If there’s one thing a journalist should always hope to be able to do, that thing would be to interview those people they find interesting and are a fan of.

Thanks to Illage Vidiot Studios, a new entity that’s grown within the Charlotte area through spotlighting DIY bands and sharing their performances with the world via YouTube & social media, RF20XX got the chance to show love for one of our favorites, Once Below Joy, by filling in as a guest host for the August 17 broadcast.

What is Illage Vidiot Studios though? They, much like Welcome To The Family Booking (formally Fest), or RF20XX, are a product of the same environment that our music scene is made of. One day, we all had an idea to do something amazing to support the community we were a part of and ran full force with it using whatever we had available to make those ideas work.

Going from housing a storage area and small skate ramp in his garage, Josh Bero, Director and Project Manager, along with the IV crew, transformed the area into a performance studio. Each part of the team is filled in with friends that see local live music the same way Bero does, including Adam Buskirk (Technical Director), Jon Sistare (Post Production Editor), Brian Buhlinger and Leon Richardson (Camera Operators). Stevie Sahuttske, Bero’s partner, would join the crew in more recent episodes as the core host, alongside her roles as Creative Director and Stage Manager.

For Charlotte music community members, many of the names that have come through to grace the Illage Vidiot stage will be very familiar. Veterans such as Heavy Liquid, Boy A/C, Leo Wolf, and The Phantom Friends, as well as relatively new collectives like blankstate., Pleasure House, Nathan Harris & The Flood, and Once Below Joy have already performed for the cameras in the year the studio’s been in operation.

So what was it like hosting? Amazing! It hasn’t been something that RF20XX has done live much, and it was the most fun we’ve had in quite some time. For how much freedom that was had in selecting and providing questions relevant to the band, and having a band perform for a handpicked audience, it felt like something uniquely special was happening there on August 17.

Almost every Sunday night, starting around 7:30pm, viewers can expect a new band to come to the studio’s location within one of many suburbs in Charlotte. Bero & crew will fire up the equipment, Sahuttske will grab her mic and cue cards, and magic will be reinvented as the audience gets to know their next favorite artist in a setting accessible to all.

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This week, on Sunday, August 24, Shankai and The Goonie Tunez will perform live on the Illage Vidiot YouTube channel. If you want to see it go down, subscribe to the channel and hit the Notification button to be alerted when the show starts up!

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ALERT! WE’VE UPDATED OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!! CHECK OUT WHAT’S NEW AND GIVE US A FOLLOW! PERFORMANCES, INTERVIEWS AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN COMING ON A WEEKLY BASIS (CHECK OUT WHAT WE’VE ALREADY ADDED THIS WEEK)!!