Small Talk: Andrew Choate; Killradio DJ & Author

Andrew Choate has a pretty interesting Southern accent, has a crazy good book that comes with a CD and he plays good music on his show at Killradio. We thought we'd talk to him before his show tonight at 9 p.m. where he will be focusing on Swedish hip-hop.

What is KillRadio and what does your show's title, The Unwrinkled Ear, mean?

The Unwrinkled Ear is my shorthand for the notion that all sounds and musics are equal - you just gravitate and go towards the ones you like best. I like to picture the ear as a flat horizontal line with it's natural wrinkles dancing and shimmying above it. Sometime I'll get a designer to logo it for me.

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Killradio is a Los Angeles collective of activists and DJs devoted to non-commercial radio and independent media. It started during the DNC convention in LA in 2000 and has grown and morphed since then. We have meetings twice a month and all decisions are made by consensus. We have a lot of documents, including our mission statement, here: http://www.killradio.org/aboutus.php

There's also an aural killradio history I put together a couple of years ago. Warning: it's pretty dry! (but I was just learning how to use the audio software. And it's got a nice background track by Cul de Sac)

Tell us about the Swedish hip-hop you are going to play tonight.

I saw Daniel Skoglund (aka 8 Tunnel 2) - an amazing Swedish musician/DJ/sound artist - perform at the Wels festival in Austria in 2003. A little while later, I decided to try and get hold of a record of his and the only way I could was through a Swedish hip-hop and DJ site. Since I was already having to pay ridiculous shipping, I decided to try a couple of Swedish hip-hop LPs too. Timbuktu was one of the ones I ordered and the dude just floored me. I contacted the Juju label that puts him out and hit the motherlode. I'm also gonna play some Organism 12 and the band Ar Snook. ALL these folks have phenomenal articulation with pitch-perfect production. The Snook boys use brass samples like cheerleadewrs use pom-poms!

Was your recently published book, Langquage Makes Plastic of the Body, inspired by living in Los Angeles?

The place you are in - mentally, physically and spatially - is always going to influence your artwork. Living in LA, I started to think about self-advertising and so I ended up incorporating jingles and signs into the book, and thinking about non-human personalities wanting to advertise themselves: birds, computers, etc. "Hullabaloo Addict" is a good example of that. It's a short song:

When you have visitors from out of town, where do you take them in LA?Il Corral definitely - it's one of the best live music venues in the country, and they don't go four days without having a show worth seeing.

The taco truck at Sunset and Marion for the 4 pastor tacos special! Only 3 clams! Plus, they're there till at least 2 am every night, spices just right, and you get so many pickled veggies you can cook up something jazzy later too.

Gotta go to Elysian Park too - there are so many great little semi-hidden spots in that park, and there's one path that curves around with views that equal Mulholland Dr. and you don't have to fight off feelings of financial inadequacy to experience it! And when you're with me and we pick a spot you get to throw frisbees to my frisbee-addicted dog.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is also a real must - perfect combination of humor, art, and science: it is reality in its most real form.

And my favorite place in all of Southern California: Noah Purifoy's environment of sculptures in Joshua Tree. There's just nothing else like it, and there are so many great sculptures made from purely scavenged materials. Overwhelming every time, and always changing.