Some of the current members of The Breeders hadn’t spoken for 15 years prior to recording their newest album, but from their enthusiasm on stage Oct. 4, it was clear they’ve made up.
Wolf Robinson is a guest contributor for the KRTU Indie Overnight blog and a sophomore at Trinity. He plays guitar and writes music for San Antonio-based band Hexgirls.
Free Cake for Every Creature released its latest album, The Bluest Star, through Brooklyn-based record label Double Double Whammy on Aug. 3. Katie Bennett, the musician behind the project, started making music for the project privately in 2012. Dominic Anthony, Indie Overnite Music Director, interviewed Bennett earlier this month.
KRTU will rebroadcast the interview with Free Cake For Every Creature on Oct. 10 on The Hippie Coffee Hours at 11 p.m.
Kathleen Creedon is an intern with KRTU and is currently a junior at Trinity. She’s the photographer and blog master for Indie Overnight.
Lala Lala released its second album The Lamb on Hardly Art on Sept. 28. The album deals with the personal trauma songwriter, guitarist and lead vocalist Lillie West experienced after her home was broken into while she slept and after the death of close friends. It’s also West’s first album since she embraced sobriety.
We sat down with Lillie West before her show at Paper Tiger on Oct. 6.
Wolf Robinson is a guest contributor for the KRTU Indie Overnight blog and a sophomore at Trinity. He plays guitar and writes music for San Antonio-based band Hexgirls. Cover photo by Thomas Van Zandt Johnson.
Here’s the September edition of KRTU’s Best of the Month. This edition includes our newest interns, Elena and Kathleen.
Paul Janeway, the frontman for St. Paul and The Broken Bones, donned a sequin cape Sept. 13 during the band’s performance at the Aztec Theatre. The show was high-emotion and high-energy, as the band recently lost its partnership with Columbia Records.
Wolf Robinson is a guest contributor for the KRTU Indie Overnight blog and a sophomore at Trinity. He plays guitar and writes music for San Antonio-based band Hexgirls. Photo taken and provided by Wolf Robinson.
Welcome back!! Although the school year is just beginning, the month of August is ending. Read about the best of this month here.
Matt Bonner is known in many circles as the “NBA Indie Ambassador,” and his recent visit to KRTU’s studios confirmed this moniker. Music For Listeners host, Michael Thomas, tracked down the Red Mamba at a Low Country show a few months ago and booked him for a guest hosting session. Bonner showed up with a long playlist of tunes and a lot of thought put into each selection, providing a salient, personal backstory for each track on the playlist.
Matt Bonner reviewing production notes with the KRTU staff.
One of the themes of this broadcast is the increase in accessibility of music over the years and the various avenues Bonner used to discover new artists. Bonner speaks about going to the CD store and tuning into the radio to find new music while growing up in New Hampshire. After the session, he asked Constantine and me to text him recommendations via Spotify or Apple Music links.
KRTU Student Manager and Host, Constantine Kouldukis with DJ Red Mamba aka Matt Bonner
Addressing the digitally-driven explosion in his ability to find new music, Bonner also spoke extensively about attending live shows and interacting with artists. While playing for the Raptors in Toronto, Bonner experienced a personal renaissance in his music taste when he began seeing artists play live. Since then, Bonner’s charity, the Rock On Foundation, has hosted numerous benefit concerts with a variety of indie artists, with proceeds going to the Boy’s and Girl’s Club - a charity highly important to Bonner.
After leaving Toronto to become San Antonio’s most famous redhead, Bonner continued attending live shows and shared a particularly funny story about an Arcade Fire show in Memphis he attended with teammate Richard Jefferson during the infamous 2011 playoff series against the Grizzlies. Tune in to 91.7 FM on Thursday, June 7th, at 10 p.m. to hear the full story!
The three hour session features lots of witty banter, deeply personal stories, and a lot of great music only heard here on KRTU, Music for Independent Listeners.
Matt Bonner and the KRTU team.
The KRTU Skyline Sessions are here! Read about our first one!
Although the Riot Grrrl movement that so boldly graced the '90s claimed to be a wave of feminism that looked to empower and include women of all shapes, sizes, and colors, these sentiments fell short in being satisfied. Laina Dawes wrote a lengthy piece about why she was never a riot grrrl, citing how she felt "there was little to no concern as to how ethnicity made [her] experience as a [black] woman different" from the white women leading the movement.
The Riot Grrrl movement was born in the early '90s in Olympia, Washington. With mostly white women leading the movement, the overall message they wanted to communicate was one that encouraged women to create a voice of their own, one that allowed them to express the grievances that predominantly-male environments would not allow them to; however, considering the demographics of the individuals leading this movement, voices of minorities often fell through the cracks.
Examining this movement retrospectively, the influence that the riot grrrl movement left behind often shines brightly in the history of white feminism, but unfortunately lacks that intersectional glow. Although riot grrrls often did their best to encourage women to make their voices heard, it essentially became a movement that was coined for "young, white, suburban, middle class" women. Should one watch the documentary The Punk Singer, a movie that centers around the story of riot grrrl leader and Bikini Kill front-woman Kathleen Hanna, one will immediately notice the lack of representation and inclusion of women of color. Kathleen Hanna's participation in Michigan Womyn's Festival, a festival with a strict womyn-born-womyn policy that only allows women who were female assigned at birth to attend, led to the erasure of transgender women's identities as valid.
In failing to view feminism through an intersectional lens, riot grrrls and their supposed "empowering" sentiments are quickly discredited considering the gender and racial biases that prevented women of color and transgender women from experiencing the sense of empowerment that only white women were able to benefit from. Ideally, had riot grrrls worked harder toward a more progressive movement that looked to include and tackle the grievances of women of ALL gender, racial, religious, and class identities, then their goals would have triumphantly been met and all women would have been able to feel empowered and valid.
