How did you join Bacchanal?
So, the funny story is I was here for days on campus my senior year of high school. I realized that Bacchanal was, by a stroke of luck, the day before my Days On Campus. I got here a day early, I had nothing to do, I didn't really know people in the city, so I thought, ‘I guess I'm just gonna show up.’ So, I showed up, and it was the last Bacchanal that was on campus prior to this one, back in 2019, with SOPHIE, Rina Sawayama and Tierra Whack. I just sat on the lawns and I thought, ‘this is really cool.’ I've played music all my life. I started piano when I was four, and guitar when I was seven, and I was coming to Columbia to study philosophy and music. I knew I wanted to - I had always been playing, producing, and performing - but I knew I wanted to explore the music business. More of the back end of what it takes to put out commercial music and facilitate other people's creative expression, and of course, festivals like Bacchanal. I got involved in my freshman year. I was on the press team. It was super fun! Things shut down for Covid and there was a lapse. I wasn't super involved in the online Bacchanal, but I was still following along. Then, in junior year, we started coming back to campus. I was really involved in the performing arts scene. I produce, play guitar, and put out music under the stage name wilchai. Playback had done a feature on me on one of my songs called Deluge. I was still in a bubble, and then Bacchanal put up a listing for a new secretary, and I was like, ‘yeah, why not?’ It seemed like the perfect chance to get back involved after a long dormancy period. I jumped back on board around December or January of last year and shadow-learned the ropes. The main thing I did last year was helping with the on-campus portion of things. I was also playing Bacchanal with Christina Li. Then we had elections last year, and I ran for co-President. I'd gotten encouragement and also feedback on a lot of ideas about how to really make Bacchanal into a vessel for a community based around music rather than just this one-off concert - to really bring it back home to the ultimate goal of pushing forward culture and community through music.
What specifically is your role within Bacchanal? What do you do for the club?
I'm the co-president along with Kofi Meighan (@fatherkofi on instagram). Our responsibilities are to get things in motion. It's largely leading our E-Board. We also work to create the vision and concept for what we want the concert, general body meetings and other event programming to look like, and what we want general body meetings and events to be like too. It tends to be a lot of facilitating, making sure everything goes right. Under the sphere of Bacchanal there's a lot of things that are delegated out to different groups. We have artist chairs who focus more on artist bookings, but Kofi and I have been super involved in that this year just because it’s fresh for everybody because we haven't had it on campus for such a long time. kofi and I spearhead what goes on and work with our e-board and everyone else down to our fantastic press team, publication Playback, design team and general body to execute. The biggest thing this year for me has been understanding the logistics of making an on-campus Bacchanal happen. Budget-wise, artist-wise, logistics-wise, with putting up a stage, signing contracts with artists, and getting in food vendors. Also making the general bodies more purposeful by inviting guest speakers like Grammy nominated producers or major labels - to having little activities and using Playback as a project to amplify people's writing.
How would you describe the Bacchanal community?
That’s definitely one of the things that’s been most exciting for me this year, one of the best parts about being co-President, has been the ability to help shape and nurture the Bacchanal community. It's definitely a tight knit team. People are really passionate about music, but it's not just performers - it's people who simply want to write about music, who want to talk about it, who know their favorite artist’s discography from top to bottom and want to express that love. We also have people who don't really know anything beyond their favorite artists’ first couple songs, and I think it's a really nice space for engaging in music in a huge variety of ways . Whether you’re a performer or a DJ who wants to play at one of our showcases, or someone who wants to learn more about how a concert runs, or someone who wants to write and interview artists on campus, there’s space for that at Bacchanal. I think it's been really fun to make a space for people to engage with music in a multitude of ways.
How does Bacchanal choose the artists? What is your process?
The process is largely driven by student sentiment, budget, and who is actually available. Obviously I can't disclose our exact budget, but having Bacchanal back on campus does mean that there is less money to go to artists just because of the nature of how this university runs. We have to be really, really scrappy with our budget, yet we try to book artists that we think will really please the taste on campus. There's a lot of students who are on the cutting edge of what's up and coming in music, which we really appreciate. We’re trying to book artists that satisfy our budget and cater to all the kinds of interests on campus. It's a matter of reaching out to artist’s agents, major agencies, managers and going through a large list of who's coming up and who we know people like. After that, finding out what’s their quote range and if they’re available - and then creating a cohesive lineup based on all those.
How does your team make the secret clues? Are they fun to do? Is it a lot of pressure?
Those are super fun! We'll be in our group chat from the moment we know that we're booking artists, and we're throwing out a ton of different, fun ideas. We try to make them hard at first because people on this campus are really, really clever. This year there was definitely someone who got every clue. It's always a matter of looking through things that would be fun. We try to do lots of references to pop culture, whether it's like the Hailey Bieber thing, or the elemental thing for Bakar. We have fun with it, and make it something that people can talk about with their friends, and also to flex their own music knowledge a little bit.
How hard is it for you all to keep the lineup a secret?
It's definitely hard, but I think this year our E-Board has done a great job of keeping it on the down-low. The funny thing is sometimes we don't know exactly who the artist is going to be. People think that we know from the beginning of the year, but things change super fast. Sometimes we'll think an artist is locked in and ready to sign, but then something changes, whether their price goes up because suddenly they go viral, or the timing doesn't work out and they have been swooped up for a tour, so we always have just had the mindset of rolling with the punches. Because of that, we want to keep it close to our chest in case things change. Even if we tell somebody, ‘it's X artist’ itt might not be that artist the next day. There have been some famous cases of other colleges booking artists and then them dropping out as late as three weeks before. A lot of it is just our team trying to prevent disappointment.
You have been with Bacchanal all four years of college, and have gone through four, very, very different Bacchanal experiences. What would you say your favorite memory is?
I loved playing Bacchanal with Christina Li. Mm-hmm. and opening. It's hard to beat that, it was a hugely enjoyable, fun and monumental experience for me. Honestly, one of my favorite experiences has been reviving the general body meetings and creating opportunities for people to get involved with music in whatever way they want. We had a really fun general body meeting a couple weeks ago where we played our version of music Jeopardy. It was a bit like Heardle, except in real life. That, I really enjoyed.We hosted a Bacchanal Bazaar in the fall, it was a flea market with student DJs, performers, and vendors all outside of Butler on the lawns. This can be a Ratrock exclusive - but there will be Bacchanal supported DJs playing at a club off campus, which is not an official event of Bacchanal, but more of a result of a communal push to make things happen, and create moments to engage with music on a community level. Things like that, genuinely, have been my big highlight.
If you could have your perfect - no budgets, no conflicts - Bacchanal lineup, who would your dream lineup be?
Off the top of my head, it would probably be Frank Ocean. I love jazz. If they could just raise John Coltrain from the dead and throw him out there, that would be amazing. I've always wanted to see Beyonce live. So it would be Frank Ocean, Beyonce, and John Coltrane.
Do you have any musical red flags? Is there a certain artist, or a certain type of music, that's a red flag for you? Also, any musical green flags?
I don't know about red flags. I don’t want to dump on anyone’s music taste. I feel like there are certain artists where they’re usually prefaced by, ‘oh, I know he has mad allegations, but I love him.’ That. It's like, okay, but why? For green flags, I love Dijon, and I've met a lot of people who like Dijon, who just have the best vibes recently, so that's gonna be my green flag.
What kind of energy are you hoping to see Bacchanal given it’s back on campus?
We really wanted it to be jubilant, high energy, and get people excited. I think, also, we're looking to have a space for people to relax and have fun, in a way that sometimes isn’t encouraged at Columbia, with everyone working really hard at a place that doesn't have a lot of large school-wide community events. It’s always been our goal to create community and a place for people to have fun.
How will you, personally, be spending Bacchanal?
I'll be working. Our call time for E-Board is 8:30 a.m., and I'll be at Low library getting things ready for the artists by 9:00. Once the music starts, though, I’ll probably be in the pits with everybody else.
I know a bunch of other E-Board members are gonna be wearing our merch, which we're going to be selling on the ramps. The T-shirts got a lot of love this year, I'm so glad people liked them. Shout out to our student designers.
Who are you listening to? What’s on your playlist?
What's on my playlist? I've been listening to a lot of Dijon, a lot of Nick Hakim. I really love R&B, so those two are big for me. There’s this artist I love called Jonah Yano, who does a kind of jazz fusion. I'm also in my singer-songwriter era, I love Leith Ross and Lizzy McAlpine. Also, a lot of cool, chill instrumental music. There's a band called Sault. One of our playback writers, Ty Nagvajara, just wrote a great article on them. I've been listening to the Bacchanal artists a lot too - I've been studying up. All of these artists have been on my rotation for a while, so it's also super special for me to get to hear some of these guys. Also, La India and Orion Sun.
Is there anything that I haven't asked you, or that we haven't talked about that you want to say?
I produce and I play guitar, and my stage name is wilchai. I put out a single in January, and was featured on something in February. It tends to be like R&B meets Indie, and I'll have something coming out in April with another Columbia student singing on it.
Also, some last words about Bacchanal, I'm super excited. I hope everybody has a really fun time, and I'm super proud of our general body and E-Board for pulling together and making this happen. They learned on the fly how to get this to be on campus, how to take the feedback from students about what kinds of artists they'd like. They put in a lot of hours, and are completely passionate about it.