How often has four dollars provided you with eight hours of entertainment and helped a good cause? Well, tomorrow night at Cowboy Monkey that can be true at the WRFU What Matters benefit. As detailed in yesterday’s article, WRFU is raising money for a new, permanent transmission tower. The benefit is taking place from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. and will feature more than a dozen local musical acts: New Ruins, Krukid, Dottie and the ‘Rail, Golden Quality, Common Loon, The Duke of Uke and several more, plus a special poetry reading and lecture from William Gillespie and Cristy Scoggins.
The What Matters benefit will also be held in conjunction with Local Matters, “a sale of area artists’ giftable pieces taking place throughout locally-owned Champaign businesses including Circles, Jane Addams Bookstore, and Rebecca’s from 3-6 p.m.”
After the jump, we’ll hear from New Ruins, Krukid and William and Cristy about What Matters.
Community radio has a special place in the hearts of local artists. According to Caleb Means from New Ruins, “It’s the way music has been put ‘out there’ for some time. With all the digital outlets of today it’s important to recognize your local scene by listening to local radio.”
Krukid agreed. “They mean a lot; local radio keeps local music alive,” he said.
William and Cristy added, “Radio, having a small broadcast radius, is a regional media. Deregulation under recent corporate bitch presidencies threatens to supplant this essential regional media with Clear Channel Communications AOR DJs with digitally-lowered voices saying, ‘Time to get the Led out,’ and making us all throw up in our cars.”
So, Saturday night is going to be a good time for a good cause at Cowboy Monkey. The new tower is just the first step in WRFU’s plans to improve its service to the community. Station Manager Andrew Ó’Baoill noted that they plan to target “increased news programming on air. We are already working with other projects within the Independent Media Center on news production, and are examining ways to expand our local news programming. [Also] online content. Webcasting and podcasting are both beyond our financial abilities at present (there are significant costs associated with copyright and bandwidth expenses), but I would hope that once we finish the tower project it would be an area we could concentrate on expanding into.”