Inspired by NPR’s famous concert series, the College’s student-run radio organization, WCFM, hosted its first series of Tiny Desk Concerts on Jan. 24. Over the course of four hours, WCFM hosted six student musicians and three musical groups at its own tiny desk in the station’s talk studio. The talk studio is traditionally a space for on-air interviews, but for the Tiny Desk series, WCFM converted it into a concert venue.
As part of WCFM’s winter study specialty programming, each act performed a roughly thirty-minute segment. Performers squeezed into the talk studio, which was outfitted with a banner advertising the Tiny Desk, microphones, and the musicians’ instruments of choice. They peered through a window to the main studio, where WCFM was transmitting their sets. The music aired live on the radio at 91.9 MHz, as well as on WCFM’s website, and footage of the event can be found on WCFM’s YouTube channel, WCFMRADIO.
Olivia Johnson ’26, one of WCFM’s general managers, said that on-air concerts have piqued the radio board’s curiosity for a long time. “Tiny Desk is something that we’ve been especially interested in doing for a long time because we have this talk studio in the station, which has been largely a storage room,” she said in an interview with the Record. “It seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with it, and we have a lot more student bands 1770833586 than we’ve had before.”
Hosting Tiny Desk was not without its challenges. Before the event, none of the organizers knew how to operate the talk studio, according to Ana Lucia Gomes ’28, who organized the event and serves as WCFM’s programming director. “We didn’t even know how to make the microphones work properly,” she said. “It was a big learning experience.”
WCFM is hosting its next Tiny Desk concert on March 11 with Victor, a student band from Kenyon College. WCFM General Manager Aidan McMahon ’26, who performed at the Tiny Desk, said that he looks forward to future Tiny Desk events. “Getting into the habit of having these really regularly is gonna be great, I think, for people in the audience as well as the bands,” he said. “This year we’ve really been trying to make a lot of spaces for bands to play.”
Angel Cuautle ’28, a member of the WCFM board who filmed the event, hopes that in the future WCFM can allow a few students to come and watch as audience members.
Killian Reilly ’27, who performed a set at the Tiny Desk, is also optimistic about the event’s future. At present, he sees the College as lacking an especially robust music scene, but he said that there is a push among students for more college rock bands.
“All of the people involved in WCFM are involved in a really great way,” he said. “[Tiny Desk] was fun. It was fairly low stakes.”
Through events such as Tiny Desk, WCFM leaders hope to provide opportunities for student artists to perform and find community. “I like to think of WCFM as an institutional pivot point around which these various groups and artists and DIY things can use our resources,” Johnson said.
The organization has hosted a handful of other live music events this year, from “Coverchella” to the “Anything But English” open mic.
Gomes found that Tiny Desk provides a unique environment for attentive listening. “Most of the opportunities we have to play live music here are at parties,” Gomes said. “And I like playing at parties, but at the same time, people aren’t really listening when you’re playing… It was really nice to be in a place where you can play, and you can care about the musicality of it.”
Editor’s note: Frances Brooks, a section editor for the Record and Programming Director for WCFM, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
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