After getting over the weirdness that comes with a journalist’s prying into personal details, this week’s Wesceleb Chris Santiago ’05 divulged the diversity of activities, music groups, and costumes that interest him. From an experimental music collective to attending the local Baptist Church on a weekly basis, Chris’s passions are far from conventional. You may have heard him on his weekly WESU radio show, or perhaps seen him traversing campus wearing a homemade horse costume. In the end, Chris taught me some valuable lessons in our short interview, like that band members don’t have to be musicians and Baptists don’t have to be Baptized.
MC: So tell me about your experimental music.
CS: It’s a music collective.
MC: What does that mean?
CS: There’s not really one person who leads it, and there’s not a fixed group of people who do it. It’s always in flux.
MC: How many people generally perform at once?
CS: It’s been as many as 20 people, but sometimes it’s at two different locations happening simultaneously so it’s hard to say. And it’s been as few as one person, just playing silently.
MC: How do you play collective music silently?
CS: I don’t know. It’s not really silence. People call it silence.
MC: What instruments do you play?
CS: I don’t really play any instruments.
MC: But you play in bands?
CS: Yeah I play in three different bands and the collective, but I don’t play any real instruments. My friends play instruments. I have a friend who plays the oboe and a friend who plays the violin. One of my friends plays this three hole-puncher that she found. And ya know, parts of cars that we find and stuff like that.
MC: What is the collective called?
CS: It’s called The Vanderlip Collective. We call it that because Vanderlip was this American who told Lenin that he would give him a bunch of money because he was a millionaire. But he actually had no money at all. It was all just a joke, but he made it into all these history books. He’s just a trickster in history.
MC: What other bands are you in?
CS: The Black Hat Masters, Pregnant Rainbow and Fire Drill. I play the keyboard, but I don’t really know how to play the piano, I just drone on it.
MC: I heard you have some sort of horse costume that you wear?
CS: Yeah I got my picture in the Hartford Courant for that. I made this horse costume out of boxes duct tape, and I called it Rosenante. That’s the horse from Don Quixote.
MC: Tell me about this Baptist church that you went to for class.
CS: It’s called the Bethel Apostolic Church. It started out because I was in this anthropology of religion class, and I had to go to a local religious community to feel it out and see what my experience was like. I chose this church because they speak in tongues and have ecstatic experiences. It was so cool that I started going pretty much every week. They started calling me “Brother Chris” and “the missionary.”
MC: Did you ever feel pressure to—?
CS: To get the water baptism? Yeah they want you to. They think you need to be saved, but they’ll love you anyway. They want to love everybody. They’re just love. They’re great. They sing songs all together all the time.
MC: What else do you do at Wesleyan?
CS: I have a radio show that goes on in an hour. I try to freak them out but not always aggressively.
MC: How do you freak them out then?
CS: Subtly. Like with Albert Ayler. It’s more like an assault, but sometimes in a subtle way, not aggressive. I really like subversive art. Like poetry that undermines that which exists.
MC: Do you want to do radio in the future?
CS: I don’t know. If there’s one near me I’d like to get on it guess. I don’t really know what I want to do in the future. I’m looking at going to grad school for shamanism.
MC: What’s shamanism?
CS: It’s about travels within worlds and gaining power because of those powers.
MC: Are you shaman?
CS: No. I don’t think so anyway. I haven’t found a specific program for it yet. I’ve been looking at Naroba.
MC: Is there anything else unusual or interesting about you that you’d like to share?
CS: I feel like I’m dying sometimes. It’s just a general feeling. Like a conspiracy. There’s nothing you can do about it though really, you just gotta kind of keep going. And I saw a whole bunch of eyeballs and trees the other day. They were in the bark of a tree when I was running over to my friend’s house.
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