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This Saturday Asian Improv aRts Midwest and Juliann Wang present an evening of music and dance, bringing her own unique brand of modern practice while paying homage to her roots. The night will feature her group My Little Realities, an experimental sound and alt-jazz collaborative. Bridging traditional motifs, poetry, and improvisation across multiple genres. Working with a collection of Chicago’s engaged innovators (Ben Zucker, Graham Nelson, Evan Kopek, John Rozman), they create inspiring moments of shared dialogue and expression, both composed and spontaneous. She will also be presenting a dance piece for this event. You don’t want to miss it! Join us this Saturday, doors at 8pm

Friday’s Elastro series features visiting audio/visual artist Jason Zeh, a new duo Ancient Futures (Scott Rubin and QūJié), and HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG.

Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization. Zeh’s work grapples with the scraps at the edge of meaning: the noise and errors that are in the margins of any message.

Ancient Futures investigates clay-shaping as performance. Humanity has been creating ceramics for over 10,000 years, forging complex lineages of values, beliefs, and social structures that continue to document ordinary life. As the saying goes, clay remembers everything. The artists transform a pottery wheel into an electroacoustic audio-visual experience. Using a collection of modern and historical tools, the artists blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual; past, present, and future; calling into question our engagements with modernity, and how we hide from it.

HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG is an audiovisual performance exploring potential timelines through nostalgia, retrofuturism, glitch, and machine feedback. Through analog and digital signal flow, the work treats glitch as a time-traveling method, allowing fractured images, unstable sounds, and recursive media systems to open memories, unrealized futures, and alternate potentialities.

Friday’s Elastro series features visiting audio/visual artist Jason Zeh, a new duo Ancient Futures (Scott Rubin and QūJié), and HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG.

Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization. Zeh’s work grapples with the scraps at the edge of meaning: the noise and errors that are in the margins of any message.

Ancient Futures investigates clay-shaping as performance. Humanity has been creating ceramics for over 10,000 years, forging complex lineages of values, beliefs, and social structures that continue to document ordinary life. As the saying goes, clay remembers everything. The artists transform a pottery wheel into an electroacoustic audio-visual experience. Using a collection of modern and historical tools, the artists blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual; past, present, and future; calling into question our engagements with modernity, and how we hide from it.

HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG is an audiovisual performance exploring potential timelines through nostalgia, retrofuturism, glitch, and machine feedback. Through analog and digital signal flow, the work treats glitch as a time-traveling method, allowing fractured images, unstable sounds, and recursive media systems to open memories, unrealized futures, and alternate potentialities.

Friday’s Elastro series features visiting audio/visual artist Jason Zeh, a new duo Ancient Futures (Scott Rubin and QūJié), and HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG.

Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization. Zeh’s work grapples with the scraps at the edge of meaning: the noise and errors that are in the margins of any message.

Ancient Futures investigates clay-shaping as performance. Humanity has been creating ceramics for over 10,000 years, forging complex lineages of values, beliefs, and social structures that continue to document ordinary life. As the saying goes, clay remembers everything. The artists transform a pottery wheel into an electroacoustic audio-visual experience. Using a collection of modern and historical tools, the artists blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual; past, present, and future; calling into question our engagements with modernity, and how we hide from it.

HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG is an audiovisual performance exploring potential timelines through nostalgia, retrofuturism, glitch, and machine feedback. Through analog and digital signal flow, the work treats glitch as a time-traveling method, allowing fractured images, unstable sounds, and recursive media systems to open memories, unrealized futures, and alternate potentialities.

At this Thursday’s Improvised Music Series Hedra Rowan and Nick Meryhew’s Tallulah Bankheist performs improvisations on an EWI. Tommy Carroll then leads a new ensemble called Original Medicine. Tallulah Bankheist’s music is fully improvised, and embraces the unpredictability and weirdness of technology pushed to unlikely limits. It’s usually chaotic, often funny, and sometimes bad (in a good way).

Carroll is a Chicago-based drummer and composer working primarily in the areas of modern jazz, folkloric percussion and electro acoustic improvisation. He showcases his jazz compositions with the Tommy Carroll Quartet and explores groove-based improvisation with Prosthetic, an evolving group that features a combination of electronic and acoustic instruments.

8:30 pm: Tallulah Bankheist
Hedra Rowan - EWI
Nick Meryhew - the same EWI

9:30 pm: Tommy Carroll’s Original Medicine
Preyas Roy - vibraphone 
Maggie Cousin - woodwinds 
Chandler Browne - udu and taps 
Andrew Scott Young - bass

At this Thursday’s Improvised Music Series Hedra Rowan and Nick Meryhew’s Tallulah Bankheist performs improvisations on an EWI. Tommy Carroll then leads a new ensemble called Original Medicine. Tallulah Bankheist’s music is fully improvised, and embraces the unpredictability and weirdness of technology pushed to unlikely limits. It’s usually chaotic, often funny, and sometimes bad (in a good way).

Carroll is a Chicago-based drummer and composer working primarily in the areas of modern jazz, folkloric percussion and electro acoustic improvisation. He showcases his jazz compositions with the Tommy Carroll Quartet and explores groove-based improvisation with Prosthetic, an evolving group that features a combination of electronic and acoustic instruments.

8:30 pm: Tallulah Bankheist
Hedra Rowan - EWI
Nick Meryhew - the same EWI

9:30 pm: Tommy Carroll’s Original Medicine
Preyas Roy - vibraphone 
Maggie Cousin - woodwinds 
Chandler Browne - udu and taps 
Andrew Scott Young - bass

Join us Tuesday night for the release show for Casts new album ‘Desire Path’. When Joshua Bohnsack began an experimental psychedelic therapy for treatment-resistant depression, he began making music to guide his sessions. As a writer and folk musician, Bohnsack had to learn how to communicate without words. Known for his work with Gold Dust, Bohnsack revived his Casts moniker and took to synthesizers and digital production. Through months of testing, Bohnsack explored what was most effective in the moment and helped in recovery the following days. This music became the concept album Desire Path, named for the rewiring of the brain. The resulting music is meant for both introspection and ego death acceptance.

We’ll have an opening set from Chicago-based experimental vocalist, sound artist, technologist, educator, and Elastic curator Paige Alice Naylor. Through sound-making and performance, she investigates the dissolution of time, the breakdown of language, and themes of death & rebirth by way of multichannel sound installation, electronically processed voice, tape loops, handmade electronics, field recordings, text scores, poetry, and repetitive, layered production. She will perform a few new studies for amplified and processed piano and voice through the 16-channel CLEAT system.

Music at 8pm!

Tonight’s the night!! The 8th Annual Elastic Arts Benefit!

If you haven’t grabbed your tickets yet, there are still some available online and we’ll definitely have some at the door. Join us for a full night of performances, food, drink, silent auction, and celebration. We celebrate all of Elastic Arts’ community, but we’re honored to be presenting the 2026 Elastic Achievement Award to the prolific and influential composer/musician/arts leader Renée Baker.

Emerging from and deeply rooted in the legacy of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Baker’s leadership contributes to the ongoing evolution of creative music as a living, self-determined practice—one that insists on autonomy while remaining in dialogue with broader cultural institutions.

Her early and formative institutional work includes her role with the Chicago Sinfonietta, where she served for many years as Educational Coordinator and developed Project Inclusion. During her tenure, she also founded and developed the Chicago Sinfonietta Chamber Orchestra, creating performance series that expanded beyond traditional concert halls into major cultural spaces. 

Baker is also a prolific composer whose output spans more than 2,000 orchestral works, with a particular specialization in film scoring—especially for race films and global silent cinema. She is the creator of over 32 operas, including the Baldwin Chronicles, a quartet honoring the legacy of James Baldwin, as well as operatic works exploring the political, social, and artistic significance of Josephine Baker, foregrounding her as one of the first Black women to achieve global visibility on her own terms.

There is so very much more to celebrate in Renee’s career, so please come out tonight to learn and create a long lasting relationship supporting her work here in Chicago. 

We’ll see you tonight at 7pm!

We can’t wait for you to experience the incredible AACM Percussion Ensemble here at our annual benefit this Saturday! Time to grab your tickets and join us!

The AACM Percussion Ensemble explores a groundbreaking fusion of rhythms and sounds. Instruments such as The African Talking Drum, Mbira, Djembe, Himalayan Singing Bowls, Cajon, Diddley Bow, flute, and saxophone will weave together the vibrant traditions of the past and the innovative spirit of the present, all under the banner of Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future. For this performance the ensemble includes Taalib-Din Ziyad, Fred Jackson Jr., Art ‘Turk’ Burton, Dushun Mosley, and Avreeyal Ra.

Grab your Elastic Arts 8th Annual Benefit tickets today, and join us this Saturday in celebrating our community. Tix link in bio!

TONIGHT!!

We have a special show this evening featuring Corey Smith’s new work ‘Essay on Resonance’ with an opening set from Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew’s Heavy Tiny project!

‘Essay on Resonance’ is a 50-minute solo performance by Corey Smith, a Chicago-based performance artist and composer. The work unfolds as a live essay in sound, speech, light, and shadow, exploring resonance as both a physical phenomenon and a guiding metaphor for trans embodiment. At the center of the work is the hammered dulcimer, an American folk instrument whose particular resonant characteristics are conceptually deconstructed and electronically manipulated. The piece scaffolds itself around the dulcimer, straddling the lines between performance lecture, shadow puppet show, pop concert, and ambient musical encounter. Meaning emerges through an accumulation, as sound, body, and space begin to vibrate together.

Heavy Tiny (Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew) create a dense miniature world of field recordings, synths, walkie-talkies, and found objects that feels bigger inside than out. We’ll get started at 8pm. Join us!

We’re closing in on this Saturday’s Elastic Annual Benefit, and we’d love to see you here! Your support goes such a long way in making all the magic happen throughout the year. Among all the great things happening here Saturday, we’re honored to have Elastic co-founder Sam Lewis and Hunter Diamond present their performance work “Praiseworthy: An Intelligent and Prompt Negro - A Railroad Disaster Averted.” It is a story from Sam about his great-great grandfather, Phil McBride. Told using a crankie-style illustration scroll, with sound design and musical accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Diamond, this piece has been performed in Chicago at the Smart Museum, for the Nasty Brutish and Short series, the 2024 National Puppet Slam in Atlanta, the 2026 Baltimore Crankie Festival, and the 2026 New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival.

Grab your benefit tickets today! Ticket link in bio!

This Tuesday we welcome Mehrnam Rastegari for her Chicago debut with a Persian Music Salon. Presented by People of Rhythm and BIYA BIYA, this culturally rooted evening features a traditional set of Iranian music. Steeped in the sweet vibes of an intimate salon, the night also centers local musicians, poetry, and a mini arts market.

Chicago based soloist and vocalist Farnaz Khosh-sirat opens the night with classical Iranian singing wherein she traces memory, longing, and what is quietly hoped for. In performance, she leans into the delicate thresholds of being human, letting tenderness, ache, and devotion rise.

NYC-based Persian musician Mehrnam Rastegari is a master Kamancheh player, singer, violinist, and award-winning composer whose sound pushes Persian music into bold, modern directions. Her work threads Persian microtonal tradition through rock, psych, and contemporary styles, creating performances that feel deeply expressive.

Yasmin “Yasi” Zacaria Mikhaiel, Iranian-American cultural producer and multi-disciplinary artist emcees the night. We’ll see you at 7:30PM Tuesday night!

We have a special show this Wednesday featuring Corey Smith’s new work Essay on Resonance with an opening set from Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew’s Heavy Tiny project!

Essay on Resonance is a 50-minute solo performance by Corey Smith, a Chicago-based performance artist and composer. The work unfolds as a live essay in sound, speech, light, and shadow, exploring resonance as both a physical phenomenon and a guiding metaphor for trans embodiment. At the center of the work is the hammered dulcimer, an American folk instrument whose particular resonant characteristics are conceptually deconstructed and electronically manipulated. The piece scaffolds itself around the dulcimer, straddling the lines between performance lecture, shadow puppet show, pop concert, and ambient musical encounter. Meaning emerges through an accumulation, as sound, body, and space begin to vibrate together.

Heavy Tiny (Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew) create a dense miniature world of field recordings, synths, walkie-talkies, and found objects that feels bigger inside than out. We’ll get started at 8pm. Join us!

Join us Monday night for an evening of bass clarinet music hosted by Tommy Shermulis, a bass clarinetist, clarinetist, and saxophonist currently based in Chicago, Illinois.

As a versatile musician, Tommy is the 3rd/Bass Clarinetist for the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, the founder of the Delicious Bass Bass Clarinet Choir, and the bandleader of the Elite Four Jazz Band. Tommy is also a member of the electronic synthesizer duo Ooobin & Goobin, the cumbia band Exodo Kumbiero, and subs with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

As an experienced educator, Tommy has taught lessons to students from the ages of 3 to 85 in both one-on-one and group settings. Tommy’s goal as an educator is to create a healthy music community where everyone is allowed to express their art freely while also achieving their own musical and personal goals.

Music at 7pm!

$FREE ADMISSION$

We have prepared another incredible silent auction this year for our 8th Annual Benefit! There is gorgeous art from our Elastic community, concert tickets, food/drink experiences, an amazing ‘record store’ with excellent bundles, and so much more. The auction went live today Friday May 8th and will run until 11pm on May 16th. Head to the auction page to check out the items, bid, and win. This year we’ve teamed up with Ensemble Dal Niente who are having their annual fundraiser the same evening right across the street. Not only can you buy a joint ticket to both events at the link below, but there are many items in the auction that will support EDN’s mission (EDN items are marked). The auction goes a long way to support both organization’s programming and artist community, so it’s a win-win for all. BID TO WIN! Link in bio to auction.

Big thank you to our label donors: Amalgam, Curio, Drag City, Hausu Mountain, Intakt Records, International Anthem, Nessa, Numero Group, Orange Milk Records, Relative Pitch Records, Relay Recordings, and More!

Big thank you to our silent auction donors: Lisa Slodki Design, Blick Art Materials, Cristal Sabbagh,  Allen Moore, Lewis Achenbach, Jeffrey Sanderson,  MCA , Bang Bang Pie, Bim Bom Studios, Wolfbait & B-girls, Sleeping Village, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Field Museum, First Ascent Climbing & Fitness, King Spa & Sauna,  Music Box Theater, Salt Shed, Old Town School of Folk Music Tickets, A Night at the Lamberson House Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago Architecture Center, and More!!