COURTESY MATADOR RECORDS
In a sort of recurring rite for rock nerds and aficionados of music in whatever form, the beloved indie band Yo La Tengo will field requests and wing their way through them live on the radio. As part of a fundraising drive for WFMU, a superb listener-supported station hearable via 91.1 FM and online from Jersey City, New Jersey, the stunt transpires, in all its likely rambling, shambling glory, on Saturday March 18 from 3 to 6 p.m.
The members of the band are famously omnivorous in their tastes and predilections, and they have delved into interconnected worlds of art too, with projects focused on the history of futurist visionary R. Buckminster Fuller and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose 1920s- and ’30s-era movies, often of mesmerizing underwater scenes, put him in contact with the Surrealists.
Requests can be logged in advance with donations promised via WFMU’s online portal. Stumping the band can be something of a parlor game, so think hard. A few modest proposals, to maybe catch a spark: the Hoosier Hot Shots’ “I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones,” Grace Jones’s “Walking in the Rain,” and “Nothing” by the Fugs.