MUSIC ‘It opened my mind to the possibilities of what music could be’

The Jefferson Park EXP concert series brings a wild diversity of sounds to a neighborhood library—and to the Internet.

By NOAH BERLATSKY

For her livestreamed concert in the Je erson Park EXP series last December, Chicago experimental musician Kimberly Sutton trained her camera on a pair of lit candles and several speaker cones of various sizes, resting on their backs like bowls and filled with water or sand. As the vibrations from the speakers increased, liquid and sand and flame started to tremble and flicker, forming restless and intricate interference patterns. Eventually the hums and throbs grew intense enough that the water began to bubble and spatter; you could see the sound leaping free of its cages and making a bid for freedom.

Keith Helt, 42, organizer of Je erson Park

EXP, has been coaxing experimental sounds out of their cones in Chicago for more than a decade. The live series has been running since 2017, and it arose from the work of a netlabel called Pan y Rosas Discos that he started in the late 2000s.

Helt grew up in Woodstock, one of the last stops on the Union Pacific Northwest Metra line. Like many a future experimental musician, he got interested in punk music early and started a band with a friend. “Aside from piano lessons, we didn’t know how to play any instruments, but we played what we had,” he says. “A Casio Rapman, some random pieces of metal, buckets, an old record player-receiver combo, cheap electronic toys, and microphones from Kmart.”

Helt moved to Chicago in 1998 to study writing at Columbia College; he also started playing guitar and putting together other bands. The most stable of these was the Rories, which he began as a one-person recording project in the early 2000s. The album Four in One Combine collects some of the Rories’ early output, which sounds like bedroom pop punk—if the bedroom in question were a hole in the ground lined with corrugated tin.

Helt put out Four in One Combine in 2008, the same year he properly launched Pan y Rosas Discos as a netlabel. It had started informally a couple years before, but at that point it was little more than a name to put on what he calls “slightly fancy” CD-R releases of his band’s music. Around the time of Four in One Combine , he decided CD-Rs were too much trouble and started just releasing Rories tracks as MP3s. It was so easy that he realized he could do the same for his friends.

The first non-Rories release, also in 2008, was an 18-minute live set by Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan, a noise project that included latter-day Rories bandmate Alejandro Morales. Later that year he released a fulllength by Black Math, a darkwave punk trio with keyboards and drum machine by Jimmy Lacy, a friend from library school. (Lacy went on to play in Population and currently releases music as Sip.)

All Pan y Rosas Discos downloads have always been free. Originally, that was because Helt didn’t see the Rories as a money-making venture. “We all had regular jobs, and our primary goal was to be heard,” he says. “We wanted people to hear our music and maybe come to our shows sometimes. So just making the music available and accessible was paramount.”

Pan y Rosas has no revenue and provides its artists with no compensation—just a curated platform and Helt’s labor. Over time, as the label expanded, its refusal to put a price on its music became a more intentional act. “The act of releasing music for free and in an organized way is resistance to capitalism, however small,” Helt says. The label, he explains, provides “a means for art to exist outside of capitalist systems. I like to think that in some small way it contributes to the development of envisioning new futures.”

As the label’s politics became more radical, so did its output. The Rories were based in rock and punk, but in the late 2000s, Helt began immersing himself in Chicago’s free jazz, improv, and experimental scenes. “I dreamed of being able to release music by these improv musicians I was getting really inspired by,” he says.

The label’s expanded purview includes the 2012 release String Theory by Chicago composer, cellist, and electronic musician Sarah