"Chips, Changes and A Cappella"

The Woldmon Theater at 112 Norton is strikingly large when it is empty.

On Monday, it seemed particularly vacant, save for a dozen young men making the most of the acoustics in the 300-seat lecture hall.

The Buffalo Chips enter their ninth year much in the same way as the previous eight, a mix of goof balls and serious musicians - often the same people playing both roles.

Like most college guys they make fun of each other, tell jokes, the occasional handstand elicits some response from the group, but mostly the conversation returns to their upcoming auditions and the annual End of Summer show at 8 p.m. Saturday.

This show will be the last hurrah for Brian Anger, a departing member of the group and UB graduate of the class of 2003. Anger said he hopes to fill 350 of the 370-seat Student Union theater where the free show is to be held.

For a group born in 1995, known for a short time as Cadence, UB's only all-male a cappella group spends a lot of time figuring out how to afford recording time for their upcoming CD - due out sometime around their Valentine's Day show -performance space, and their after-show parties.

The mood, tense during financial discussions, changes to a lighter tone as they discuss what type of singers to take.

"For all the stuff you relied on Marc for last year," senior tenor Eugene Lubliner says to sophomore tenor Evan Lloyd, "there will be two new guys will be relying on you."

No pressure.

"We're a different type of a cappella," Lubliner said. "We're not like any other group. At Cornell they'll stand up in tuxedoes and do the same Billy Joel song as everyone else. We'll dress in drag and do Maya Angelou poems,"

"We're different because we're not barbershop," said departing senior Marc Stellrecht.

"And we're hot," quips Joe Stellrecht, Marc's sophomore brother.

The End of Summer show, along with being the final performance for both the elder Stellrecht and Anger, acts as a tool to fulfill several of the Chips' needs.

"It introduces us to freshmen," says senior music director, John Taylor.

"It also sells CDs," adds Lubliner, and it allows us to "recruit anyone by eliminating the charge. That way we can get more people to go."

The group loses two high tenors this year in Stellrecht and Scott Kornberg, who graduated in May, as well as bass Anger and baritone Brian Pustolka, who transferred out of UB. Auditions, held over the next two weeks in 112 Norton Hall, will decide who replaces them.

"It's difficult to find tenors and basses," Lubliner said.

The Chips are more than just song - their stage performances include sketch comedy, audience participation and video montages.

"I've seen the group in the four years I've been here," Lubliner said. "We started out strongly performance-based and moved to insanely difficult arrangements. Now we're swinging back to the performance, something that most a cappella does not concentrate on."

"Our goal is to have fun on and off the stage," Taylor said, "and have the audience have fun too."

The Chips are now in a time of transition, but realize that their continued success depends on what comes next and not resting on their laurels.

"If we think it will go over," says junior tenor Steve Balesteri, "we'll do it."

That attitude largely captures the group's energy, an energy that justifies itself in the ensemble's musical experimentation, technical proficiency and desire to have fun.

For their part, the Chips are keenly aware of who they are and their role on campus, and when the members speak of themselves, words like "brotherhood" come up. But so does the term "gefilte fish." The bar of solemnity has been set.