Contributors: Danette Chavez and Jen Bacher; Graphic: Clockwise from top left: Mike Reed (Photo: Colin Gahungu); Helado Negro (Photo: Steve Sym); Hannah Cohen (Photo: Alexa Viscius); Julianna Barwick (Photo: Steve Sym); Darius Jones Trio (Photo: Julia Williams); Photos courtesy of Sound And Gravity
When Condé Nast shut down the Pitchfork Music Festival, the festival he co-founded nearly 20 years ago, in 2024, Mike Reed immediately got back to work. The musician, composer, and bandleader is entrenched in the Chicago arts scene—in addition to being the founding director for Pitchfork, he’s also the programming chair for the Chicago Jazz Festival and he owns and manages events at two local venues, Constellation and Hungry Brain—and he wanted to put music front and center at festivals once again. And so Sound And Gravity, a five-day event that took place from September 10 through September 14 across six Chicago venues, was born.
That may sound like too tidy a summary for such an undertaking, but Reed quickly reteamed with Sima Cunningham, his “no. 2” in organizing Sound And Gravity, who also played a big role at the Pitchfork fest (and performed on the closing night of the inaugural SAG fest). They began their plotting with Hungry Brain and Constellation, of course, then continued to expand from there, but didn’t have to venture too far, adding North Side venues Beat Kitchen, Rockwell On The River Event Space, Judson & Moore, and Rockwell Patio (the latter three are all in one complex that overlooks the Chicago River). Reed told The A.V. Club he wanted to revive the vibe from “back in the day, the record store, the indie rock, sort of VFW halls,” of hanging with “this group of people and we’re into this one thing, and that’s enough. That’s the whole world.” Making a musical discovery together: “There’s not enough of that going on,” Reed said.
But the music festival scene in Chicago, like elsewhere in the country, is struggling. Several local fests have been shuttered in recent years, and attendance has waned more than waxed. Reed was well aware of this and the broader “shrinkage of arts organizations” in the city, but he compares the risk he took to “falling off of the second story, not off of a skyscraper.” Though it grew to feature more than 50 artists in its first year, Sound And Gravity’s scale was always meant to be more manageable than a Lollapalooza or Pitchfork; Reed and Cunningham were aiming for the vibe of a “Midwestern Big Ears” or the late, great CMJ Music Marathon. Those festivals, Reed said, “were much more specific about what they are. And now the bigger ones, I mean, look at what Lollapalooza was, [and] look what it is [now]. Coachella, the same thing. They’re just, I don’t know, they’re like shopping malls and some of the shopping malls close. Some will stick around, but there’s nothing special about it.” Part of the problem is that “Those events are not for music people, [they’re] for everyone else. The music is just the backdrop for the marketing.”
An A.V. Club staffer and contributor set out to the first Sound And Gravity festival to gauge the balance between art and commerce—Reed knows the festival has to be financially viable to move forward—but mostly, to discover new music while weaving in an old standby or two. Our paths intertwined throughout, though only one of us had the fortitude to make it into the five-timers club.
The Tara Clerkin Trio (Photo: Steve Sym)
Danette Chavez
I’ll admit it, I was the one who tapped out early. The work week caught up with me on Friday, so I am ashamed to say that I didn’t have it in me to travel up north to see Body/Head, Kim Gordon’s new duo with Bill Nance, on Saturday. I hear and accept your booing (though, in my defense, it was a 70-minute trek on public transit, coming and going!). But I chose my sonic adventure at random, doing my best to embrace the “discovery” part of the festival. I began my journey on Thursday with the Tara Clerkin Trio, an English jazz-folk group I was encountering for the first time. Clerkin’s lilting voice rose above the band’s airy soundscapes, which all made for the musical equivalent of an amuse bouche. I did see Helado Negro (real name Roberto Carlos Lange) taking in the show, hours before his own set that would close out the second night of the fest.
I moved in and out of shows for the rest of the evening, catching earfuls of William Tyler (familiar) and Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore (new-to-me). I then waited at the spacious Rockwell On The River concert hall to see Helado Negro, whose This Is How You Smilewas one of my favorite albums of 2019 (2024’s Phasor is even richer, and a bit more melancholy). His energy was just what the crowd (not just me) needed at 10:30 pm on a weeknight after walking back and forth across three to six venues. I was pleasantly surprised by the age range in the room, a real merging of Generations X, Z, and millennial.
On Friday, I let Jen, whose own “diary” you’ll find below, guide me through the lineup and venues. She has incredibly expansive tastes in music, which is key at a festival like this. We began the night with Edsel Axle at Hungry Brain, a skilled guitarist who also just looks impossibly cool.The avant-garde jazz of The Chicago Underground Duo was an early highlight, and not just for me. The room at Beat Kitchen was packed—when I left my spot to get a drink of water, five people took my place. But I did purchase Hyperglyph the next day. Next up was Nabihah Iqbal, a London DJ and musician I was listening to for the first time, who offered up some dreamy shoegaze. There was a spoken word vibe to some of the songs, which Iqbal rendered with great conviction.
Reed had told me part of the appeal of this fest is that it’s almost a “headliner-less event,” in the sense that headliners aren’t really determined by the festival: “Your headliner is whoever you’re going to go and see at 11.” In that spirit, I’ll say that Iqbal, who capped off the fest for me, was my other headliner. My final count was seven acts across five venues, and while I could have been more comprehensive, I absolutely tapped into the festival’s ethos, that of focusing on exploration (which was aided by wearing comfortable shoes).
Jen Bacher
Sound And Gravity’s “know before you go” email encouraged attendees to “include a few new artists” in their itineraries, and there were ample opportunities to do just that. Being a somewhat-regular to the city’s more experimental venues, there were plenty of locals I’ve seen before (including the great ensemble of Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, and Whitney Johnson), and with the lineup overlap I skipped some repeat local favorites to catch artists I hadn’t seen before. Some of the most rewarding sets for me personally were duos, several of whom don’t play together often, so in that regard the fest was a real treat.
The festival actually launched on September 10, but I was only able to catch some of Mute Duo‘s, possibly my favorite Chicago duo at the moment, set that day. The Rockwell Patio gave ample space to their expansive psychedelic sound composed of just pedal steel guitar and drums/percussion with an occasional synth base, and the neighboring cicadas proved to be a delightful impromptu collaborator.
Guitarists James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg hadn’t played out together in 10 years. I’m not sure if that was the reason behind the casual stage banter on Thursday, but I found Elkington’s quips over breaks as Salsburg tuned his guitar rather charming; it made the set seem more like hanging out in a friend’s very large living room. Not to be outdone in the department of chutzpah, at one point Salsburg’s young daughter decided she needed to be onstage; afterward Elkington quipped “We don’t know whose child this is. We have one on the rider.” Closing their set with a cover of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” was an absolute delight to this child of the ’80s and ’90s.
Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore were equally enchanting live—more layers of sound but still gorgeous melodies, and we all got a treat with Barwick’s impromptu rendition of happy birthday (playing two days at the festival for one’s birthday had to have been pretty special). One of my favorite parts of the festival was how all of the artists seemed genuinely excited to be there. I noticed Steve Gunn (whose performance I missed this go-round) catching several of the same performances, as well as Helado Negro (stage name for Roberto Carlos Lange), and Skyler Rowe of Mute Duo.
Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore (Photo: Colin Gahungu)
You’d think for as much as I loved Fugazi in college that choosing a Thursday night headliner would be easy, but I have really been digging Steve Gunn’s output the last few years (his collab with Bing & Ruth, Let The Moon Be A Planet, is achingly beautiful), and Helado Negro’s albums are a Sunday morning coffee listening go-to for me! But I caught Gunn a few years back and knew Danette was catching Helado so I went with The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis. I knew I was going to enjoy this performance but was not prepared for how intuitively Lewis’ sax fit with The Messthetics playing. The back-and-forth rock soloing between Lewis and guitarist Anthony Pirog was something I didn’t know I needed in my life, while the speed and slowing of the funk groove on That Thing just made sense.
Speaking of artists supporting other artists, as well as 10-year reunions, Chicago Underground Duo’s set was the fest’s first to hit capacity, and with good reason. Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor’s new album Hyperglyph is raucous fun spanning the spectrum of what one could call jazz, and the live performance matched if not exceeded that energy. The next act was the Jeff Parker Expansion Trio, made up of Jeff Parker, modular synthesis favorite Jerimiah Chiu (a former Chicagoan now residing in Los Angeles), as well as jazz scene drummer and L.A.-resident-by-way-of-Bloomington Ben Lumsdaine. Parker did what he does best, which is a very specific guitar tone, surrounded by wildly talented fellow musicians, making delightful improvised jams. The whole day at Beat Kitchen was an [unofficial?] International Anthem label showcase, and at both sets I found myself standing next to local labelmates.
There’s no shortage of captivating cellists in this town, and on Saturday, they were represented by Helen Money. I’ve come to really love watching live cello performances because while most of us think of the instrument as being played with a bow, maybe even strings plucked like a stand-up bass, we rarely consider how a musician can play it as percussion by knocking on the body. Money utilized all of the above, as well as industrial synth loops under her dark and deeply emotive, but ultimately hopeful playing.
Also at the Electrical Audio-curated stage, I caught most of Papa M’s (David Pajo) set. Surprisingly I never got into Slint but had a good friend who was a fan; despite not knowing any of the songs, this set still sounded so familiar. But the most transcendent performance of the fest for me was Rafiq Bhatia‘s. I had casually listened to maybe two songs of his in the week prior, and one (“Clearing, Crickets“) immediately struck me as achingly familiar. So I went into this set mostly unversed, but anyone who starts a performance with a loop of nature sounds has my full attention. With only a trumpet player, guitar/synths, and drums, the set ebbed and flowed across a sonic landscape. I still don’t understand how some of those sounds came out of a trumpet. And I don’t think I’ll ever understand how Bhatia pitch-shifted his guitar, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. I cannot wait to catch him live again.
I hadn’t planned on being part of the five-timers club, but with the last-minute announcement of sets by Finom (the aforementioned Macie Stewart and Sound And Gravity deputy showrunner Sima Cunningham) and The Big Gig (Mike Reed onstage to close out his own fest), well, I hopped on my bike and headed to Hungry Brain. I was rewarded with a stripped-down Finom set: just two guitars or guitar and violin, and two harmonious voices. Their performance for closing festivities made perfect sense, as Finom was born of Stewart and Cunningham seeing tons of music and saying to themselves “We could do that/We should try that!/What are they doing?!” Stewart and Cunningham shared a new song, with Reed joining them on drums to close out the performance.
I popped out to grab a drink with a friend nearby and missed the first song or two of The Big Gig but what a joyous room to walk back into. Bubbling jazz covers and a tired but still excited room of heads bobbing to six musicians on the modest stage (three of whom were playing saxophones). It was a lovely way to end an experimental new festival that I hope will stick around to put more new music on my radar. I’ll be at Constellation and Hungry Brain in the interim.
