Radio Days

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“我在这个世界上找到了自己的位置 一点钟主持电台节目.m. 20世纪80年代在纽约,” writes 82年的布鲁克·温茨 in the introduction to her recently published book, 变形纽约: Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980-1990, adding, “I had just started school at Barnard when I showed up at Columbia’s WKCR-FM.”

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Wentz, who went on to an impressive and varied career in the music business, 包括领导ESPN的音乐部, managing A&Arista唱片公司的R, 并获得公告牌音乐奖最佳世界音乐专辑奖, spent her days studying art history at Barnard but her evenings hosting 变形的夜晚 ——这两者之间的共生关系，她是很久以后才明白的. 被称为“探索新音乐的世界”,” the show, 哪个节目今天还在播, 招待了各种各样的人, 从古典到流苏, 从爵士乐到实验性, 从流行到前卫.

还是个少年, Wentz presciently seized on the show’s popularity among the downtown set to sit down with emerging artists in a studio in Columbia’s dank Ferris Booth Hall (now Alfred J. Lerner Hall) for discursive conversations on art, music, and the ’80s New York zeitgeist. 四十多年后, 这些新生人物现在是文化的重量级人物——约翰·凯奇, 劳丽·安德森1969年, Philip Glass, and Ravi Shankar, 举几个例子. Unearthed in 变形纽约 这是他们播出以来的第一次, the interviews represent a fascinating time capsule and a touchstone of Wentz’s life and career.

Wentz grew up in San Francisco and initially enrolled at Boston College, 加入学校的广播电台，试图连接, but quickly realized that she felt like a “fish outta water” at the staid New England campus. Though she’d only been to New York once with her mother, she decided to transfer to Barnard. “I’ll never forget driving down from Boston in this little BMW 2002 I had at the time,” she recalls. “I drove with all my belongings down to 110th Street to a residence hall, 我们当时在二楼. 在那里的第一个晚上非常吵闹!”

她可能是新来的纽约人, but Wentz had already investigated the campus radio scene before she even stepped foot in Morningside Heights. 我试着跟其他孩子说, ‘Hey look, 我要转到十大电竞游戏综合排名, 你们的广播电台怎么样?” she remembers. That station, of course, 哥伦比亚传奇的WKCR-FM, which began broadcasting in 1941 and has played host to everyone from jazz royalty, 比如艾灵顿公爵, Dizzy Gillespie, 查尔斯·明格斯, 献给嘻哈先锋 伸展阿姆斯特朗和博比托秀.

在她第一次WKCR会议上, 温茨希望“假装直到你成功。,“但就像她说的那样, her hamfisted reference to jazz fusion resulted in blank stares and banishment to an adjoining room, 她在哪里遇到了哥伦比亚大学的学生马克·阿博特.

“他一直在做[变形的夜晚] for a while … and was like, ‘We play Karlheinz Stockhausen, Philip Glass, and Tuxedomoon.’我说，‘Tuxedomoon? 那是我家乡的一支乐队!’”阿博特给了温茨1个a.m. to 5 a.m. slot on Thursday mornings, which she occupied for the next six years. Thus began her sonic wanderings into the uncharted corners of nocturnal New York. 震惊的是，车站里没有其他人跟着拍, she focused her programming on artists who were performing at some of the most fecund venues, 包括《十大电竞游戏综合排名》, 实验媒介基金会, Mudd Club, and Danceteria. “If an artist wanted to come up to the station and promote their stuff, we were like, “Sure, why not? 不管怎样，这有助于消磨一个小时.”

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Nineteen-year-old Wentz may have just been trying to avoid dead air, but soon she was conversing with the likes of master minimalist composer Philip Glass, 她的第一个面试者. 考虑到他们的职业, 像格拉斯这样的艺术家工作时间很奇怪, which often required Wentz to pre-tape the conversations to air later on her show. 出于实际需要而生的, those reel-to-reel tapes — along with a few cassettes recorded on her Sony Walkman — became invaluable documents of an era. Yet after her college years, they sat decaying in Wentz’s basement for decades.

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在COVID-19大流行期间在家, 温茨重新发现了录音带, 其中一些已经严重恶化. 她联系了旧金山的“数字革命”, 哪家专门从事媒体保存, 传递和记录采访内容, 稍后添加背景和额外的艺术家细节. The result is 变形纽约 (哥伦比亚大学出版社), 2023), 400页的温茨访谈, 还有艺术家的图像, ephemera, 由前Sonic Youth吉他手Lee Ranaldo作序.

再次听到她的采访让温茨百感交集. “In some of them, 他们在调情, 这很有趣, 在某些情况下, 我紧张得要命. In other cases, I can’t believe how confident I sound for a 24- or 25-year-old.” Then there was the interview Wentz didn’t even remember conducting. “一次采访(实验作曲家)Peter Gordon给了我, 这是[他]和[大提琴家兼作曲家]亚瑟·罗素,” says Wentz. “It’s really quite interesting because I never even recalled interviewing Arthur Russell. There’s sort of a mystique around Arthur Russell, a resurgence about him too. So I was probably most surprised about that interview, and I was thrilled to include it.”

但对温茨来说，有一个主题在所有其他主题中脱颖而出. “我最喜欢的采访可能是约翰·凯奇. 我的意思是，(他)是一个如此可爱的人，”她宣称. Wentz fondly recalls talking to Cage about his relationships with [painters] Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and the time Cage showed her Johns’ “Numbers” series at his apartment. “我的意思是，这很酷，”她说. “我完全被打倒了.” 

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毕业后, Wentz briefly considered furthering her art history studies at Yale but ultimately decided she wanted to pursue her passion for music, 在WNYC和New Music Distribution Service工作. “I did anything I could after I graduated to pay the bills but [also] to be in music,” she recalls. “虽然我确实在大都会艺术博物馆做过兼职. So I wasn’t totally throwing my art history career away,” she adds, laughing.

温茨最终进入了这个行业的商业领域, 成为著名的音乐版权和许可专家, 写两本书(嘿，这是我的音乐! and 音乐版权揭晓) on the subject. She also previously served on the board of Other Minds (“a leading organization for new and experimental music”) in San Francisco and currently serves on the board of Indexical (“a site for radical and experimental work”) in Santa Cruz. “Both of those places are dealing with avant-garde music, just like my book talks about. 所以这有点像兜了个圈，”她指出.

Looking back, Wentz says she had no preconception that her radio show days at Barnard would lead to a career in music, but she can now identify the thread between her visual art studies and what she was doing with 变形的夜晚. “I didn’t take any music classes at Barnard — it was strictly art history,” she says. “But then John Cage and all these experimental artists also worked with visual artists. 菲利普·格拉斯与视觉艺术很亲近. 劳里·安德森很接近视觉艺术. Christian Marclay, who’s on the [book’s] cover, now is part of the visual arts. 所以这些都是交叉的. And in New York it’s so great, ’cause they’re crossing over all the time.”   

变形纽约 现在可用. 想要听书中的一些采访，请访问 http://soundcloud.com/transfigurednewyork