The Daily Gamecock

WUSC-FM parters with Carolina Productions to bring dance pop group to campus

Come Saturday, on-campus students shouldn’t be surprised to find a full-fledged concert break out just outside their windows.

Starting at 3:30 p.m., WUSC-FM’s Connect2Cola music festival will tear up Greene Street with some of the best sounds the Southeast has to offer, and it’s all free with a valid CarolinaCard.

The festival will feature Charleston folk duo She Returns From War, Atlanta punk-rock group Concord America and three groups hailing from Columbia.

“We’ll have NewSC, which is a hip hop collective that’s been in Columbia for a while. They’re headed by Fat Rat Da Czar, who works at Jam Room,” said Sean Taylor, WUSC-FM’s program director and a fourth-year political science student. “FKMT is really definitive in the local punk scene. Their music is not too heavy, not too light. They opened for Of Montreal at the Indie Grits film festival. We’re having Dear Blanca. They’ve been around Columbia forever, they’re the rawest rock music you can get in Columbia.”

Athens-based dance-pop group REPTAR, a widely appealing band on the up and up, will headline the festival.

“I don’t even know what to say about REPTAR,” Taylor said. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like their music. They’re an eight piece band. They’ve played at Bonnaroo, they’ve played Hopscotch (in Raleigh). They’re beloved across the Southeast … REPTAR was kind of an obvious choice.”

The wide-ranging lineup is the main event, but no festival is complete without a vast array of local vendors.

“We wanted to do something that would allow freshmen to really see what Columbia is all about,” Taylor said.

To give new students that experience, WUSC-FM will bring to first-year students the things Taylor said they can’t find on their own.

WUSC-FM teamed up with Carolina Productions, Connect2Cola and Jam Room, a local recording studio which has been named Best Recording Studio in Columbia by Free Times, for the event.

WUSC-FM station manager Savannah Walker said the collaboration between the groups has yielded effective partnerships; Walker said her team handled the talent, while CP handled the logistics.

“We were originally just marketing to students,” Taylor said. “Just doing that drew so much attention from the community that a lot of the promotions you see outside of the University just happened on their own. People just got really excited.”

In the past, WUSC-FM events have generally stuck to smaller venues, but with these new partnerships, it seems that WUSC-FM’s horizons have expanded.

“People seem really excited about it, as they should be,” Taylor said. “It’s not everyday that REPTAR comes to town.


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