In her hopefully long-lasting column “Stanford Sonar,” Micah Chung ’30 interviews random Stanford students about their favorite artists and most pressing recommendations.
Hello ladies, gentlemen and all in between! Welcome back to the “Stanford Sonar,” your biweekly stop for music recs from the Farm!
I’ve got some bad news. Your favorite columnist caught the infamous frosh flu. There’s even more woe to this tragedy: instead of the customary five, I could only interview three people for this edition. Turns out coughing every other sentence doesn’t make people inclined to chat with you at all, let alone about music.
However, I am now in okay-ish shape and will resume your regularly scheduled programming!
My first brave interviewee, Gavin Ahumada ’30, is an ever-virtuous Frosh Council member and was sick himself. I asked him my three usual questions:
- Who is your current favorite artist?
- What is your favorite genre?
- Any music recs for the Farm?
“My current favorite artist is The Weeknd,” he told me. “I love songs that you can sing to, that you can dance to, that are upbeat…but sometimes [I like] The Weeknd, which is almost dark R&B…I’m really down for whatever if it’s danceable.” Ahumada crowned pop, specifically sing-along pop, as his genre of the moment.
As for recommendations, Ahumada’s advice to students was simple: check out Spanish-language music! “Latino, Latin American pop, reggaetón, you can’t go wrong,” he told me, as I was in the middle of hurling up half of my lungs in the hallway. Ahumada pointed to Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro as artists to tune into.
After my interview with Ahumada, my illness sharply worsened, and in a cruel twist of fate, I was bedridden during Halloweekend. It was a bummer, but at least I could catch up on schoolwork. Turns out germs are scarier than ghosts.
Like any self-respecting college student, I scrolled Instagram Reels until I felt better. Once I did, though, I made it out to Democracy Day, where the fabulous Faye Cholthichanta ’30 allowed me to ask about her favorite music! One quick interview in Branner Hall later, I gained a wealth of musical recs to share with you all.
Cholthichanta, an aspiring jazz pianist, named Ryo Fukui as her current favorite, a Japanese jazz pianist of the 20th and early 21st centuries. She added that Fukui’s “Mellow Dream,” the opener to the album of the same name, is a song she’s currently working on, and named the album “Scenery” as a prime recommendation. As if that wasn’t cool enough, Cholthichanta showed me her incredible jazz skills on a keyboard in her room!
As for her favorite genre, Cholthichanta had a simple answer: all of them! “Literally every single genre,” she said, “jazz, other times I go to R&B — Japanese R&B was something I was really into over the summer — and then I started getting into black metal. I just have these cycles or phases where I go through rock, metal, jazz, pop, R&B…”
Feeling pretty confident in my recovery, I returned to FloMo after Democracy Day, optimistic that I’d soon be able to chat it up with people all around campus again. But you know what’s a really cruel twist of fate, dear reader? I’ve got asthma, which means that after getting sick, I still cough for around a month as it flares up!
But as always, there’s one group of people who I can always count on to be welcoming: the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band! Mostly because a ton of members are also sick, but that part is less important.
The stupendous Sophie Hu ’30, a lovable LSJUMB member, was also happy to overlook my cough and chat with me. Hu told me that her current favorites are Glass Animals and Ren Gill, two artists that she described as “pretty different vibes.”
When I asked Hu to name a favorite genre, she replied, “I listen around. I like musicals, I like alternative, I like things with good instrumentals, so there’s like [a] good drum beat, then guitar, but not too heavy. So like, mild rock, mild punk.”
As for recommendations, Hu wants you to listen to Chalk Outlines, an emotional and hauntingly performed collaboration between the already-mentioned Ren Gills and the UK-based singer-songwriter Chinchilla.
And with that, that’s a wrap for the second edition of the Stanford Sonar! My personal recommendation for the Farm today is The Bean Tones! This jazz quartet out of LA went viral for the pun-laden pick-me-up that is “A Trout, No Doubt” and has released multiple singles and albums since. If you’re a fan of vocal jazz and enjoy instrumentation that walks the fine line between virtuosic and expressive, check them out!
Now, this intrepid reporter is going to put off folding her laundry in the hopes that it’ll fold itself.
If you’d like to be interviewed for the Sonar, reach out at [email protected].