How many times have you thought about recording those dormant songs, releasing them from your brain for the rest of the world to hear? How many times have you actually done it?

In an effort to encourage this sort of productivity, the Record Production Month (RPM) Challenge is daring bands across the world to record an album in twenty-eight days during the month of February. This is not a contest; rather, the RPM Challenge is exactly that — a challenge. Bands are asked to send their recordings to the Challenge’s headquarters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Participation in the Challenge spans the globe. A map on the program’s website is crowded with dots marking the locations of participating bands.

The Challenge is meant for everyone. No experience, expensive equipment or virtuosity needed. It is an invitation to take initiative.

“It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month…where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days…Maybe they don’t have Grapes of Wrath or Abbey Road at the end of the month — or maybe they do — but that’s not the point. The point is that they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear,” according to the Challenge website.

The request is for either ten songs or 35 minutes of recorded material, due by the first of March, to be posted on the RPM Challenge website. At this point, more than 2,000 bands have signed on to the Challenge.

Elizabeth Antalek, OC ’98, is volunteering to help with the logistics of the Challenge, and is also participating for the second time with her own band, Foxlove.

“We recorded in one long, rather miserable might — the last possible night — in [my bandmate Chris Greiner’s] kitchen, on a laptop, with multiple technical glitches that almost resulted in a white flag of surrender on our part. But, hoarse and cranky, we pulled through,” said Antalek, remembering her experience from last year.

“Since RPM, we’ve written more songs — with an eye to recording a more leisurely and considered album,” she said.

She encourages Oberlin students to sign up, for she feels that the Challenge is particularly relevant to students at Oberlin, “a place of creative ferment.”

“RPM might be an obvious fit for Oberlin students if it took place during Winter Term; and yet, I feel that the defiant achievement of recording a whole album in the first month of a new semester might be even more tempting,” she said.

Antalek says that the idea of the Challenge would resonate well with Obies.

 “It astonished me, the energy people had for projects and commitments above and beyond their classwork,” she said.

Citing impromptu performances in A-level during reading period as well as a particularly poignant concert, Antalek explains her reasoning:

“I went to one show that I’ll never forget, senior year, in an empty building down on South Main. I think most of the light in the room was ambient from the street, and this petite, fine-boned girl was at the microphone. She was — you couldn’t call it singing — keening the inexplicable refrain, ‘Flying ants! Flying ants!’” she said. “I wish I’d gone to more of those house parties.”

Since Oberlin, Antalek has become more personally involved in making music.

“I’m fond now of the scrappy, the makeshift, the homemade and I know I missed a lot of that energy [in Oberlin],” she said.

Antalek offered students this wisdom:

“Think about doing something for RPM, if not this year, then next – or set yourself other arbitrary parameters, give yourself some other crazy deadline. You won’t regret it.”