A total of six local bands are set to perform at Bassline this Thursday, Nov. 16 as a part of the first off-campus venture for the college’s Sessions @ 33 series. Among the line up are five bands of current and former Columbia students including No Shelter, Rotundos, Disco Lemonade, Deadbeat Daycare and Laceles.

Filmed and recorded at WCRX studios at 33 Ida B Wells Drive, Sessions @ 33 got its start in 2022 and has showcased a wide array of students’ musical talents in an intimate setting similar to NPR’s Tiny Desk series.

The series is headed by Tom Joyce, one of the college’s internship and career advisors, and Matt Cunningham, an assistant professor of instruction in the radio department and faculty advisor for WCRX.

The idea for the event at Bassline came about after Joyce and Cunningham saw the amount of opportunities that the series offered budding musical artists at the college. Sessions @ 33 hosted a live event at this year’s Manifest, but the upcoming event at Bassline marks the series’ first event off-campus.

“Instead of just our tiny little space in the radio station or down in Studio A at audio arts and acoustics, we’re actually gonna be at a venue—a live place,” Cunningham said. “Why stop at the station if we can do a live version of it?”

Joyce and Cunningham landed on the event’s venue through an ongoing connection with Columbia College alumni Slavic Livins (‘00), who currently works as an audio engineer and producer at Pressure Point Studios, which is connected to Bassline Chicago. After finalizing the venue for the event, Joyce began working on lining up various bands to perform.

“I started connecting with different bands that I was aware of on-campus that we’ve worked with before for Sessions [@ 33] and then there were a couple of newer bands, and it sort of all came together, which was really great,” Joyce said.

Freshman audio arts major Marlowe Shachory’s band Laceles formed earlier this semester and jumped at the chance to perform at WCRX for Sessions @ 33.

“We were kind of just working towards that, and then after our session, Tom [Joyce] came up to us and asked us to play this show,” she said.

The upcoming show at Bassline offers bands the opportunity to play in a venue much bigger than the studios at WCRX.

“These bands [get to] play a venue that’s a 250 capacity venue—that in some cases they might not have had a chance to play this early in their career,” Joyce said. “This also gives Bassline, which normally doesn’t do a lot of rock shows, the opportunity to have some good up-and-coming young talent.”

The opportunity for the bands to perform for a large crowd has prompted a strong sense of excitement for the upcoming show.

“Playing a 250 capacity room is big, and if all six of us bands are able to get that thing filled, it’s going to be crazy, it’s going to be cool,” Marcus Bailey of Disco Lemonade said.

In piecing together the lineup, achieving a diverse mix of sounds was a priority.

“There’s a lot of different genres [present] so it’s not the type of bill that most of these bands might be used to playing on, where it’s strictly in their genre,” Joyce said.

While preparing for their upcoming performances, several of the bands have been putting in extra work to make sure the show is as polished as possible.

“We’ve been really working our asses off just to make sure we put on a good show and have great energy,” Joaquin Braganza, a senior film major, said of his band Deadbeat Daycare. “We’re just excited, we’re happy to be here.”

Many of the band’s goals for the upcoming performance is to use the opportunity to showcase the very best of their talents.

“We always strive to make every performance we do better than the last,” Bailey said, who graduated from the college this spring with a contemporary, jazz, and popular music BMus degree. “We’re hoping to have some new songs to play for everybody, and we’re just looking to have a great time and rock out.”

No Shelter, Rotundos, Pure Intention, Disco Lemonade, Deadbeat Daycare and Laceles will each perform at Bassline Chicago, 2239 S. Michigan Ave. on Thursday, Nov. 16 at 6 p.m