We would like to congratulate John Watkins for winning the Twitter edition of our Manorlady ticket giveaway. John, you and a plus one will be on the list at Saturday’s Manorlady, HotChaCha, and Night and the City show at The Southern. You also won a copy of the Manorlady CD, which you can pick up at the merch table at the show. We would also like to congratulate Lauren Corridon for winning on Facebook. Lauren, your name with a plus one will be on the list at the show as well.

If you missed out on Twitter and Facebook, we have a third pair of tickets to give away right here on the blog. The winner of this round also wins a copy of the HotChaCha LP on wax or CD, your pick. Please include Manorlady in the subject line and your first and last name in the body.

That house that keeps having house parties is having another one tonight; I don’t have too many of the details, but I know the line-up will include a K Records artist (whom I’ve never heard of) called Generifus, as well as the bands 1985 (who are not very easy to google), Wastelanders, and a “special guest” …  doors are at 8:00, I believe the hosts are attempting to discourage the consumption of alcohol on the premises, and I have no idea what cover charge they’ll be asking for (although I hope they at least remember to collect one, this time).  Sounds fun!

If anybody has any links for those other bands, or knows who the secret guest is, or has any other info, leave it in the comments!  You can call any of us to ask for directions to the house, or better yet ask Dylan or Jack (it’s their house).

Exciting happenings tonight. Firstly, The Paramount ends its August series of iconic rock films with D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back. The documentary focuses on Bob Dylan’s tour of the U.K. in the mid 60’s and has earned its place within the canon of American classics. That means don’t miss it! As a classic, it is widely referenced by other artists and my favorite is perhaps Weird Al’s “Bob.” So there’s that, too. Ticket’s are $6 and the film starts at 7:00.

Afterward and around the corner, you can catch a great night of awesome rock bands at The Box featuring Nurse Beach, Heavy Cream, and Heavy Burner. This will be the first show for Heavy Burner, a nasty new local band that promises 1970s style acid rock. Just what we’ve needed in town, right!? The band includes the drummer from Valkyrie and a couple of members from Unholy Four. They also act real wild. They’re joined by Nashville’s nearly all-girl garage band Heavy Cream. Heavy Cream just passed through a few weeks ago but we can’t get enough of them or their friends JEFF the Brotherhood and Natural Child, who have also played here, not to mention Turbo Fruits, who will play at the Tea House on 9/16. Heavy Cream played with Nurse Beach at their last show in town and those guys jumped at the chance to be paired with them again. We will speak not of ulterior motives. To be succinct, the staff here at Nailgun is really excited about Nurse Beach. I lack the genre vocabulary to appropriately classify them (nor am I at all interested in doing that) but I can tell you they seem to be Charlottesville’s version of Ultra Dolphins. Music starts at 10:30 and there’s no cover.

At 8:00PM, Blue Moon will host Driftwood and the Slaves, a pleasant folk band from Binghamton, New York. It’s free and early so that might be your best option if you can’t do the late night thing or spare the cash for the flick.

There’s an exciting bill at The Box tonight. Three bands, each of them delicious. I suppose the main attraction would be Missouri’s Viking Moses, who just can’t seem to avoid a Devendra Banhart or Jeff Mangum comparison. And that’s not a bad thing at all. The performance is notoriously impromptu, something we Charlottesvillians have appreciated in DBB Plays Cups’ shows. They’re joined by The Woolly Moon, a Baltimore band whom you might enjoy if you are a fan of Drakkar Sauna or Magnolia Electric Company. The final band on the bill, Morgan’s Orange, hail all the way from Seattle. Very pleasant stuff not unlike the other acts. I recommend you check it out. The music will start around 10:30 so come out! No cover.

You probably already knew that NaS and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley — respectively, a rapper who hasn’t put out a good record in 16 years, and the 32-year-old son of a guy whose best music came out 44 years ago — are bringing their collaboration of dubious quality to the Charlottesville Pavilion this evening. C’est la vie.

BUT did you know that there’s an after-party at Rapture, with Q*Black and DJ Select? Well, you know now. That one has a good chance of actually being a fun show, too. It’s at 10pm, it costs $10 (or $5 with a stub from the Pavilion), and it’s 21+. Quintin’s my favorite rapper in town, and I seem to recall Select is pretty good as well. That’s tonight!

Local group The Wiles are having a CD release party tonight at the The Box; haven’t seen them play a gig recently, but they’ve been around for a while, playing mildly surf-y pscyh-rock that is sometimes awesome and sometimes merely fun. They’re the only band on the bill; show starts at 10:30, and there’s no cover! It’s been a pretty slow week for music, so if you’re looking for something fun to do tonight, check it out!

After missing a show Sunday, I’ll be back on the air on WTJU tonight, from 11pm-1am, hosting “Aunt Beast’s Radio Theatre” … Sarah’s already done her last show two weeks ago (with help from myself & Patrick), and I’ll be filling in the spare week before the new (only moderately different) weekly fall schedule starts up on Monday.

WTJU afficionados may also be interested to learn that tonight will be the VERY LAST edition of the “Hep Imp Show”!  Chris McRae has been hosting the show for a very impressive nine years, and tonight will be the last one. For those nine years, he’s brought an impressive and often inscrutable array of interesting sounds to the airwaves between 1 and 3am on Wednesday nights; I’ve often heard people (even WTJU alums and Hep Imp fans) say things along the lines of: “I don’t know what the hell he’s playing, and I don’t always like it, but I’m glad there’s a place for it in WTJU.”  Well, I actually do really like most of what happens on the Hep Imp show; Chris is definitely an industrial-music nerd (which I’m fond of, having grown up around industrial music nerds), but he shies pretty far away from anything approaching EBM or synth-pop or dance music; he’s much closer to the Coil / Nurse With Wound / Ant-Zen / Diamanda Galas end of the spectrum, playing lots of drones, spoken word stuff, spooky field recordings, etc.  To give you some idea, his last few marathon shows were themed around Current 93, Klaus Shulze, Negativland, and Tangerine Dream (and they were all ear-openingly excellent).

Anyway, tonight will be Chris’ last show; I’ll be on at 11pm, Chris will be there later on, and we’re gonna hang out and play weird scary music for your enjoyment. Tune in live on 91.1 on your FM radio dial, or catch up later on the WTJU tape vault. Happy listening!  Call us if you like what you hear.

We got a nice little show at the Garage tonight. It may be the last time you can see Andrew Cedermark in Charlottesville before his album drops in a little over two weeks. And after that, The Hill and Wood will demonstrate what they’ve prepared for their first NYC-area show ever in just a few days. These things are always free, so you should by all means go! See you there.

Set times:

8pm – Andrew Cedermark

9pm – The Hill and Wood

So hopefully the weather isn’t as gray and overcast in Charlottesville tonight as it is here in Brooklyn, and it’ll be perfectly ideal to stop by The Garage for what should be a great show.

My good friend Trevor Wilson from Vermont will be playing some songs for you, with tourmate Jesse Rifkin of The Wailing Wall opening up. I think this quote sums things up pretty well:

Here’s a few things related to WTJU that I thought I would take the time to note here…

First of all, everyone has been asking me what the status of the station is. Well, it’s still up in the air. But where things were once incredibly bleak, they now look hopeful. The good news, as you may have heard, was that Burr Beard’s new plan of action for the station was withdrawn back in July after widespread outcry from volunteers, listeners, and alumni (This all happened weeks ago, you have have heard more eloquent and in-depth descriptions of all of this elsewhere.); the higher-ups at the Office of Public Affairs have listened to our voices, and are eager to put together a new plan for the future of the station.

So what does that actually mean?  Well, right now it means a whole lot of boring meetings in which we form committees and subcommittees… What does it actually mean for the average listeners? To start with, we’re looking to sponsor a lot more shows here in town, and cross-promote them heavily by bringing bands into the studio, networking with the folks in the music departments at the University, and by throwing more events of our own.

There may be also be changes in the weekly schedule soon, and opinions are sharply divided amongst the various departments and volunteers as to what that schedule should look like. I can’t claim to speak on behalf of the Rock Department, but I know that many DJs here have been upset that Rock has basically been nudged out of the daytime slots over the past 15-20 years; although my own show is late at night (and I’d like to keep it that way), I’d love to see more Rock programming in the daytime, especially if one of the stated goals of both volunteers and supervisors alike is to increase student involvement.

Speaking of which, we’ll be throwing a “back-to-school” / “welcome to UVa” party on September 3rd at the UVa Amphitheater, with Invisible Hand, Andrew Cedermark, and the Caninos; I’m actually making a poster for that show tonight…

“But wait,” you ask (yeah right); “isn’t James’ radio show tonight?” Well, yes and no. Actually, I’m on a special 1-week probation from the studio, because I fucked up and missed part of a show I agree to sub for last week (usually probation lasts for a full month, but I only fucked up 25%, so this will be my only week away). And luckily, former WTJU Rock Director DJ Danger Dimples is back in the country for a few weeks, and has agreed to cover my show. So if you tune in to the Madame Psychosis Hour tonight, you’ll hear her instead of me! FYI. It should be a fun show.

So I’ve taken the time that I would usually spend on Sunday evenings preparing for my show (read: napping) to go back and post the playlists from the past few months of shows, something I’d gotten waaay behind on keeping up with. The playlists for the Madame Psychosis Hour (and various shows I subbed for) are now up on the Rock Department’s blog, going all the way back to … um, April (there’s still a few missing from the marathon in April that I need to fill in…)

Now, suppose you’re the sort of person who would like to listen to shows like the ones described in those playlists… BUT you’re a reasonably sane individual, and you don’t usually stay up ’til 3am on Mondays. Or suppose you live outside the WTJU broadcast radius. Or maybe your favorite show from whatever genre happens to conflict with your work schedule, and you never get to tune in. Well, I am pleased to inform you that an archive of past WTJU shows can now be streamed online! (the good shows are on there too, not just mine).

All you have to do is go to the still-kind-of-wack-looking WTJU homepage, and click “Tape Vault,” and … oops, looks like it’s actually down at the moment. Sorry folks, we’re still getting the kinks worked out. But they’ll be back up there soon; actually, we’re working on a new website, too! Anyway, the tape vault usually holds archives of shows from the past two weeks; they’re not downloadable, and you have to listen straight-through, BUT it’s a significant improvement that brings us one step closer to the 21st century, and for that I am glad. Happy listening! See you in radio-land.