Elastic Arts

09/12/2026

This Sunday evening Ritual Rhythms Chicago presents an evening of ritual journeys through transformation and transcendence, exploring death and rebirth through music, storytelling, and dance. Featuring Secrets of the Beehive, Mehtab Kirtan’s Death Songs, and dancers Kitty Khaos, Noori, and Stacy.

Led by Jason Winslade, the founder of the Beehive, on vocals, shruti box, melodica, and percussion, Davis Krieg on guitars, Brett Taylor on acoustic fretless bass, and Julian Daniell on drums and native flutes, and joined by special guests Mehtab Kirtan on additional percussion, Allison Hill on cello, Maya Williams on violin, Heather Engholm on backing vocals, with dancers Kitty Khaos, Noori, and Stacy manifesting the stories through dance, Secrets of the Beehive will bring to Elastic Arts the culmination of seventeen years of songwriting and storytelling, borne from the rituals and bonfires of the American Pagan festival experience.

The evening will begin with a performance of Death Songs, a new improvisational project by Mehtab Kirtan, exploring the journey to the beyond, featuring the haunting vocals of Ultra-Violet Archer. We will also feature art by Caskets and Co and tarot by Storm Orion Dolente.

09/11/2026

TONIGHT!!

Tonight’s CLEAT Series features three sets from Chicago artists, with a duo from Steve Reidell & Tim Kinsella, solo set from Alexander Panos, and the duo Squonk.

Steve Reidell makes music with/as The Hood Internet, Air Credits, Surgery Boys, Volutus Records, and plays the bass for Black Moth Super Rainbow & To***co. He also composes music for television & film, and has recently made a foray into creating multichannel soundworks. Tim Kinsella plays in the groups Kinsella & Pulse, LLC & Who Is The Witness? & has previously played in the bands Joan of Arc, Owls, & Cap’n Jazz. Steve & Tim decided last New Year’s Eve that it’d be fun to make something together for the CLEAT system, and this is their first collaboration.

Alexander Panos is an electronic musician and sound designer whose work examines interior life and the structures of longing that shape it. The hard-won release of his debut album, “Nascent,” has garnered acclaim across the electronic music landscape and beyond. Rare sound palettes, deconstructed speech, and impressionistic atmosphere converge to form a highly personal musical language. The result resists definition, and moves fluidly between technical precision and emotional openness.

Hedra Rowan (born 30 September 1984) is a British singer and songwriter and a founding member of the girl group Squonk alongside Nicole Alonso. With Squonk, she has had six number-one singles and two number-one studio albums, making them one of the most successful-charting British pop acts of the 21st century. Rowan was fired from the group in September 2009 and was replaced by Jade Ewen, but returned to the group in 2012 with the original line-up.

Music will kick in a bit after 8! Join us!

09/11/2026

Afrofuturist Weekend XI is October 1-4 throughout Chicago + 100% FREE to attend. Join us!

Elastic Arts' 11th annual AfroFuturist Weekend is a FREE 4-day celebration of forward-looking music, art, and performance that envisions radically positive futures for Black people. Citywide in West Garfield Park, Bronzeville, Humboldt Park, Logan Square

09/10/2026

TONIGHT!

Join us for a unique free jazz meeting featuring two leading Croatian improvisers, an unconventional double-drum-and-bass trio with Chicago powerhouses, and a quintet convergence that promises to be explosive! This is the first-time appearance of this trio featuring Jacob Little Cloud Fawcett and Tyler Damon on drums, with Andrew Scott Young on electric bass. The three have appeared together previously in various incarnations around the city and beyond.

8:30 pm:
“Gregor Samsa” - soprano sax, keyboards
“Karlo Rossmann” - double bass

9:15 pm:
Tyler Damon - drums
Jacob Little Cloud Fawcett - drums
Andrew Scott Young - bass

10:00 pm: Damon + Fawcett + Rossmann + Samsa + Young

09/10/2026

Join us this Sunday for the closing of current visual gallery exhibition ‘quiet as it’s kept’ curated by Harlem West. It will be a final opportunity to see the work, but also experience a film screening of ‘Suzanne, Suzanne’ by Camille Billops. Please join us! The event is free and open to the public. Doors at 1pm.

Film: 1:15pm
Artist Talk: 2:30pm

09/09/2026

Join us Saturday for a multi-genre Printers Row offsite event featuring performances from Casts, Norman W. Long, and Akjai, and readings from local small press authors, including Kathleen Rooney, Téa Jones Yelvington, and Robert Kloss (Always Crashing), Aug Stone, Scott Laudati, and Benjamin Niespodziany (Maudlin House), and Jessica Anne, Emily Capers, and Timothy Moore (Long Day Press). Doors at 7pm, free admission but donations accepted!

09/09/2026

Join us Saturday late afternoon for our final outreach event of the summer at South Merrill Community Garden! We’ll have Naydja Bruton’s Rhythm Ninjas, udochukwu anidobu, and Amari Amai. Naydja Bruton & The Rhythm Ninjas are a drummer lead ensemble. The music is centered around healing and storytelling. Naydja believes that music is a vessel to building community and community is the key to healing and positive change. Her hope is that when you walk away from her show you feel energetic and hopeful about all that can be possible if you just follow your heart. 

OFF SITE AT
South Merrill Community Garden
7030 S. Merrill Ave. Chicago, IL 60649

09/08/2026

This Friday’s CLEAT Series features three sets from Chicago artists, with a duo from Steve Reidell & Tim Kinsella, solo set from Alexander Panos, and the duo Squonk.

Steve Reidell makes music with/as The Hood Internet, Air Credits, Surgery Boys, Volutus Records, and plays the bass for Black Moth Super Rainbow & To***co. He also composes music for television & film, and has recently made a foray into creating multichannel soundworks. Tim Kinsella plays in the groups Kinsella & Pulse, LLC & Who Is The Witness? & has previously played in the bands Joan of Arc, Owls, & Cap’n Jazz. Steve & Tim decided last New Year’s Eve that it’d be fun to make something together for the CLEAT system, and this is their first collaboration.

Alexander Panos is an electronic musician and sound designer whose work examines interior life and the structures of longing that shape it. The hard-won release of his debut album, “Nascent,” has garnered acclaim across the electronic music landscape and beyond. Rare sound palettes, deconstructed speech, and impressionistic atmosphere converge to form a highly personal musical language. The result resists definition, and moves fluidly between technical precision and emotional openness.

Hedra Rowan (born 30 September 1984) is a British singer and songwriter and a founding member of the girl group Squonk alongside Nicole Alonso. With Squonk, she has had six number-one singles and two number-one studio albums, making them one of the most successful-charting British pop acts of the 21st century. Rowan was fired from the group in September 2009 and was replaced by Jade Ewen, but returned to the group in 2012 with the original line-up.

09/06/2026

This Wednesday September 9th our Elastro series welcomes electronics composer Hunter Brown back to Chicago, alongside Elastic debuts from chelliah and Stereotypewriters.

Brown will present Machinic Auto-Affection 1: Voice, a custom cybernetic speech-synthesis system that explores the speculative potential of the inner voice to reconstruct sonic memory and hallucinate new auditory phenomena. Drawing on the phenomenological concept of auto-affection, this work stages the inner voice as a synthetic, self-modulating process shaped by vocal utterance and self-perception.

This voice’s outputs are not necessarily semantic or linguistic; they emerge as abstracted representations of internally perceived sound, modulated by external stimuli and shaped by the interaction between the synthetic voice and the machinic ear. The system combines vocal-tract modeling, machine listening, spectral decomposition, and hallucinatory resynthesis to render a machinic voice that can generate, hear, and transform itself.

chelliah is the moniker for Chicago-based electronic musician Erin Thomas. She creates techno, electronica, and ambient music rooted in sonic worldbuilding — using modular synthesis to explore digital worlds through pattern, texture, and repetition.

Stereotypewriters is a brand new duo from George Nsapo and Nicole Alonso.

Join us Wednesday 9/9 @ 8pm!

09/02/2026

Join us one week from today Wednesday 9/9 as our Elastro series welcomes electronics composer Hunter Brown back to Chicago, alongside Elastic debuts from chelliah and Stereotypewriters.

Brown will present Machinic Auto-Affection 1: Voice, a custom cybernetic speech-synthesis system that explores the speculative potential of the inner voice to reconstruct sonic memory and hallucinate new auditory phenomena. Drawing on the phenomenological concept of auto-affection, this work stages the inner voice as a synthetic, self-modulating process shaped by vocal utterance and self-perception. This voice’s outputs are not necessarily semantic or linguistic; they emerge as abstracted representations of internally perceived sound, modulated by external stimuli and shaped by the interaction between the synthetic voice and the machinic ear. The system combines vocal-tract modeling, machine listening, spectral decomposition, and hallucinatory resynthesis to render a machinic voice that can generate, hear, and transform itself.

chelliah is the moniker for Chicago-based electronic musician Erin Thomas. She creates techno, electronica, and ambient music rooted in sonic worldbuilding — using modular synthesis to explore digital worlds through pattern, texture, and repetition.
Stereotypewriters is a brand new duo from George Nsapo and Nicole Alonso.