arrangements, and for Berklee student artists and bands to really put their own spin on these songs. The songs we have chosen include chart-topping hits and lesser-known but influential works:

In addition to what’s happening behind the scenes at Berklee, Heavy Rotation has been getting attention outside of Berklee with a mention in Billboard. This is ramping up to be quite a partnership as Heavy Rotation advisor Professor Jeff Dorenfeld continues conversations with RightsFlow. According to RightsFlow’s director of licensing (and 2003 Berklee graduate) Kim Gerlach, they are looking forward to supplying their marketing expertise to help build a plan for the commercial success of this release.

It’s not too late to submit your works for consideration to hrrecords1@gmail.com! We’ll accept any form of submission, be it a link, an MP3 or even a video. Submissions will be accepted through this Friday October 22, so don’t miss out on your chance to be part of this unique opportunity!

by Katy Eggleton
Heavy Rotation Records, Artists & Repertoire

Heavy Rotation Records has been presented with an exciting offer by RightsFlow, a music licensing and royalty service provider. RightsFlow will be sponsoring the recording process for the next release by the student-run record company. This is an awesome opportunity for Heavy Rotation; in the past, students have submitted album-worthy recordings and HRR took care of the mastering process, as well as planning and promoting the famous BPC Release Concert in the spring. So what’s the catch? The release will be an album of cover songs, which will demonstrate and introduce artists to RightsFlow’s new song licensing program, Limelight.

The concept of the cover album is a basic analysis of how relatively unknown bands become known, and how subsequent bands can become even more widely known than the original by modeling their particular style or sound after their favorite artists. Influences are a huge part of every musician’s life, so HRR decided to look at the lesser-known influences of some of the biggest names in rock music. U2 has spoken about the impact that Joy Division, a short-lived English rock band from the late 1970s, had on their music. Sonic Youth’s eventual success was propelled by many other acts they influenced who came out of the Seattle grunge scene, notably Nirvana. Listening to the song “Don’t Want to Know if You’re Lonely” by hardcore 1980s punk band Hüsker Dü, it’s clear where Green Day’s inspiration for “Welcome to Paradise” came. And the list goes on.

With this recording, Heavy Rotation Records hopes not only to do justice to many of our rock favorites, but also to expose listeners to some artists that they may be unfamiliar with. Having passionate and energetic musicians will be the key to this project’s success. Do you think you have what it takes to cover Gang of Four, Green Day, Hüsker Dü, Joy Division, Mission of Burma, My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, Pixies, Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth or U2? Let us know before October 22 by e-mailing your submission to hrrecords1@gmail.com and you may have the opportunity to be a part of this exciting project.

by Katie Bilinski
Contributing Writer

Members of the Berklee Interarts Ensemble

At first glance, Pythagoras and Coltrane seem like an awkward juxtaposition. The customary attitude assumes that some humans have been programmed to understand the analytical math and sciences while the talents of others favor creativity and the arts. However, the exploration of symmetry, patterns and ratios has not only been the obsession of scientists like Pythagoras but the tool of composers from Hildegard of Bingen to Bartok and Coltrane himself. Subject to the truths of the natural world, the arts and sciences find themselves intertwined in an eternal relationship. Acutely aware of this correlation, the students and faculty of Berklee’s Electronic Production and Design Department embrace the symbiosis of knowledge and artistic dialogue—the conscious collision used to develop new means of creative expression and global communication.

In spring 2010, faculty member Neil Leonard established the Berklee Interarts Ensemble, in which students collaborated outside the classroom to explore sonification and aesthetic issues inspired by the real-time signal processing and computer-driven models from Leonard’s Nocturnal Sounds from Hohle Fels (2009). Written for alto saxophone and laptop, this piecework was composed after the discovery at the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany of a 35,000-year-old bone flute, the earliest known musical instrument. Mr. Leonard remarked that, “the composition reflects on the intersection of emerging technologies and the genesis of artistic languages.” The group’s research was reconstructed into their debut performance, a live broadcast to the VideoFormes International Video Art and Digital Culture Festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The ensemble included Berklee faculty, students, and alumni as well as School of the Museum of Fine Arts students. The result was a stunning display of sonic arts interpreted through physical movement, which was captured and rendered by video projection.

This performance merely scratched the surface of the musical possibilities of sonification. With the help of astrophysicist Kelly Snook of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Neil Leonard along with students John Hull and Enrico de Trizio started to explore solar data from the Advanced Composition Explorer Science Center, with an emphasis on models that are valuable to scientific sonification research. They found that seemingly non-musical information could be used for musical purposes: using the motion of celestial objects as a model for mixing, particularly panning; manipulating pitched material, using non-linear iterative functions to synthesize related harmonies in real-time by using the data as a control source for real-time pitch shifting; and utilizing noise as an artistic resource.

Their diligent effort resulted in two pieces presented at the International Conference on Auditory Display in Washington, D.C. The first composition, realized by John Hull, utilized celestial motion as a model for mixing. Inspired by Partita Tripla con Galelei, a composition by Maura Capuzzo, Marco Braggion and Neil Leonard which also used solar system models to dictate sonic spatialization, John researched and programmed orbits in MaxMSP and printed them into Logic 9 as panning algorithms to alter layers of harmonious material. The four-minute production is a collage of processed samples, including vocal excerpts, that requires sound dispersion in which each voice originates from a unique location, such as a 12.2 surround sound or a similar 360-degree diffusion system. The haunting melodic elements and unique panning cause the listener to be overcome with otherworldly sensation, one of alien beauty.

For the second composition, Enrico De Trizio converted ACE solar wind data in MaxMSP into a MIDI control source for sample playback and modulation of granular synthesis, ring modulating, and physical modeling. This dense mosaic of noise-based sounds provides a stark contrast to John’s slowly evolving layers of sound. The frenzy immediately grabs the listener’s attention and the chaotic piece evolves in such a way that listeners are continually drawn in with the development of a groove, which even incorporates a bass line from Philadelphia legend Lee Smith. The transitions from traditional music to noise keep the listener on his toes throughout the entire piece.

Well-received in Washington, the Berklee Interarts Ensemble continues to push forward with new ambitious projects, including interdisciplinary-artwork performed by a network of collaborators in Boston and Italy as well as several other countries. Their quest for expression not only reaches deeper into the development of the arts but also provides a platform for cooperation between intellectuals of different fields, backgrounds, and countries. With knowledge and collaboration, the potential for discovery is limitless.

By Jehad Choate
Staff Writer

“Throwback Attack” host Don Cesar

I spend the better part of each Friday tucked away in the Groove office typing away at the next brilliant piece for our readers to take pleasure in reading and never commenting on. It can be a strenuous task, but luckily our headquarters is right next to that of The BIRN, which broadcasts a plethora of music. The Berklee Internet Radio is no stranger to the speakers of my Macbook, especially on Fridays at 2 p.m. when DJ Don Cesar hosts “Throwback Attack”.

What is a throwback? Cesar says it’s “a sudden reminder of the past. This can be brought about by hearing a song from high school, seeing an ex, or watching an old show. It is similar to a flashback; it’s something retro and can range from clothes, phrases, or anything really.”

Remember Boyz II Men? How about that song “Breakfast at Tiffany’s?” I remember music in which I was told not to go chasing waterfalls and taught how to do the “tootsie roll.” When these songs come on every Friday, a piece of me which can sometimes feel lost in all the jazz standards I have to learn comes back to life. Memories of happy, innocent times before utility bills and work consumed my life revive enough childlike energy in me to get through the workday.

So why does Don dedicate an entire show to throwbacks? “I was trying to find out what kind of show to pitch and I couldn’t think of anything. I was going through ideas and I heard a song on one of the shows I was doing and I started laughing and said ‘damn, that’s a throwback if I ever heard one’; my friend started laughing and he said that would be a good idea for a show. I was thinking about it before but I didn’t think it would seriously work. I ran it by my girlfriend and she thought it was great idea. I ran it by friends back home and they thought it was genius, then I did a Facebook group and I got like 50 comments within two days for song ideas.”

“Throwback Attack” is genius! The best part about listening to music from within the last twenty years is realizing how rich it is in style and diversity. Cesar believes the best part of music from late eighties to the nineties is how compact it is, having “really nice melodies, accompanied with nice harmonization, and a comfortable groove… all within 3 minutes. The quality improved tremendously. Look at New Jack Swing and Black Street for example, they were messing around with different drum patches and found a great formula.” With bands like Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine merging rock and rap, the Red Hot Chili Peppers adding funk, plus the latin-pop invasion and numerous other categories, listeners should never feel bored or tired because the music is varied and engaging.

Are you ready for a trip down memory lane? Tune in every Friday from 2–4 p.m. in the college radio section of your iTunes or at TheBIRN.com for the “Throwback Attack” brought to you by Don Cesar and The BIRN.

My Fake Funeral performing at SXSW in Austin, TX.

By Zac Taylor
Managing Editor

Heavy Rotations’ number one zombie flick aficionado has dropped her name in favor of a more fitting, group-oriented moniker. Ann Driscoll has renamed her solo project My Fake Funeral, derived from the name of a one-act musical theater piece she penned last year. The band still features the same cast of topnotch musicians: Bruno Esrubilsky on drums, Dabbo Caucci on bass, and Justin Hancock on guitar.

MFF broke in their new name last Saturday, April 17 at Church. The crowd danced and sang along with Driscoll and the boys; imagine In Utero-era Nirvana fronted by Fiona Apple with an orange Grestch guitar. The quartet is still tight from a number of SXSW showcases, and are currently compiling material for a record sometime this summer.

Also the front person for all-girl dance rock band Mrs. Danvers, Driscoll’s catalog continues to define itself as dark and edgy content juxtaposed with super-catchy melodies and highly sing-along-able choruses; the tunes “I Wanna Be Your Zombie” and “I Wanna Believe You” perhaps exemplify this delightful contradiction.

You can catch My Fake Funeral this Sunday, May 2 on the roof of 173 Newbury Street at 2pm. Check them out at myspace.com/myfakefuneral.