Heavy Rotation Records Album Release Concert

One amazingly unique aspect of life at Berklee College of Music is the student-run activities. Clubs, bands, radio shows, gigs, you name it. One of these is Berklee’s student-run label Heavy Rotation Record (HRR).

Its latest project, Under the Influence, produced by Paul Kolderie, is the live performance of a compilation featuring covers of famous rock artists, including Green Day, U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, The Pixies, and Smashing Pumpkins, performed by Berklee students and alumni. HRR’s celebration of Under the Influence includes a concert on December 3rd at the Berklee Performance Center, featuring special guest Roger Miller of Mission of Burma, performing on acoustic guitar.

A really cool highlight of this concert is the recording: Kolderie, the producer, used the same console, original amps and microphones he used to record the Pixies and Radiohead. The project gave the artists performing in the concert the opportunity to create something new through the reinterpretation of these classic songs, doing as much as possible to incorporate this older gear into this new creativity present in the CD. As much as it sounds like this performance features six cover bands, the songs each artist will be performing might as well be completely new, as they wrote their own arrangements and instrumentations for the new versions. Most of the HRR artists even transformed the genre and musical style of each song, such as creating a bluegrass version of Green Day.

As a girl who loves the majority of the bands being covered in this performance, I am so ready to hear what they have come up with.

The HRR artists, including Julia Easterlin, Da’Rayia, David Pramik featuring Johnny Duke, the Boston Boys featuring Emily Elbert, the Berklee String Metal Ensemble and Pinn Panelle will perform songs from the CD. The concert is $8 in advance ($12 day of show) and begins at 8:15 p.m. Tickets are available at berkleebpc.com and at the box office.