Mike Benedetti's Interview, July 1999:
Music was always around when I was growing up--I guess I fell in love with it through my parents' record collection, and pretty quickly my own. I got a record player and some kiddie records for Christmas one year pretty early on. Soon after, I had appropriated a big box of my parents' old 60s pop 45s, and from there it was on to LPs--The Carpenters, The Who, The Kinks, some Motown stuff, a bunch of soundtracks, etc. My parents really instilled a love of music in me from an early age.
All that, I think, really paved the way for a massive appetite for music and sound, and on a different level, an appreciation of records as compelling objects apart from their role of sound deliverer.
High school brought the usual--REM, The Clash, Elvis Costello, The Cure, The Alarm, etc., etc., really opening up the doors to the world of weird music out there, and in turn opening my eyes to the whole commercial vs. non-commercial debate--something I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about in late high school and early college.
But college is where things really went over the edge. I pretty quickly gravitated toward the radio station, which really accelerated the process--having access to a huge library of music, old and new, let me switch into overdrive.
I literally went nuts when I took a look at the music library at WXDR, spending hours upon hours listening to and taping all the things I had heard of and never was able to hear, and probably more importantly, being led to plenty of things I had never heard of before. That sped up the process considerably.
My dorm just happened to be right next to the student center, where the radio station was, and I ended up spending lots of late nights digging through the stacks, digging up records from any band I could think of that I had heard of and wanted to hear. Connections were being made like crazy--this leading to that, and that leading to those over there. I was able to pack tons and tons of listening into a relatively short period of time.
It wasn't too long before an interest in weird rock and punk rock became a love of improvisation and sound experimentation.
Meeting people that had the same musical interests as me made it all click, and is what keeps it moving these days. That's what halana is about, to an extent--making connections with people who have similar interests, and also hopefully allowing others to make their own connections to what we're on about. Pulling together a community of sorts.