“Oh shit, are you okay?” I ask. John Paul Thompson is sitting on a crate outside the WHPK studio in the University of Chicago’s Reynolds Club, and it’s beginning to crack.

“Oh, yeah.” He laughs, and readjusts his weight. Thompson has a great laugh. It’s a deep throat laugh, the cock-your-head-back-and-slap-the-knee sort.

Thompson, a first-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, runs the Pandarosa Record Company of Cedar Hill, Texas, just outside of Dallas. He is also the man behind the two concerts (Peter and the Wolf, the Dodos) held earlier this year in his dormitory, Shoreland Hall. The Thompson brothers, Joseph, David, and John Paul, brought the Pandarosa together about five years ago. Today, it is almost exclusively run by John Paul. Read the rest of this entry »

“Peter and the Wolf” refers to a single artist named Red Hunter, who performed a show in Hyde Park last Thursday night with a duct tape-patched guitar and a keyboard synthesizer. His clothing was similarly nonchalant, and his laid-back appearance anticipated his friendly rapport with the forty to fifty member audience. At 9:30 (the scheduled start time) there was no one but the show’s organizer in the ballroom of the University of Chicago’s Shoreland Hall dormitory. But people gradually gathered and by the time he began, the audience had grown enough to not be embarrassing, yet remained small enough to still remain relaxed and comfortable. Though the size of the Shoreland Ballroom dwarfed the group that had formed around the stage, it proved to be a great venue. The echo of the sound in the immense, mostly empty space disguised the quality of the old and well-used equipment, which only became really apparent when Hunter announced “this one’s a jam,” or “this one starts with a beat,” and added a synthetic rhythm with his outdated Casio to the otherwise simple tune and vocals. Read the rest of this entry »