Elastic Arts, 3429 W Diversey #208, Chicago, IL (2025)

10/07/2025

This Thursday the Improvised Music Series pairs up with Amalgam to celebrate the local label’s 10 year anniversary with a 3 day festival that kick’s off October 9 here at Elastic Arts. The evening will open with a solo set from Emily Beisel, followed by the duo of Carol Genetti and Peter Maunu, and closing with the electronics duo Paradise Complete (Bryn Davis / Nick Meryhew.) Music at 8:30pm!

Emily Biesel - solo bass clarinet + electronics

Carol Genetti - voice, electronics
Peter Maunu - guitar, violin, mandolin

Paradise Complete
Bryn Davis - electrionics
NickMeryhew - electronics

10/07/2025

THIS WEEK AT ELASTIC ARTS!

More festival events in this wild festival season w/ Ear Taxi + Amalgam, Roger C Miller solo set (of Mission of Burma!), Joy Guidry bassoon/electronics set, Adi Newton on CLEAT (of Clock DVA!), and our final Outreach Program event of the season! Join us!

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8 | 7:30 PM
Ear Taxi Festival: Taxi Concert ft. Black Moon Trio, Alyssa Arrigo & Leila Bowie McClenahan

THURSDAY OCTOBER 9 | 8:30 PM
Improvised Music Series x Amalgam: Emily Biesel + Genetti/Maunu + Paradise Complete

FRIDAY OCTOBER 10 | 8:00 PM
CLEAT Series: The Anti Group, Matar, Illusion of Safety, post doom romance

SATURDAY OCTOBER 11 | 8:00 PM
Elastro: Roger Clark Miller, Joy Guidry, Mountain Laurel

SUNDAY OCTOBER 12 | 12:00 PM
Elastic Outreach Program: Dark Matter Resident Eva Supreme
*This Event is Off-Site @ James Stone Freedom Square, located at 3615 W Douglas Blvd in Chicago, IL 60623*

10/06/2025

The Ear Taxi Festival presents its Taxi Concert at Elastic Arts this Wednesday Join Alyssa Arrigo and Leila Bowie McClenahan as they present works by four brilliant local composers, many inspired by Chicago’s rich history and poetry. Chicago: Living History brings together compositions that reflect the city’s dynamic stories. The Black Moon Trio performs Convergence: Health Equity in a Changing Climate, exploring environmental racism and health inequities through music, illustration, and videography, highlighting the resilience of affected communities.

Performers:
Alyssa Arrigo, piano
Leila Bowie McClenahan, voice
Black Moon Trio:
Khelsey Zarraga, violin
Parker Nelson, horn
Jeremy Vigil, piano

Tickets are available at the door

09/28/2025

TONIGHT! Employees Only presents GOTHIC KING COBRA at 7pm!

In memory of Joshua Fay Saunders (1991-2025), a.k.a. prolific YouTube personality and metal musician Gothic King Cobra, Employees Only will host a rare in-person screening of the internet documentary cult classic GOTHIC KING COBRA (dir. Joel Patrick a.k.a. trappped, 2014) at Elastic Arts on Sunday, September 28 at 7pm. Saunders’ cock-sure ramblings about life, death, s*x, and drugs while working as a Wendy’s employee in Casper, Wyoming are forever iconic. The hour-long doc will be preceded by the 16mm short SWEET SAL (1979, 25 min) by Tony Buba. A unique counterpoint to GOTHIC KING COBRA, SWEET SAL takes us decades back to visit upon another eccentric rambling man. In this film, a street hustler named Sal Carulli likewise embraces the small stardom of being a doc film subject, mirroring Saunders’ arrogant, strange, and existential musings against a backdrop of economic devastation. The 16mm print of SWEET SAL is provided by Chicago Filmmakers, whose Picture Start Collection has been repaired and organized this year by local filmmaker, projectionist, and curator Ben Creech. Special thanks to Ben Creech, Michael Metzger, and Chicago Filmmakers.

7pm - tickets available at the door!

09/27/2025

TONIGHT is night two of our 2025 Elastro A/V Festival, curated by Yousif Alzayed. The program is titled ‘Expanded Cinema Performances’ and features three acts of video projectionists combined with musicians and movement artists. Each of the three acts will be utilizing the 16-channel CLEAT speaker system, along with multiple projectors and installations, in order to activate the spatial qualities of video and sound. This will be very special. 8pm! TONIGHT!

Lineup:
Yousif Alzayed
Fahed Albreiki
Ruby Que
IPH
Kat Bawden
Ryan Garvey
Adam Rosenblatt

09/26/2025

Tonight is the first evening of our 2025 Elastro AV festival, curated by Suspended Culture. The collective is ‘presenting a new project inspired by mermaid and water folklore. We see this curation as a great opportunity to collaborate on some experimental sonic and visual expressions surrounding Black people’s connection to water, spirituality, fantasy and mythology. They’re thinking about how “otherness” finds home and transcendence through lore and fantasy. And what are the ways that historical and ancestral knowledge has been, and can continue to be, transferred through storytelling? How can we forge alternative futures by highlighting the past or nonlinear patterns formed through time?
We really look to the history of maroons to provide context, reflections and pathways to liberation practices that provide refuge from effects of everyday capitalism + colonialism.’

Suspended Culture has invited a wonderful ensemble of artists to present three unique AV sets starting at 8pm.

Set 1: Claire Staples, Carissa Lee, Sun Lynn, Andres L Hernandez

Set 2: Zoe Butler, Kezia Waters, Sam Thousand

Set 3: Allen Moore, Najee, Jupiter Brown

09/26/2025

This Sunday is our next edition of Soft Power! Angela James and Sarah Clausen will combine guided meditation, simple movement/breath work, and improvised ambient sound for deep communal relaxation. Guest musicians are invited with each session, with this week featuring Jordan Wright + Meredith Nesbitt. Participants will bring their own yoga mat and blanket to lie down comfortably on the floor and rest together. No experience or skill necessary, the goal is to unwind together and tune the parasympathetic nervous systems through breath and gentle sound.

09/25/2025

Saturday is Night Two of our 2025 Elastro A/V Festival, curated by Yousif Alzayed. The program is titled ‘Expanded Cinema Performances’ and features three acts of video projectionists combined with musicians and movement artists. Each of the three acts will be utilizing the 16-channel CLEAT speaker system, along with multiple projectors and installations, in order to activate the spatial qualities of video and sound. This will be very special. 8pm Saturday

Lineup:
Yousif Alzayed
Fahed Albreiki
Ruby Que
IPH
Kat Bawden
Ryan Garvey
Adam Rosenblatt

09/24/2025

We’ve made it to another Elastro A/V festival where our Elastro series presents two days of audio and video installations and performances from a wide range of local audiovisual Chicago artists! Night one is curated by the prolific collective Suspended Culture.

‘A Suspended Culture is a culture on pause, a movement interrupted, a dream deferred. As a collective of visionaries, their work together inhabits the liminal space of a dream. Time is no longer necessary here; rather, time collapses into an ever-expanding radical presence. In a Suspended Culture, they play. They rehearse the future and we invite love to bind us to what liberates us.’

The collective has invited Claire Staples, Andres L Hernandez, Zoe Butler, Sam Thousand, Allen Moore, and Najee to perform. Join us Friday at 8pm!

09/23/2025

Small groups with big avant sounds! This Thursday’s IMS hosts genre-shapeshifting trio Filament on tour from NYC, and welcomes Philadelphia-based guitar Matt Shuff, collaborating with local mainstay percussive boundary-pusher Tyler Damon. See you there!

8:30 pm -Tyler Damon (drums) & Matt Shuff (guitar)

9:30 pm - Filament

Alex Carter - saxophone
Tobe Tsuchiya - piano
Danilo Randjic-Coleman - bass

09/22/2025

For our second CLEAT Series event of September this Wednesday, we feature two A/V duos exploring spatial sound, Transsonic + Senem Pirler & Monica Duncan.

Transsonic is an experimental transmedia duo that creates immersive site-specific performances and installations bridging the vibrations of light and sound through technology. The duo investigates the ontology of music beyond sound and the possibilities of transmedial listening. In Fluid Ontologies, Transsonic continues to expand their intermedial artistic practice in performances. For this project, they develop their laser feedback instruments, using lasers as sound sources and solar panel microphones, as well as a musical agent system that uses machine learning for interaction and latent timbre spaces. With the incorporation of multichannel spatialization, Transsonic extends the spatial dimensions, sonically and visually, creating a unique audiovisual experience. The project explores and defines new concepts of the instrumentality of light in audio circuits, putting space, bodies and instruments into one dynamic feedback system. Transsonic’s Fluid Ontologies is presented with support from the Goethe-Institut’s Music Division.

Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan’s Surface Connection explores the concept of q***r space, the non-human, and their relationship to bodies through a series of audiovisual intra-actions where we touch/excite surfaces and objects. Through this performance, we investigate the question of how “q***ring” happens when non-human and human bodies interact with one another in a complex audiovisual ecosystem. By amplifying the vibrated surfaces (such as a reflective mylar) through close-up cameras and microphones, we “disrupt” the assumption of how bodies move in space, and we “deviate” bodies from their normative representations and their linear paths.

Elastic Arts

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