Guitars ripping, basses thumping, drums racing and singers belting musical masterpieces have all become a reality. “Over fall break, 300 students rocked out to Architecture in Helsinki with Dr. Dog in the Talley Ballroom,” Scott Menut, president of the Wolves D.I.N., said.
On March 12, Gospel, Racebannon and Mass Movement of the Moth will be crooning in the intimate atmosphere of the Talley basement game room. And that’s just a warm up. On March 30 the epitome of indie rock will hit the Talley stage — The Books.
Universities have always been popular venues, embracing the up-and-coming artists searching for their niche.
“Duke has the Coffee House, East Carolina has the Pirate Underground and UNC is blocks away from the Cats Cradle,” Menut explained.
But until the creation of the Wolves D.I.N., State lingered out in the cold.
During the fall 2005 semester, Menut, a senior in chemical engineering, became founder and president of the D.I.N. with a very ambitious agenda: “Bringing better music to State.”
Menut began with a team of devoted music lovers and together they sketched a working association. Dennis Duffey serves as vice president, Allison Russell as the band booker, Grayson Walton as secretary and April Gehling as treasurer.
Allison Russell, a junior in biological sciences, came with a great deal of experience as a former employee of the campus radio station WKNC.
“We are going mostly for national bands — Architecture [from Helsinki] was from Australia, the Books are national. Working at KNC, I got a lot of contacts there and I know a lot of people in the music business here, which helps a lot,” she said.
The students chose the name “The Wolves D.I.N.” for multiple reasons. “Din” is actually a word defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun meaning, “A loud noise; particularly a continued confused or resonant sound, which stuns or distresses the ear.” Or it can be a verb meaning, “To ring with sound.” Both connotations reflect the students’ purpose to tear away the silence State has inflicted upon itself. Still, there is more. They chose to represent the word “din” as what Menut describes as “a very progressive acronym,” which will come to stand for a different theme every show.
Currently the D.I.N is working ardently to recruit new bands including The Go Team! and Ladytron. Its focus so far has aimed at more indie rock bands, but it hopes to expand, including genres such as punk and alternative.”Pretty much anything but Crossfade,” Russell joked.
The ultimate goals for the D.I.N include a music festival involving hundreds of bands over a span of a few days.
“We’re trying to plan a big festival similar to what James Madison does called Mack Rock, that’s a huge festival — 1000 bands over three days. Another one in New York called CMJ, they had 3000 bands over a four- or five-mile radius at a bunch of underground spots,”
“At CMJ two years ago I got to see this intimate performance in this tiny cafe from a band called Arcade Fire. Last year they got picked up by Spin records, so it’s unbelievably cool we got to see them play before they got big,” Russell explained.
Russell’s experience is what D.I.N. wants to provide here at State — an experience where the memory is so vivid, the smoke can still be seen, the acoustics still heard and the passion still felt. The dream of a music festival at State might be a few years away though, since it involves a lot of influence and money the club is still trying to raise.
“One of the limiting factors here is not being able to have alcohol at shows,” Menut said.
Holding the events in Talley as well as being a new club creates serious obstacles in obtaining a liquor license.
“We have thought about having bands play in the design school pit where the bring-your-own-beer Design Halloween party is held annually,” Menut said.
But that involves bands playing outside, which a lot are not willing to do.
“A lot is still up in the air,” Menut explained.
The achievements of the D.I.N. are already impressive, especially with the performance commitment of The Books, which is a quickly growing indie rock sensation; and by indie, they really mean indie.
“We do all of our own sample collecting, composing, writing, recording, mixing and mastering in our home studios using PCs running cheap software and the ragtag equipment that we’ve pieced together over the years,” The Books states on its Web site. “What you hear on our records is exactly how it left our hands, with no producer, engineers or sweetening in between. We are completely independent, beholden to no corporations and we have funded all of our music entirely ourselves.”
Tickets for The Books go on sale February 14 at ticket central. They will run $5 for students and $7 for everyone else. The concert is on March 30. The doors will open for the Talley Ballroom at 9:00 p.m. and the show will start at 10:00. Gospel tickets are prospectively going to be a $4 or $5 donation since they are a touring band.
“Considering what goes on Tuesday and Thursday nights, I love the $1.50 cinema — it’s awesome,” Menut said. “But it’s not often you can go somewhere that close in Raleigh for four or five bucks and get something a little bit different.”
