MUSIC

the awesome Ed Paschke Art Center,” he says. “But my general impression was that the vibe here was largely ‘Live and sleep in Je erson Park but drive elsewhere for anything else.’ I really wanted to help improve that situation by providing some music activity up here, since that’s what I have experience with.”

Helt was already a regular patron of the Jefferson Park library when he approached its sta about booking live music. He’s a fan of libraries in general, and works as an archivist in his day job. He thought the library would be a perfect venue to provide free concerts to people of all ages, including those not able to get out late on weeknights.

Branch manager Eileen Dohnalek was enthusiastic about the idea too—though she says that a handful of older patrons were initially a little taken aback. Sta have tried to be careful to put up signage so people will know that the library is going to be less quiet than usual.

Many patrons have appreciated the chance to hear something different, though, and Dohnalek has too. “For me, the first performers, in March of 2017, were the most memorable, mostly because the music was so di erent than what I would define as music,” Dohnalek says. “It opened my mind to the possibilities of what music could be, beyond traditional genres like rock, folk, or classical.”

Sarah J. Ritch gave the first performance on March 18, 2017, playing cello and electronics. Helt uploads video of Je erson Park EXP concerts to Vimeo, and during Ritch’s set you can occasionally hear a child’s exclamation from o -screen. The space, Ritch says, “is surprisingly great for intimate, quiet sounds, and also can handle the louder feedback.” The audience is typically a mix of experimental music fans who’ve come for the performance and people who just happen to be in the library. “You might think that the people who just wandered in would turn around and leave,” Ritch says. “But they always stick around, which is really nice.”

One of Helt’s favorite entries in the series is a 2018 performance by Chicago video artist and poet Shrine, aka Sara Goodman, assisted by fellow Chicago experimental musicians Jim Jam and Alexander Adams. Goodman’s work involves the projection and manipulation of nostalgic video, and it fits with comfortable eeriness into the library space, evoking school slideshows and educational programming from decades past. Grazing deer roam around the screen, but then the gentle nature-special visuals dissolve into drippy rainbow patterns; meanwhile, ambient throbbing and barely audible voices suggest teachers and PBS narrators gathered for a meeting in a distant boiler room.

Jefferson Park EXP hosted in-person concerts roughly once per month until the library closed for renovations in summer 2018, and it had only just resumed in late 2019 when the pandemic shut it down. Its livestreams, which began in July 2020 via Twitch, have been more irregular—sometimes three in one month, sometimes none for two months. Helt has hated losing neighborhood audiences and face-to-face interactions to COVID restrictions, but moving Je erson Park EXP online has created possibilities and opportunities too. Kimberly Sutton’s speaker-cone installation probably wouldn’t have worked as a library concert, for example; you need to be up close to see the liquid and sand shaking and trembling.

The shift to livestreams has also made it much easier for Helt to invite performers from beyond Chicago. Lauren Sarah Hayes was back in Phoenix after her first live tour when lockdown arrived in March 2020, and she loved the idea of being able to perform for an audience in some form. Her half-hour Je erson Park EXP concert in November 2020 takes full advantage of the format to create an audiovisual assault. The screen shifts and segments with colors and e ects, through which you can sometimes see Hayes speaking into a microphone or manipulating what looks like a video game controller to create power-electronics squalls and blasts of noise. Even further afield, Mariela Arzadun, aka Florconvenas, contributed a performance from Buenos Aires in August. She soundtracked a series of overlapping abstract visuals and nature videos with minimalist electronic patterns evolving into drones—it’s like watching some ominous extradimensional life cycle.

Helt is still working with Chicago artists too, including one of the newer additions to the Pan y Rosas catalog. Helt found self-taught noise musician Helena Ford on Bandcamp and reached out, and her album Wir Brauchen Angst. Und Schade. came out on the label last November—the same month she appeared on a Je erson Park EXP livestream.

The album’s 13 drone tracks total more than two hours; the longest is more than 15 minutes. The length, Ford says, is a way to “expose to my listeners what it’s like to be going through the process of becoming transgender, or what it’s like being transgender.” Each track is sometimes crystalline and lovely, sometimes hammering and painful, evoking a process that seems to go on forever.

Ford is relatively new to the Chicago experimental scene. She grew up here but didn’t start creating noise music till she was in college at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. She graduated in 2018 and returned to Chicago, and since then she’s self-released most of her music—so when Helt contacted her through Bandcamp about putting out an album, she was thrilled. “It was a huge, huge honor,” she says. “I really felt like I achieved something by releasing something through an established record label.”

“Experimental music is a really diverse space that allows people to break away from the conventions of academic classical music, and really allows people to get involved in their own thing,” Ford continues. “And I think that’s really wonderful.”

The next livestream is Sunday, April 25—a return engagement by Argentinian artist Mariela Arzadun and a set by Chicago multiinstrumentalist Reid Karris. It’s followed on Sunday, May 2, by performances from two Chicago acts, indie-pop four-piece Impulsive Hearts and guitarist Cinchel. Helt hopes to restart the library concerts when COVID is controlled. He’s already musing about ways to continue including faraway artists, perhaps by projecting streams for library patrons as well as booking in-person performers. Whether that’s possible or not, Pan y Rosas Discos and Jefferson Park EXP will keep going for the foreseeable future, opening minds and splashing unusual sounds around.