A new student-created music magazine called “Griot” is set to release its first issue this month. The magazine will include a mixture of features and music reviews of new and upcoming artists and releases.

“The features include people’s personal opinions of music in general, the music scene, biographical write-ups of certain group … like we’re writing about Slum Village and the Detroit music scene,” said Austin Purnell ’08.

The first issue will include articles on topics ranging from album covers to salsa music to the black rock coalition. A large portion of the magazine will focus strictly on reviews of current and upcoming releases, including a write-up on the new Bun B album, according to Sam Ubl ’08. Ubl is serving as informal co-editor for the first issue.

“We’re trying to do stuff that is relevant at the moment,” he said. “Basically the only criteria is that it has to be relatively new and something that people care about … we want to create a voice within the Wesleyan community for the music that we all know we’re listening to but previously have not an expressive medium for.”

The overall content will have a broad focus, though, discussing a lot of national and international music, according to Omar Davis ’07, another collaborator on the magazine.

“There’s people writing about hip-hop in foreign countries…there’s a lot of world music,” Davis said. “It’s pretty much all corners of the earth, not just on the northeast. There’s a lot of different genres like folk, indie rock, hip hop, so there’s a good variety.”

Purnell had the initial idea of the creating the magazine. The effort now includes a core group of 10 to 12 other writers and contributors who have been meeting weekly. According to Ubl, the magazine will be more open with its submission policy for the next issue.

“We have a bunch of different people on the crew,” Davis said. “If you’re contributing, then you’re on the staff basically, but then there’s also a smaller core of organizers.”

There are also plans for an online version. The website may include the music written about in Griot available in streaming format for students to sample.

“On the website we hope to host our articles and various other components like Podcasts and web streams,” said Ubl. “It should be a whole multimedia onslaught.”

Future plans could involve expansion to include more resources related to Wesleyan, according to Owen Roberts ’08. Roberts is working on the magazine layout in addition to contributing written pieces.

“There were a lot of ideas thrown out at the first meeting,” Roberts said. “People were talking about a calendar of events [including] bands coming to Wesleyan and general music events. We also talked about advertising for [needed] student musicians … like classifieds, basically.”

Although Roberts suggested plans to release an issue as frequently as every month, Purnell said a large portion of the plans would rely on the interest generated by the first issue.

“We plan to have one every semester … but we’re going to let out the first issue and see how it goes; then we’ll go from there,” Purnell said.