Chicago’s Experimental Music World Gets a Vivid Portrait as Levi Dayan Maps the City’s Genre-Crossing Underground

CHICAGO, IL — Chicago’s reputation as a music city runs deep, but Levi Dayan’s new piece for The Quietus argues that the real story is how many scenes coexist at once. From experimental jazz and ambient work to rave music, footwork, and left-field pop, the city comes across as a place where different musical languages overlap instead of staying neatly separated.

Dayan frames his own move to Chicago in 2022 as a response to that pull. What he found was a scene that can feel sprawling and hard to map at first, yet surprisingly familiar once you start seeing the same artists, bookers, and listeners move between basement shows, clubs, and underground spaces.

A city where experimental music rarely stays in one lane

The article spotlights a wide range of Chicago artists and institutions that help sustain that cross-pollination. It points to cellist Dorothy Carlos, vocalist and laptop musician Lula Asplund, modular noise artist Sarah Lutkenhaus, and the Hausu Mountain label founded by Max Allison and Doug Kaplan, alongside ambient figures like John Daniel and Erik Kramer.

Dayan also emphasizes how Chicago jazz, noise, and club music frequently intersect. He cites Natural Information Society as a defining example, while noting that footwork and juke veterans such as RP Boo, Traxman, and Jana Rush can still be heard in neighborhood venues as well as larger rooms.

The review also zeroes in on a wave of recent releases

Beyond the citywide survey, Dayan uses the piece to highlight several records that reflect Chicago’s restless creative energy. Guido Gamboa’s All Is Not Coherent In Nature is described as a warped, guitar-driven tape work; Norman W. Long’s Scenes of Contestation… And the Expanded draws on decades of field recordings; and easygoingtech’s Steelworkers is praised as a tightly built club EP.

He also singles out Alana Schachtel’s Lipsticism project and Sidaka’s sprawling 2025 album Guiding Wind, presenting both as examples of Chicago artists making intimate, emotionally charged music without abandoning experimentation.

What Dayan says Chicago offers that other scenes often lose

One of the piece’s central ideas is that Chicago’s creative force comes from collaboration rather than competition. Dayan links that spirit to the city’s working-class history, neighborhood identity, and long habit of musicians sharing stages across genre lines instead of guarding their own corners.

He also avoids romanticizing the scene as insulated from wider pressures. Chicago’s segregation, disinvestment, gun violence, rising costs, and gentrification all shape who can participate, even as the music keeps adapting. The result is a portrait of a city whose underground culture is thriving precisely because it is constantly being remade.

Chicago's music scene, one story at a time — Chicago Music Guide.