While most students at UC San Diego focus on meeting graduate school requirements or obtaining valuable internships, Fedra Ramirez stands out as a musician in love with the gratification and experience that comes with performing. Being a theater major has given her the opportunity to express herself while studying at a university that is too lustful for STEM. As she took the time to sit down with the UCSD Guardian to tell us of her journey from a spectator of downtown night life to a performer, she didn’t fail to remind us that she still is a UCSD student — stressed to meet deadlines and complete undesirable science GE classes.

Ramirez is a junior in Thurgood Marshall College who was born in Mexico City but raised in both Miami, Florida and Chula Vista, California.

When asked what inspired her to become a musician, she replied, “I don’t remember not wanting to be one. … When I was little, I used to sing a lot because it was easy, and you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument.”

As a dedicated performer, her father took young Ramirez along to events and musicals he would attend. And just like that, her interest grew into an aspiration.

She and fellow high school friend-turned-partner-in-crime Shereen Fahrai bonded over similar tastes in music, which eventually blossomed into the formation of On Fifth. She was always used to changing schools, so establishing a newfound bond valuably transformed her high school experience. “I was new and making new friends at the time,” she said, referencing her life on the move.

However, their mastery on the guitar and their rich cultural backgrounds ultimately sparked a musical relationship.

As a theater major, performing on stage has become a part of herself, but the path there was far from straight for Ramirez. In the midst of searching for opportunities to showcase their talents, she and Fahrai both used one thing to help get over their stage fright: street performing. “We were hanging out in downtown [San Diego] one day, and we didn’t have any money to hang out,” she said, “so we thought, ‘Why don’t we street perform?’”

Their name “On Fifth” reflects their frequent busking spot: at the intersection of 5th Avenue and G Street in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego. Ramirez nostalgically described the ambiance of street performing as charismatic, and said she was able to interact with lively characters like herself. “No one’s really paying attention to you at first, so it really helped me work on my projection and audience interaction,” she said.

When you are that dedicated to your craft, opportunities begin to reveal themselves. On Fifth has gone far in the past three years, from participating in a diverse range of stages of open mic nights to gaining gig opportunities at the House of Blues. “It was fun. We got to meet some interesting people and even work with old analog recording equipment — so old that even Elvis Presley worked with it!” she boasted.

On Fifth has taken a brief break from performing to record its debut album. “It might be an EP, we’re not sure yet. We hope to have it complete by summertime so we can perform it,” Ramirez said.

When asked about a song that holds value to the duo’s endeavors, she mentioned one they wrote themselves — “La Vie Urbaine des Roses,” channeling the life and perspective of a boy downtown selling roses whom they frequently observed. “There really is no particular reason as to why it’s partly in French, but we think maybe it has to do with that fact that the Gaslamp Quarter has some French influence,” she explained. Jazz, the blues and French chansons are big influences for On Fifth’s eclectic sound and highlights the two performers’ individual cultures.

Whether it’s making it big by being in the right place at the right time, or spending years grinding through the music industry, Ramirez demonstrated that the journey can help you find your style and reason for performing. “I definitely want to move to New York after graduation,” she expressed about her future aspirations. “I feel like it’s the best place for people with passions in theater and music.”

But for now, the Gaslamp Quarter is her getaway and On Fifth’s platform to discovery.

Find out more at onfifthduo.com

Image Courtesy of On Fifth

Going professional in the music industry requires more than a few investments upfront: cash for studio recordings and equipment, cash for travel, and time to play and perform. It’s a difficult balancing act, especially when you’re a full-time student at UC San Diego. Jason Matkin, business major and singer-songwriter straddles the line between these antithetical obligations with the hope of succeeding in both. The UCSD Guardian sat down with Jason to discuss the highs and lows of being a student musician.

Well aware of those hurdles, Matkin wryly reflected, “The industry is really hard … But if I could choose one career to do for the rest of my life, it would be music.” He’s wanted to be a musician well before coming to UCSD, and his first album, “Forget the Dark,” stands as testament to that desire.

A mix of mountain folk and pop, it’s a one-man guitar-and-voice collection and the culmination of years of work.

“I started when I was in high school,” Matkin noted. “There’s some songs that are very old. For example, ‘Parkside’ is the first one I ever wrote.”

When asked to discuss the connecting thread between business and his overarching musical aspirations, Matkin told the Guardian, “I figured international business would be more applicable to music. Being a musician is essentially being self-employed, and you spend a lot of money. Recording, traveling, you know, getting where you need to go. On instruments, repairs, strings.”

Nonetheless, Matkin’s choice of major has borne fruit. “I make money playing at shows, restaurants and corporate events. With the knowledge I’ve acquired over these last two quarters, I’ve been able to convert it into a legitimate business.” It’s a slow-going process, but his profile has grown over the last two years, and he’s started work on a follow-up to 2015’s “Forget the Dark.”

With recent singles like “The Storm” and “Underwater,” Jason has laid the foundations for a new album, planning to record during the early weeks of this spring quarter. His work has veered closer to an earthy, down-home style in recent years, accented by a personal enthusiasm for hiking and backpacking.

Primary creative periods accompany times spent in Alaska at his uncle’s house. Upon a customary visit last August, Matkin found himself reinvigorated and ready to work again. “I went through a long period of no writing … It’s hard to be in such a picturesque location and not feel inspired. The first three days I was there, I wrote five songs. I played shows there … It was amazing how instantaneous it was when I got there — the writer’s block was just gone.”

Matkin also touched on more pragmatic concerns. He was candid with the Guardian about the difficulty of receiving exposure.

“You can go about it just off promotion, promotion, promotion … Eventually, you might create a fanbase and a record label might sign you. Or it could just be dumb luck.”

He’s taken a philosophical stance toward the music industry rat-races, however. “The music itself is what I’m in this for. It’s not fame, necessarily. To me, success is being able to do what I love.”

Hailing from UC San Diego’s Musicians Club, Spent Penny consists of fellow Tritons with a passion for performance. From Battle of the Bands to the UCSD Guardian’s own Pocket Office, Spent Penny has utilized its own unique talents to provide musical performances and emphasize its love for the UCSD community. As they approach the end of their undergraduate careers, Adam Kim, Connor Schultz, Cuong Luong and Alexander Pelletier took the time to sit down with the Guardian and reminisce on their musical journey.

Guardian: Please introduce yourselves and mention how you contribute to the band.

Kim: I’m Adam Kim and I am a fifth-year general biology major with a minor in music [ERC]. I play the guitar and sing lead vocals for the band.

Schultz: Hello, I am a junior with a computer science major [Warren]. I am the lead guitarist and back-up vocalist for Spent Penny. Sorry, I don’t have a minor in music.

Luong: I am Cuong Luong and am a first-year graduate electrical engineering student [Marshall]. I am the bassist.

Pelletier: Hi, I’m Alexander Pelletier, and I’m a senior with a bioengineering: bioinformatics major with a minor in music [Warren]. I play the drums for Spent Penny.

G: How did you all decide to form your band, “Spent Penny?”

Kim: We are all a part of UCSD’s Musicians Club. We currently have a Facebook group consisting of 900+ members. The original founder of Spent Penny (Hassan Shaikley) thought it would be a great idea to post on the group with the following words: “who wants to start a s***** punk band?” From there, we all were the only ones who showed consistent interest and decided to start practices at Cuong’s apartment. At that time, we were limited and had to use the drum set from the game Rock Band as our first [piece of] equipment. We only had one song ready after the practice, and it’s titled “Change Your Mind.” That was our first song together, actually; we made it the first time we all met and practiced.

G: What is the meaning behind the name “Spent Penny” anyways?

Kim: We actually had a hard time choosing a name.

Schultz: We actually went to a band-name generator website. No joke. We kept seeing random names and decided to choose the least worst one. At first it didn’t seem to make sense, but after a while of constantly using and saying it, we grew to like it. I believe a lot of band names don’t make sense at first but they become normal after using them. I also like it because we think it has come to represent the effort we put into the band.

Kim: It’s actually a British idiom meaning to “take a piss,” which we thought was pretty funny.

G: What was it like trying to find your sound as a band?

Schultz: Something I like to say as a joke is, “Adam writes the songs, but I make them sound good.” What I mean is that he puts his heart into writing the songs, but then we all add our own parts and uniqueness into them. It’s really a band effort. We were trying to fit a punk sound at first, but we ended up finding a different path.

Luong: I don’t think we were ever a punk band. I wanted a punk sound at first but I didn’t really have time to participate in the songwriting process so I was okay with playing the songs the others wrote … Regardless, I would experiment with different bass lines during practice — none of which made it to live performances due to me forgetting what I came up with. I would just end up following what Adam would play, which is fine for our purposes.

Kim: Hassan described punk as “the idea of not caring what other people think.” That’s how I believe we connected to punk, the sound didn’t matter, but how we saw ourselves as a band [did].

Pelletier: When I joined, they had most of the songs written for the band already, so I just played what the previous drummer (Austin Chinn) had played but tweaked little things here and there to make it my own. We’ve written two songs since then, and I really tried to make those drum parts sound distinct from the other songs.

G: Describe how it was like trying to find your first gig, and the experiences since then?

Schultz: Our first gig was performing at Art Power around Fall Quarter 2015. We were really concerned with what to wear — Adam even bought new clothes just for it!

Kim: Yeah, I wanted us to be uniform, because I felt like our appearance says a lot about us as a band.

Schultz: Like mentioned before, we were really trying to fit a “punk band” style. We thought we needed to become more hardcore. But now that we have played a couple of gigs for our friends, we kind of just play what we want and what comes to us naturally. Our most recent gig, and one that’s dear to us, is Rise of the Rejects. It was an event we created last year when we got rejected from Sun God’s Battle of the Bands. It included all the bands who lost Battle of the Bands and still wanted to perform for students. I believed it really reflected our purpose for creating the band, which was to genuinely perform for our friends and the community.

Kim: We felt great knowing that we put our music out there and that the audience was there to see us perform willingly; they even knew our songs! We saw Rise of the Rejects as less of a competition and more about genuinely sharing our love for music and performance with the UCSD community, which we value. Afterward, we didn’t feel so bad about losing Battle of the Bands, because that’s really all we wanted in the first place: to have people see us perform and sing along to our songs.

G: Describe how it was performing at The Guardian’s own POOF event.

Schultz: Yeah … I actually didn’t go.

Kim: Yeah, I was trying to convince him to go so we could perform our first acoustic gig together as a whole band.

Schultz: Well, we performed at POOF around Winter Quarter of 2016 along with Good Neighbor. It was our fourth gig overall as a band. I was excited to actually get asked to perform for once, rather than volunteer or sign up for an event like we were used to.

Kim: Actually … I reached out to Peter McInnis to perform at the event. He wanted our performance to be perfect, which made me more nervous and I actually messed up the words when we covered Paramore’s “Only Exception.” We also got to play a song we wrote called “Dinosaur,” which is about our anger towards A.S. [Council] and our rejection from Battle of the Bands.

Schultz: Yeah we were able to perform our first angst song at POOF… it was a fun thing. We actually got to perform for a real newspaper staff!

G: Do you see a future with this band?

Kim: Unfortunately, I don’t see a future, personally. Alex got accepted to a Canadian graduate school and Cuong is moving to Northern California. I think “future” is not what matters in that sense. I think we had a good run. I don’t think we can salvage the band after graduation since it took us a good while to find our new drummer, Alex, after his predecessor graduated. I think it’s good to end our career on a high note and I definitely believe we had made an impact with our performances and inspired our friends and fans. Without Spent Penny, I don’t think I would have been into music production as much as I am now. I’ve definitely had thoughts of getting recognized, but once Connor rejected that idea for his career, it made me realize that I don’t think I can do that journey with anyone else. Every member here is irreplaceable.

Luong: I’m going to be working in the Bay Area during the summer, so I’m not sure at the moment. It definitely helped me improve as a musician and be able to play individually, which I’m grateful for.

Schultz: Sublime with Rome was created to try to keep the old band name alive. I personally don’t want to do that just for the sake of continuing the name. We don’t want to have to hold on to the name, it’s really just to reinvigorate my passion in music. Even if Spent Penny is not continuing, I hope to utilize what I gained from it in the future.

Kim: Personally, what I would want to do is release an actual album one day, since we’ve only got a few video recordings at the moment. I do hope we get together again some day, have a reunion to produce one even if we are apart. I want to be able to look back on this experience in 30 years and say, “Wow, I actually did something cool in college.” I don’t think the end goal was ever Spent Penny — it was always much more than that. It was about the journey.

This article has been edited and condensed for clarity
Image Courtesy of Naomi Kline

Caroline Foley talks art, animation, and the industry at UC San Diego.

“We weren’t expecting this many people!” the A.S. Concerts & Events employee quipped as I glanced at the line at the entrance of The Loft. 150 cartoon-lovers waited eagerly to see Caroline Foley — director, animator, writer, and character designer — known best for her work on “Rick and Morty,” “BoJack Horseman,” and “Toasty Tales.”

After we packed ourselves into the space, Foley began the talk by introducing herself and her journey into animation. She recalled drawing constantly, creating characters in her head and bringing stories to life, yet she didn’t decide to be an animator until she watched behind-the-scenes clips of “The Lion King.” She went on to study at CalArts, receiving her BFA with a focus in stop-motion and 2-D animation. Getting her start at RingTales Cartoons animating shorts for The New Yorker, Foley soon began working again with stop-motion for “Robot Chicken,” and later with 2-D animation for “BoJack Horseman.” In 2013, she joined the “Rick and Morty” team and went on to co-create the pilot for “Toasty Tales” with creative partner Thomas Borowski, leveraging her two first loves — stop motion and 2-D animation — into one show. She told us that she’s looking to “inspire everybody to hopefully find their path in life and career in animation, because it feels really good.”

Sharing several videos of her work developing from pen scratches to elaborate designs, detailing the nitty-gritty parts of pitching a show (“Get a lawyer!”), and projecting a slideshow called “Caroline’s Guide on How to Create Fun Characters For Your Hit Cartoon Show!” Foley spoke truthfully and candidly about the highs and the lows of the field, giving concrete strategies to budding animators as well as nuggets of wisdom and encouragement. In this way, Foley was able to impart knowledge and vocalize her message — being an animator is not this idealistic, far-off career of which one can only dream. It’s a job, and it’s a cool job that you too can have.

As Foley delved further into her passions, it was clear she had a soft spot for unconventional animation. “I love animating trippy things!” she laughed, segueing into her work at “Rick and Morty.” “Never thought in my career I could animate trippy stuff for TV.” We watched as she played a few clips of the “trippy” sequence she animated in season three of “Rick and Morty.” The first clip had rough lines, swirling around into different shapes, characters, and objects. “It’s really messy, but you get the feeling of movement,” she mused.
The clip evolved on the screen, and, as the lines cleaned, shapes colored and world realized, we all slowly, yet intensely, fell under Foley’s spell. In this sense, Foley is a magician, creating an optical illusion to animate a movement-driven scene. “Nothing’s really moving … it’s totally a mind trick and it works,” she laughed as Morty’s face turned into a psychedelic vortex on the screen beside her.

Of course, Foley’s rule-breaking extends beyond her work at “Rick and Morty.” Foley’s animated cartoon for kids, “Toasty Tales,” revolutionizes animation by bringing together two distinct worlds — stop motion and 2-D animation. “Nothing really exists on the scale we made this” she beamed, flipping through clips and screengrabs from her Amazon pilot episode. Foley discussed her journey with “Toasty Tales” at length, particularly with regard to character design and development. “I wasn’t a typical girl growing up,” Foley began, introducing one of the show’s titular characters, Waffle. “I didn’t play with Barbies and that kind of stuff … and Waffle is a reflection of me, so it’s important that her character design reflected that.” Waffle was designed to “break the mold” of the typical female character — actively created to avoid the stereotypical traits female animated characters often have, such as a dress, long eyelashes or a waistline. Pointing to examples such as “Robots the Movie” and “Inside Out,” Foley notes that the men are really interesting characters — they look like monsters or aliens — but the women don’t have any unique structure or design. They just look like “feminine” people.

Foley’s push for female character representation parallels her efforts to increase representation of women working in animation. According to Foley, 65 to 75 percent of students studying animation in college are women — yet women make up only 25 percent of animators in the industry. This is why she joined Women in Animation, a non-profit organization with the goal of furthering, supporting and promoting female animators. The organization’s mission is to make the animation industry 50-percent female by 2025. Throughout the talk, Foley made it her focus to empower future female animators, stating that there are very few women in leadership roles and hosting public talks. “Women are not seen as natural-born leaders,” she told a young woman who asked what Foley would have wanted to know as a woman in college pursuing animation. “So if you want to move up, you have to go after it and prove yourself.” Foley recounts a story from her early work directing in a small studio — except no one called it “directing” or referred to her as a director. “When these situations present themselves, don’t be afraid to speak up,” she says, calling all the future animators of the room to never lose faith in their passion. “You might have to navigate yourself a little bit, but you’ll get there. I am proof.”

Caroline Foley’s inspiring words, helpful advice, and endless passion for storytelling and animation made the night truly memorable for all the cartoon-creators and cartoon-lovers crowded in the room. As her story reminds us, a career in animation is not so far out of reach — so long as you’re willing to break the mold.

Learn more about Caroline Foley and her work at carolinefoleyanimation.com.

Illustration Courtesy of  Caroline Foley

Short and pale and young and lovely, the boy from Leiden goes walking by.

Niel Bezrookove, clad in black, had just arrived at my office and sat down with great satisfaction, but seemed a bit frazzled. Strange for a student who has over 10 different musical personas and an ever-growing vault of short stories while researching cognitive science. Just before arriving that morning, he had been made a public-transport chump instead of a champion when three full MTS buses skipped him. Fortunately, sipping his elixir — his daily Arizona Green Tea — had bestowed the student musician with some sense of serenity. He began to settle when that sweet rush of high-fructose corn syrup hit his stomach. It was time to poke and prod. Was he born an artist destined to achieve a mention on Stereogum? Pitchfork? If we’re to take him at his mother’s word, yes.

“I guess it started straight out of the womb because my mom says I came out singing random s—. The theory is that kids can hear things when they’re in the womb, so maybe I heard some stuff seeing as my parents are big music junkies. Just music, as far as I know. My dad was into Van Halen, some metal, and his electric guitar while my mom was really into classical music and Brian Eno,” he told me.

“There was a pedigree of music, but both my parents were refugees so they didn’t really have many opportunities to do something musical growing up. So, I think for that reason they pushed it onto me pretty early. By the age of four, I got selected to be a boy soprano in the choir and take classical piano lessons but this was all in the Netherlands, so this was kind of a different atmosphere. A whole lot of old Lutheran s— in Latin.”

He wasn’t bound to form or medium, however. His Dutch prep school ran its young students through the ringer, going so far as to having them perform an unabridged version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Theater was the first thing I was into and I played Puck in the play. I think we did ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ too. I wasn’t Brando and I wasn’t Stella, though. And one of the ‘Henrys’ by Shakespeare. Prep school was tough. You had to know Latin just to get into university.”

Bezrookove left both the Dutch and school behind at the age of 14 for our shores. Unenrolled in the school system and with idle hands, the eastward move incited his initial foray into electronic sampling.

“My dad had a synthesizer that I really loved but I wouldn’t even make music on it. I’d just record funny sounds and edit them together. My first tape was UFO sounds that I edited together. It was very out there.”

Bezrookove had broken past the strict regimen of practice over play, of getting “better” at music for the sake of improving on it.

“Up to that point, music had been a thing for me to perfect after looking at a sheet. Y’know, the instructor would drill me for 60 hours a week on the proper technique and would whack me on the hands with a long stick when I hit the wrong note, some real ‘Matilda’ s—.”

TV — teacher, mother, secret lover — had stepped in the place of constant practice and school. Now, he spent his days watching hours of Comedy Central and using his cousin’s antiquated plastic Mac to keep up with the rap music first introduced to him by “Chappelle’s Show.” American media and culture had pulled him from the Netherlands like a modern form of cultural pilgrimage with J. Dilla and Erykah Badu as his guiding deities.

“I wrote a short story about Tila Tequila traveling back in time to stop a genocide after watching Tila Tequila’s ‘A Shot of Love’ and wondering, ‘How would Tila Tequila respond to a real problem?’ That’s when I realized that I could put some music to it.”

This was all an education in of itself, as a literal school soon would be. After two years outside of the public school system, he was re-enrolled and used art as a way of lashing out. “I did a bit of graffiti with some punk friends, but I wouldn’t call it art because it wasn’t necessarily that great. It was more petty vandalism. We would also make billboards, write weird s—, and made a lot of skate videos with my dad’s camera. Which I broke.”

Back in the Netherlands, he had prepared to go to college by the age of 12 — the idea being that in three more years he’d be attending a gymnasium (for the mind, not muscles) before heading off to higher education. “I was already studying calculus there, so when I got here, it was like, ‘Here’s basic algebra’ and I thought it was such a waste of my time. I would either sleep in class or read and teachers hated that. I had a 1.21 GPA in high school. I still got into Berkeley and [UC San Diego] because of my SAT scores, but I chose UCSD because I had heard stories from my friend about people poisoning each other and writing fake study guides just to sabotage other people’s grades. It just didn’t seem nice over there.”

Bezrookove opted for what can only be described as a less stressful environment, in relative terms, here at UCSD. With the daily benefit of La Jolla’s coastal breeze making its way through his curls, he continued to work on his writing and art. “I just write for the hell of it, but a lot of my stuff is still laboriously written. Lyrics, even my comedy all come from my writing. Same thing with my Tila Tequila rock opera. I wrote a short story about Tila Tequila travelling back in time to stop a genocide after watching Tila Tequila’s ‘A Shot of Love’ and wondering, ‘How would Tila Tequila respond to a real problem?’ That’s when I realized that I could put some music to it. So they’re all part of the same universe in my head.”

Aside from his excursions into Tequila-land, he’s been asked to create an art exhibit for Sixth College — an immersive experience, as Bezrookove describes it. “The idea is that you go into a room with 18 Macs and each one plays music that it chooses through a computerized decision process. These computers are then going to try and recreate one of those corny cruise commercials where they try to create the sense that you’re out at sea with audible breezes, but I want to make an easy listening sea ocean atmosphere without humans involved.”

Exhausted after speaking for a full 90 minutes on his life and with multiple tangents leading off into “The Simpsons” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” references, Bezrookove managed to get a second wind in to share some final thoughts on UCSD’s future and what it currently offers students.

“I hope that UCSD doesn’t strangle the life out of the Old Student Center here because of what the Food Co-op, KSDT, the [UCSD] Guardian, and Darkstar offer. I think the reason a lot of millenials feel stressed out is because they don’t feel like they have any control over their lives.”

He emphatically argued in favor of student-run initiatives as a means of fostering collaboration and community. “Places like this are of a far greater value to somebody’s development and education than what four classes could offer. I hope these places go on for a long time. I don’t know what the odds are, but I hope they go on.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Photo Courtesy of Esra Elhendy

The post Leaving Behind the Primordial Borscht: Niel Bezrookove’s Cultural Pilgrimage appeared first on UCSD Guardian.