The headlining act’s lead singer Liam at the event’s climax.
A backdoor look at Cornell’s underground DIY, narrated by yours truly.
12:00
The yawning lemon shade of the blinds in my room block the light that would have woken me before getting eight hours of sleep— it is an aptly set alarm, the tune of one of my favorite songs, that hovers me out of a much needed slumber after a late night of jamming and laughing with friends.
My feet hooded in clogs kicked up against the porch bannister extending from a dusty beige couch we lugged out with hopes of smoke and morning coffee with the sun, a common college daydream. I eat my cobbled breakfast and meditate on the day ahead: a concert on the same elevation, consisting of three bands. A Fanclub Collective Production.
A cobbling in itself: Fanclub Collective is an independent Cornell Club, we, a group of around fifteen students, receive about eight grand per academic year to support small-scale music events. Using the money for gear and commissions to local and up-and-coming artists from the northeast, we try to be inclusive and approachable, a phenomenon and a scene for anyone to discover spirit in something live.
13:10
The smooth grumble of my Mom’s beat up minivan rolls familiarly out of the deteriorating driveway after two other members of the Collective have shown up, Dennis and Elliot. Elliot is one of the people keeping the house show scene alive at Cornell – he knows his sound engineering, and has a deep love for Folk Punk, the overarching Genre of the two bands he has started and continues to play in: Home for Bugs and Tall Travis.
We slide down to West Campus to Watermargin (水) Cooperative, one of eight such spaces on campus technically designated university owned housing. Cooperative houses typically consist of 20 people who engage in a diverse community of students that work together to create a unique living environment, cleaning and cooking for one another: we occupy a multiluminous set of peripheries. Some of us are gay, some are humanists, others find their passions in plant breeding or communism, potting and canvassing for a better future. I’m enraged with a zeal for music, which is why the show would later bounce the front lawn of Triphammer Co-op, where I live. These houses are usually where Fanclub shows take place; their sentiment thereby underlies the Cornell House Show culture.
My minivan trunk closes even with everything we’ll need inside, cords of all types, mains, subs, mics, decorations, lighting equipment, and a dirty striped area rug.
14:00
Load in. We get to setting up the PA (Public Address System). Two tables and twenty chairs come off of what will be our stage for the evening to make room for our performers— a spectacle to remember.
At first, setting up the jungle of cables is intimidating: knowing where each one goes and what it does seems an impossible feat, and thus the concert. This is the stage Dennis occupies, he is just beginning to learn. I know that it gets easier with every setup, and that the memory of each wire placement and dial on the mixer sinks into second nature. For our next show, we’ll have Dennis walk us through the process.
Teaching more people to run sound at underground shows is vital. Passing this information on is the only thing keeping a social scene and cultural blue zone on Cornell’s campus alive— Fanclub Collective has existed since the early 2000’s, remaining small and DIY. To stoke the flame of this creative opportunity is one of my utmost crucial motivations; the tradition of passing down this knowledge in the passion of live music is something that I’m awe-filled to be a part of.
We finish setting up an hour later and I kick back for lunch and a much needed nap before the wreckage of the evening.
16:00
Vicious Fishes. A name that sparks brutal golden memories for me and many other alternative, angst-filled college students alike. When they walk up they are a whirlwind of worn jeans, calm acquiescence and a readiness to play. Fanclub’s headliner for the first show of the semester, Fishes are a set of four Ithaca natives, skyscraping over the likes of Dennis, Elliot and I—Zeb on Drums, Jacob on Bass and Liam on lead vocals and rhythm guitar all stand over 6 foot. Jonas, whose dad helped start Grassroots Music Festival, slouches closer to the earth and is one of the quieter personalities in the band. Rolling up in their turquoise astro van that they tour in, they are an admired and imposing squad.
I know these things because they are recent Fanclub staple – once a band becomes known by our followers they are likely to come back, in a violent symbiotic relationship where the performer is chasing the high of a vivacious, participatory audience and the concert goers seek a familiar outlet for their strife and steam. Previous Fanclub favorites have ranged from Metal in Skip Tracer to Math Rock in Yaktus, for which my roommate Justin was the bassist.
Zeb sets up his drum kit, which I have never seen before. It is large and white, so to reflect our colored lights and create moving orbs of steadiness, the unique Fishes rhythm surly inciting mosh-pits. This is a personally important moment for me— Zeb was one of the drummers who first inspired me to play. Our porch provides enough space for his girthy percussives to punch their urgent beats at the back of the act. 9/16 wasn’t the first time Triphammer supported shows on its Porch— for Slope Day 2022 and 2023 we had Silas Brainard Band and the Ants on Stilts and Yaktus headline early mornings packed full of tunes for students at the end of spring semester.
As Fishes backlined the guitar amps, they plugged in and were ready to soundcheck. Soundcheck comes with a unique set of challenges for college students who are limited in knowledge and gear. Troubleshooting becomes a guessing game of hope and jank-crafting make-shift replacements for items we haven’t acquired yet. Mostly, it’s just minor tweaks to make everything sound whole, and adjusting the monitors so that the performers can hear themselves play onstage. Sound tends to be iffy in DIY scenes, and I’m proud to say we’ve had mostly good reviews from artists. Chris D’Aquino, former Fanclub sound guy and founder of Baltimore hardcore band Violet Evergreen, taught Elliot and me how to mix live sound: “it’s just about weaving it into one sound, and not doing too much.”
17:00
For Free?, a three piece offshoot from Fanclub returner out of Ithaca College pulled up psyched to see Fishes sound checking, and soon set up on stage. Ben, temporary lead singer (the group performed for the first time on Saturday, missing their dramatic and tempered female lead vocalist) and guitarist, had an excitable light hearted spirit about him. Jack, the bassist, was chiefly concerned with the bass feeding back— we had run it through the PA for a more voluptuous undertone. The drummer, Ryan remained softer spoken, but damn did I admire his seemingly loose drumming that stayed tight on the mark of each beat.
Their soundcheck was smooth, and as we were nearing the end our third band, which was running late en route from the Hudson Valley, finally Arrived. You could tell it was them from a distance because of the confident swank in their every bootstep. Wax Girl— a psychedelic shoegaze band with intimations of punk. They were a Binghamton University band comprised of four witty, fun-loving and well dressed indie kids. The lead guitarist, Kate, had a dope denim trench that I outwardly admired.
Wax Girl chills out on our front lawn during soundcheck.
18:00
I left Dennis and Elliot to finish the Wax Girl soundcheck; I went to check on the food. Fanclub has committed $30-50 a show to feeding the bands and friends who contribute to lifting the show to realization. Some housemates were vibing in the kitchen, finishing a dinner of vegetarian tacos. This combination is especially rare and impactful – to pay a band, serve them dinner, and bring their music to a stage in my own house is an enigma. Another friend made cookies that a member of Wax Girl described as “the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had.”
The house the hour before a show is a wild rush— everyone in frenzy. Our doors are set for six thirty, and play is set for seven. In DIY culture, nothing ever happens on time. At any given moment during a show we are fifteen minutes behind schedule.
Housemates Justin and Sophie pose in front of the meal they made.
Wax Girl and For Free? line up for dinner.
19:15
By this time probably forty people have shown up, enough to get the gig sounding. The sun is at the horizon, and warm light encrusts the beginning of our evening. To the delight of many, For Free? started the night with a Car Seat Headrest cover, and rolled away with sweet tunes.
Fanclub’s biggest rule is to have fun, but as a person responsible for both the club and my house, I had a lot of working around to do. Cars double parked in the active driveway, friends asking me to use the bathroom (and foes too), the absence of a trash can.
This didn’t stop me and a growing crowd from rocking to the group’s untested vocals and familiar alternative rock sound. Their set gave a flourish to Jack’s basslines and Ben’s guitar. They played with a voracious energy that induced the audience to stay bursting for music through the rest of the night.
The audience waits around between sets.
20:00
Wax Girl steps up to the stage. I’m ecstatic: their soundcheck was good. They played their edgy cards deftly with a lively response from our ragtag crowd of punks and hippies. The drummer, Quinn, and the lead singer, Santiago, engaged in a habit of hitting their vapes during the set, bristling with romantic tension. They had brief pauses in their set which threw off the musical flow in face of addiction, the rush of coalescing delinquency on stage supporting their rock and roll aesthetic.
For shoegaze, a genre where vocals are usually spacey and in the background for most of the song, I was excited for the appeal of Santiago’s range. I had him turned up a bit because his ability to hit both low and high notes in succession during soundcheck was astonishing. Unfortunately, his inflective power seemed to have decreased in the limelight, ruining the set for some concert-goers.
One student, who was not exactly bopping to their sound, referred to their image as “bingy” with a hard g, indicating the school they go to. This a keyhole for the strange contradictions in the Fanclub community and at concerts. A Binghamton band plays at a Cornell house show with an Ithaca College band and an Ithacan band – there is certainly difference in the backgrounds of the performers: some disparagement comes from that. Despite this, I think that diversity in performers of all types is a valuable thing, and in having a different lineup every time, we have different groups of fans come together into one audience, searching for meaning in the sound as one. Last fall, Fanclub hosted a Cornell band, an Ithacan youth band, and an Ithacan dad band. The difference and collectivity of the crowd was miraculous.
The redeeming quality of Wax Girl was their soft driving guitarists, the pillars upon which their sound stood. Evoking a classic shoegaze sound reminiscent of Slowdive, the two guitarists’ petal work was worth the admiration of every guitar fanatic present.
Santiago, bassist and lead singer, feeling the flow of Wax Girl’s set.
21:00
Alright everyone knows what they showed up for now here we go. Fishes. Renowned for Zeb’s excited drums, Liam’s monotonic vocals and casual beer beaten surf rock feeling, they have played three Fanclub shows in the past year— they deliver every time.
Now they have a new album recorded, due out in the next year. While they played favorites from All The Time, their EP released earlier this year, like “All The Time,” a pace-changing hero that could fit the slowest parts of a bar crawl or the fastest heart-racing fantasy of the night, “Miss Sadie,” which one Cornell Student said is named after them, and “Don’t Forget Me,” they also showcased some of their upcoming sound.
What makes the Fishes so fun to see over and over again is the cowboy-cool swagger of their sound, the tranquil atmosphere of the band members and the slow building temper of their songs: there is a breaking point for the band and the crowd alike. Such was the same with their new music; many left the concert in anticipation of their western-guitar riffs and performances to come.
21:15
The unnoticed pothole of the night was not the sorry state of our driveway at 150, but a surprise appearance. Cops. The one word that no one likes to hear (sorry officer).
The music didn’t stop, and most of the crowd didn’t notice, but all residents of the house were spooked. For some fringe-drifters and left-leaners, the police are akin to devils. We were turned up to around 120 decibels when the man in blue showed, and he did not seem ready to dance. We presented our noise permit accepted by the township of Ithaca, which the officer laughed at; after threatening a ticket and refusing to disclose our rights, he walked off after dispatching a tense warning.
After lingering to make sure we turned down, he drove off, after which I, Cooperative Residents, and Fanclub members were all able to relax.
22:00
Our noise permit only lasted until 10pm, and after the scenario with the policeman we weren’t going to oversound our welcome. Fanclub shows and the house scene usually tend to go past their intended end-stops with the 15-minutes-late-nature of the shows, but not this time.
The usual post show haze rolled in like a fog with a revving engine. Everyone is psyched from the show, their spirits agitated with energy. After a show I can’t stop beaming with joy for the music, and saying something like “that was so sick!,” my teeth bearing light in the dim post-show. Many others cool down with a cigarette, the fuel for their night ahead. With this the dregs of multiple-earring hitched showgoers and satisfied performers comingle and get to know one another.
These ten minutes after a show are a special part of legend. The fleeting adrenaline rush after it crescendos in mosh pit hysteria is most cathartic at this point. This time our lawn was barren – the Fishes had induced a mosh on moist soil, tearing grass up into a patch of brown.
22:10
What goes up must come down, and the universe must cease in silence. Plus, we need to treat our Cooperative houses responsibly to continue using these residences as venues. Breakdowns in the past have ranged from a smooth and interactive experience to just two people gunning it against a whole PA.
Fanclub has welcomed ten new members due to its first appearance at clubfest, so we packed up with ease, put the tables back on the porch, and dropped everything off at Watermargin Coop. The cable wrangling and sub wrestling was a softer burden to bear together.
23:00
Concrete studded and dirt wrapped converses outside the Coop, Dennis, Elliot and I exchanged earnest hugs, and walked off into our nights.
At Fanclub we create a platform for musicians unparalleled in its aura, opportunity for students to learn, and passion for live music.
Fanclub hosted three more shows on 10/31, 11/2, and 11/11. There are two more coming up this semester: 12/1 and 12/5.
