Contributed by Michael Andrews
NC State has a reputation for being an engineering school first and everything else second. When people think of State, they do not think of humanities, and they certainly do not think of music. The Wolftrax Music Group at NC State is trying to change that perception.
Wolftrax is a newly formed club at NC State. Founded in the summer of 2015, the club’s main goal is to promote local music artists both on and around campus through showcases, music sessions and music production.
“The idea behind Wolftrax is that we are going to discover artists in the area, especially student artists, and we’re going to help them develop their talent, produce their music and also distribute it,” said Mic Andrews, a senior studying arts studies with a music concentration and the vice president of Wolftrax. “We take an artist, and we connect them with people to help them get whatever it is they need to start recording; then, we promote them through our social media and through our own resources to help them set up events.”
In its first semester as a club, WTMG ran open-mic nights twice a month in the One Earth lounge. Andrews said that the open mics were a good way to get the club started finding artists and networking, but the events were expensive to run and that the club wished to focus on showcases of NC State artists instead.
“We prioritize NC State students because we really want to develop music around NC State and turn the college into more of an arts and cultural hub,” Andrews said. “We know there is a lot of untapped, non-networked talent at NC State, and we want to bring that talent to the surface because there are a lot of people here who love music.”
In addition to the open mics, the club also ran a tailgate show at the Clemson-State Halloween football game. The club rented a stage and a sound system and played music featuring local artists, including Vanilla the Hun, an alternative rock band Andrews plays guitar for.
“It was a test run to see what we are capable of,” Andrews said. “Everything went according to plan, and it was a really good starting place.”
The club’s first showcase of the semester is a hip-hop and rap event on Tuesday, featuring two DJs and emcee Anderson Burrus, a senior studying communication media at NC State. Burrus is regular participant in the NC State Cypher. On Jan. 31, Burrus and several other rappers broke the Guinness World Record for longest freestyle by rapping nonstop for 12.5 hours.
“It’s been a lot of fun watching Wolftrax grow over the past year,” Burrus said. “It’s brought together a wide variety of students with different skill sets such as writers, programmers, designers, etc. and allows all of them to collaborate to put on shows such as the one on Tuesday, and when they asked me to headline one of their shows, I was more than happy to do it.”
The doors for the event will open at 7 p.m., with music starting at 8 p.m. The event is free to attend and will take place in the Talley Student Union ballrooms. Andrews said the event is focusing on hip-hop because that is the genre that most artists in the club focus on and the genre that most students seem to want to hear. Andrews said other organizations focus on other genres, such as the Country Music Association, leaving WTMG to focus on hip-hop, rock, rap and electronic dance music, or EDM.
The club is already hard at work trying to set up an EDM show for its next event. WTMG is hoping to partner with Hunt Library to run the event in the Visualization Lab but does not have a confirmation on this plan as of yet or a set date.
“It would be really cool to partner with Hunt because they have all the resources needed to run an EDM-type show,” said Griffin Matthews, a freshman studying business and WTMG’s treasurer. “They could also help with marketing, which would make it easier on us.”
The club is also putting together a mixtape to act as a collaboration between the different artists involved in the club and has already booked a recording session at Bull City Sound, a recording studio in Durham.
“We want to have a collective place where all the people from campus can share their music in a singular location,” Matthews said. “If that goes well, we might do more of them.”
Wolftrax Music Group will be hosting at least two more shows this semester including the EDM show in March and a rock show in April.
“We want to become a channel where students can access local music and also take their local music,” Andrews said. “Why should someone have to pay $70 for a ticket and drive to Red Hat or PNC when there is so much talent here?”