It feels hard to believe that winter is already over, but the early inklings of spring are already showing themselves: the jackets are off, the birds are singing, and, maybe most tellingly, there are shows to go to again. There is perhaps no greater musical happening in the entire country than what is going down at Levitation this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Thalia Hall in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood.
Levitation Chicago, entering its second year of existence, is actually part of a series of Levitation festivals put on by The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the people behind what used to be Austin Psych Fest. The move to make APF somewhat of a travelling musical event is a smart move by the group, who now have additional events in Chicago, Vancouver, and France where they can showcase some of the best psychedelic, experimental, & generally left-of-center music that the world has to offer. A 3-day music festival focusing on the weirder, wilder elements of music is a noble and risky pursuit, but to absolutely knock it out of the park with such a varied and consistent lineup shows an awesome commitment to bringing the midwest great music.
Here at WSUM we will be giving you a day-by-day writeup of what to expect from each day's lineup. Check back tomorrow for Friday's lineup, and the next for Saturday's.
LEVITATION CHICAGO- THURSDAY
ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
HEALTH
GARY WILSON
VAADAT CHARIGIM
EARTHEATER
HAUSU MOUNTAIN DJs
What a lineup!! If you aren't familiar with any of these names, there's a lotgoing on here. If you're looking into checking out one of the days and are interested in the weirder side of electronic music, this would be a great day for you. Kicking things off will be Eartheater, a genre-defying solo project from Alex Drewchin out of Brooklyn.Eartheater's RIP Chrysalis was one of the most memorable releases of last year: analog synth and drum machines creep up against eerie pastoral folk passages throughout the album, creating a sense of electronic-acoustic juxtaposition that somehow feels wholly organic and utterly unique. It'll be interesting to see how she pulls this off in a live setting. Repping Chicago throughout the night, the dudes behind the fantastic local tape label Hausu Mountain will be spinning in-between sets.
After Eartheater will be Vaadat Charigim, an Israeli shoegaze group that update the classic wall-of-sound shoegazing style with hooky vocal punctuations and memorable melodies. Gary Wilson will take the stage halfway through the night. The moment will be one of the most anticipated of the weekend: he's a cult classic that most in the audience probably never thought they would have the chance to see. Wilson released a lone experimental, funky pop-rock album in 1977 before fading into obscurity, only to become a deep underground favorite and emerge in the 2000s with new material. It'll likely be the most straightforward and danceable set of the night. Things will take a darker turn as HEALTH bring to the crowd their artful collisions of electropop and noise music. Their more recent work has a definite 1990s goth feel to it- consider this set an opportunity to break out those Tripp jeans still sitting at your parents' house.
Closing out the night is the unparalleled Oneohtrix Point Never, whose Garden of Delete was one of last year's most captivating and one-of-a-kind albums. Daniel Lopatin, the man behind OPN, sought out experiences, emotions and sounds from the cringeworthy trials of adolescence as influence for his most recent album. The result is a staggering work of electronic experimentalism informed by everything from spiked-hair nu-metal to Napster-ripped trance and IDM. The music ends up sounding like so much more than the sum of its parts. Lopatin's idiosyncratic compositional style and ear for sounds and phrases that simultaneously fascinate and repulse point toward brand-new, weird-as-hell horizons for left-of-center music, and the people behind Levitation Chicago couldn't have been more on-point in selecting their first headliner of the weekend.
