Chances With Wolves Rock the Airwaves

Chances With Wolves is your favorite new radio show. It is! Trust us! East Village Radio lets hosts Kenan and Kray and Mikey Palms warp your brain every Thursday night from 2 to 4 a.m. I was delighted to stumble across them a few months ago during a phase where I was getting sick of my music selection. But now I'm cured!!! Read on and get INFECTED.

I want to know about how you became obsessed with music. And is there a specific artist or person who influenced you -- like the older brother of a friend or a really cool stoner aunt or something?

Kray: My first love was a musical scavenger, like myself, and I found that I could impress her, and therefore win her heart, by making her mixtapes filled with beautiful music she'd never heard before. And like many romantic young men, I quickly learned to hone that skill which most endeared me to my love. I'm still making her mixtapes in my head. Lily Wheelwright.

Kenan: As far as "out music" is concerned, When I started really listening to what people like John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy and Rashaan Roland Kirk (and a host of others) were doing, and I started to understand it as it fit into a musical and societal context, it was a revelation for me. From there I was just opened up to all different kinds of music, though it took me a while to realize that. Also, people like Mikey Palms, Kray, Ro Agents, Cosmo Baker and others have put me on to countless things I wouldn't have known about otherwise..

Other than it being a really awesome name, why or how did you come up with "Chances With Wolves?"

Kray: I think there was some old movie that has a similar title. I can't remember.

Kenan: What are your chances with wolves? Not good. Unless you run into those wolves that raise babies. Then you're OK.

Kray: That name was pure Mikey Palms' genius. We'll have to let him explain.

Mikey Palms: There are many different reasons why we agreed upon the title "Chances with Wolves," but mostly a lot of ethereal convincing and positive massaging upon my part towards Kool DJ Kear, who generally puts a lot of thought into everything he does. Chances are rare for him. I think Kray was generally cool with the name, he just wanted it to be sincere. I liked the idea/metaphor of wolves as being these beautiful wild animals, forced to domestication for survival, to become dogs, adapting to humanity, working with humans for common goals... survival. teaching ourselves to bark and keeping the rare howl for special occasions, like when we hear or smell something we really like, or want to embrace -- to have will over the kill (Ghandi knew about this special skill)... and developing a special friendship and bond for centuries with the most destructive animals to date.

Something you're really great at is playing tons of songs I know, but that are covers or are the original version of a song that I only knew the cover of and had no idea about and would probably never come across otherwise. It's like, I know this music. Even if I don't know it, I feel like all the songs makes sense. You guys are basically curating sounds and songs in a really awesome way. Care to talk about that at all?

Kray: You know what It's like? It's like we're building up our own "standards," and then what's interesting is a take off on that standard. Like, for instance, a lot of those Beatles covers we play, maybe by objective standards, might not be as "good" as the original, but the original is so widely known, so standardized, so "played out," that it is only in the finding of these weird take-offs, that we can reawaken their original magic.

Your show has this old radio program style where it's heavy on sound effects. I mean, it's just so lovely to be listening to a really gorgeous song and hear that wolf howling randomly. Really great. And the sound files from old movies, TV shows or radio shows featuring wolves are awesome too. What kind of sound effect or sound file arsenal are you working with?

Kray: I love that you said that! There's a whole tradition of radio that I really had very little knowledge of, but we seem to be instinctively retracing these old programs. I mean, think about Wolfman Jack. I love how in American Graffiti at the end he pretends like he's not really the Wolfman, because he isn't -- the Wolfman is a character that only exists in the signals and frequencies of the radio waves. He pulls a Wizard of Oz and hides behind the curtain.

Kenan: I wish we actually stayed more on top of our sound effects game and rotated in new ones with more frequency, because I think it does add a lot of texture to the show. There is something really playful about it, but I think it also has this haunting quality that really enhances the listening experience -- I hope. I have gotten a bunch of stuff off of old records, and we have weird people we know record stuff whenever we can.

Can you talk about album covers and how great they can be for a minute?

Kray: If you go to Southpaw you'll see the walls covered in record covers. Those are Kenan & Mikey's records that they sacrificed for the walls. They took the records out and put them in white sleeves. and stapled the covers to the walls. That always impressed me. I'm not sure I'd be able to do that.

Mikey Palms: I figured I'd rather have them on the wall looking beautiful where everyone can enjoy them than sitting in a crate collecting dust.

Kray: I'm saddened by the death of the record cover. Really by the death of the record store. I love holding them and looking through stacks of them, reading the backs. I made a site called Radiobelly.com dediated to giving a way free music by me and my friends. I made it so you can pull up an actual cover and flip it over and read the back. I tried to make it like a virtual record store from the future.

You guys are steadily gaining an underground following. I have friends that I told about this interview, and they flipped out. That's extreme -- because, you know, you're just some awesome dudes, no big whoop, but there's something happening here.

Kray: Really, the response we've gotten has been astounding, touching even at times. We love everybody who bothers to listen.

Kenan: I really like when people send us songs to play that are right on the money -- it makes me feel like we have a listenership that understands and appreciates what we're trying to to do and is responding in kind to it. That is the kind of stuff that makes it worthwhile for me. But the fact that we are getting mail from Japan, Sweden, Mexico, Germany, etc., is a testament to the power of this medium. I mean, the interweb is really bananas.

You're really bananas. I love bananas!!!