the sounds of adulthood, the hummusless grind

in his brain-rewiring performance, Anthony Pateras must've had all his equipment plugged into the same powerstrip as the lamp that rested on the table, because i couldn't take my eyes off the little flickers that fell in sync with some of the deeper bass frequencies grinding out of his synth rack. the most expansive sounds he could churn would suck some barely-noticeable light from the center of the room, and during an immersive piece that at times felt both weightless and impossibly heavy, both intimate and distant, it reminded me of the finite power allotted to this room, the finite waves of the sound, the finite number of people in the room.
in a move that was at best foolish and at worst legitimately destructive to my ears on a longterm scale, i sat in front of a speaker, and was really taken with how anthony's ability to snake frequencies
directly into the pit of my ear, like they had nested and curled against my eardrum. hearing the tiny oscillations in each tone rub up against each other... he had engineered a real physical proximity to sound.
anthony is a startlingly friendly man (he approached me for some mystifying reason!) with an ambiguously australian-esque accent and who is easy to picture eating a pastrami sandwich at a deli (this is NOT some lazy code for jewishness; it more indicates a humility, i.e. a willingness to publicly undergo the overstuffed-sandwich-collapse insides-out-the-back catastrophe that no deligoer is exempt from, to be a world-class electroacoustic musician who appears at a deli suggests a warmth and self-deprecating dignity. plus i don’t think pateras is jewish as a.) his name is genealogically untraceable and b.) i am not optimistic about the jewry of australia.)

i met him last night after the show, which was at Lampo. lampo occupies a curious and potentially infuriating space between elite, hibrow gallery space (women with large stones for a necklace or segmented gold watches) and young diy noise venue (men with psych rock t-shirts and troublingly soft mustaches). you are equally likely to find people invested in chic design firms as you are people with stick and poke tattoos; for this it is not unlike RISD, and similarly it poses eternal questions about the merits of institutionalized art spaces. the event, which took place in the #1 wealthiest neighborhood of chicago in an opulent historical building, was (literally) gatekept, and occupied primarily by people who wouldn't necessarily feel out of place within its gates. what does it mean for "fringe music" to be reserved for people well-accustomed to it? it pulls any urgency from the music, which by nature is physical, immediate, urgent, powerful, and potentially empowering and rests it down to enter a "tasteful palette." who knows. this is in no way a diss of anthony pateras, who is making great work for a great audience... like anyone attending a recognizably-named university, i am just reconciling how endeavors like this fit into the real world. how many of us there were... "adults"?

while i was briefly hit with a wave of lucid self-consciousness while grabbing multiple glasses of wine, i also maintained a confident air of adulthood when i found myself engaging in "map talk" with some other chicagoans. i went to the show with my new friend Eliza, who says things like "indeed" and has a brain that is probably 1000 times bigger than mine. having just graduated, they are now inescapably an adult but seem to have figured it out for the most part. we stopped at HALAL GUYS but HALAL GUYS was out of both hummus and pita, which is a betrayal that is so devastating beyond words that the blog post stops here.