the Rice Thresher

Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Brandon Allport Will Rice College junior Josh Levin and seniors MJ Kwan and Kellie Simon are the Social Insects, the winners of this year's Battle of the Bands.

At KTRU's 17th Annual Outdoor Show on Sunday, Rice's population of music fans and lawn loungers might find themselves distracted from the buzz of mosquitoes by the sounds of some much larger insects. As the winners of this year's Battle of the Bands, also sponsored by KTRU, the eclectic trio of Will Rice College students known as the Social Insects ­­­- made up of senior Mary Jane "MJ" Kwan, senior Kellie Simon and junior Josh Levin - has embraced their newfound campus fame like a child dropped in a swimming pool: With surprise, flailing limbs and a grasp at what had seemed impossible. The Thresher invaded their practice session in Will Rice Room 204 to preview the Insects firsthand and is still scratching the itch.

Thresher: How did you get together? Have you played together in the past?

MJ Kwan: Once upon a time, I guess during my sophomore year, we played together a little bit.

Josh Levin: We made a song called "The Cell Song."

MJK: And then a semester passed, and I made some cardboard drums. Kellie started coming over more often and discovered the cardboard drums.

JL: And then we started playing, and we had this dream of sending in a demo to the Battle of the Bands, not even playing in the Battle of the Bands, just sending in a demo, and then they accepted us, and we thought it was a joke, and then we played in the Battle of the Bands and apparently we won? And now we're playing at the KTRU Outdoor Show? Wow, it sounds really weird when you say it like that.

MJK: Yeah, it's one of those "dream come true" stories.

Kellie Simon: It really is. I never thought I'd be in a band, and I never thought I'd play the drums, because I had just gotten my drum set.

Thresher: Have any of you been in bands before?

MJK: This is my first real band. I've played with other people, but I'm always their little fill-in. Guitar, bass … I started out playing classical piano and classical cello, and then senior year in high school, I started getting into other instruments … But we don't actually know how to play our instruments.

Thresher: What do you play?

JL: We all sort of play the same things, except Kellie does more drumming, and MJ and I do more guitaring, but we all play bass and the Fat Man. The Fat Man's the synthesizer that MJ made.

KS: MJ made the [wooden] bass, too.

Thresher: You're an Archi?

MJK: Yes.

This thing is the Fat Man, it's an analog synthesizer. It has two oscillators, and you can control them, and it has a filter and an amplitude thing. You can make it sound really glidey. My friend and I built this from a kit. It was like twenty hours of soldering. We soldered the "on/off" switch backwards, so now it's off, but it's really on, and the same with the other switches.

And the bass … Last year I was in the mandolin studio, which is a funny story in the architecture building, and this year I continued making instruments even though I wasn't supposed to.

Thresher: What genre are the Insects? Could you give examples of some of your songs?

The group sits in a circle taking turns giving short responses.

JL: Hip-hop.

KS: Folk.

MJK: Albanian.

JL: Country.

KS: Rock … pop rock.

MJK: Uhh, emo?

JL: [laughs] Double-experimental! Actually, we're single-experimental. :::KAI/ROS::: is double-experimental [according to the KTRU Web site for the Outdoor Show]. We didn't really say what genre we were, so they called us experimental, but then they called the other band "double-experimental" to differentiate-

MJK: Because they're probably way, way more experimental than we are. We also have a prog song.

JL: Also, part of our rap song is Gregorian chant.

MJK: We have a fake Russian song. Maybe we shouldn't say that because there's an actual Russian band playing. It's also not even Russian, it's Esperanto.

JL: MJ's an avid Esperantist.

MJK: The song is called

"S alikoko Roko," which means "Shrimp Rock."

"Tiu salikoko konas pli da rok 'ol mi.
Tiu salikoko venas roki tien ci,
El la maro, per grandondo.
Por salikoko roko pretigas la mondo."

It means, "The shrimp knows how to rock better than I do./The shrimp is coming here to rock out, from the sea on a giant wave./The world is preparing for the coming of the shrimp." And basically what happens is that the shrimp comes to the land and plays and becomes really popular, and the narrator's band gets destroyed because nobody cares about them anymore.

KS: Our rap and Gregorian chant song is called "Celestial Bodies," and it started on a car trip. It was called "Meow" at first because I was saying, "Meow, meow, meow, meow," making synthesizer noises. It gets crunk and hip-hoppish, but Josh said we should do Gregorian chants, so it starts in Gregorian chants.

MJK: She wrote the lyrics on a napkin at the 59 Diner.

JL: I would also like to note that the recording is not complete if you can't see her face while she's doing it. Because she gets animated.

MJK: Bread Dance is the song we probably do the best even though it is completely improvised … The song is Albanian, but not really Albanian.

KS: We like to assign nationalities to our songs.

JL: We always play it sitting on floor. For the rest of the songs, we rock out.

Thresher: Do you have any events coming up?

JL: On Friday at noon we play live on the air at KTRU. On Saturday we play JamFest at 6 p.m., and on Sunday we play at the KTRU Outdoor Show at approximately 2:30 p.m.

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