Chicago’s August 13–16 concert calendar has plenty of full-band bills and late-night dance options, yet the most coherent small run arrives Thursday and Friday at Elastic Arts. The Avondale venue’s programming links forward-looking improvised music with sound art, performance and listening: on August 13, composer-vocalist Ken Ueno leads an Improvised Music Series program with BananaAcid; on August 14, the CLEAT Series presents Suzanne Thorpe’s A Serenade for Settling alongside Bonnie Jones, Stephan Moore and Binary Stitches. It is a two-night guide for listeners drawn to texture, space and musicians treating sound as material with physical presence.[1][2][5]

Thursday, August 13: voice, gesture and collective improvisation

Ueno’s Elastic Arts set is built around solo and ensemble performance, with the venue describing an approach shaped by extended vocal technique, breath, resonance, movement and gesture. Ueno is a UC Berkeley composition professor whose work spans composition, vocal performance, improvisation and sound art; those overlapping practices make this an especially apt booking for a room accustomed to music that shifts its center of gravity in real time.[1][3]

BananaAcid follows with its five-member improvising ensemble. Elastic Arts identifies the group’s sources as early jazz, free jazz, classical, electro-acoustic and folk traditions, a wide field that suggests an evening organized around active listening instead of tidy genre boundaries. The useful practical detail: the venue lists Ueno at 8:30 p.m. and BananaAcid at 9:30 p.m.; tickets are available at the door.[1]

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Friday, August 14: a listening environment with bodies inside it

Friday’s CLEAT Series changes the scale from a performer’s breath to a room-sized sound field. Thorpe, Jones and Moore will present an iteration of Serenades for Settling: Tending Ostreidae, using a speculative oyster-habitat soundscape distributed through Elastic Arts’ CLEAT multichannel system. Thorpe’s work brings together acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology, while her research examines human and nonhuman systems through sound.[2][4]

The second half, Binary Stitches, is billed as a sci-fi-horror dance performance by Caleb Foss, Michael Hart and Timothy Tsang, combining live visuals and audio, music, and dance. That pairing gives Friday a sharper theatrical edge: ecology and underwater listening in one work; data, digital traces and embodied motion in the next. Elastic Arts describes its CLEAT programming as focused on its installed 16-channel speaker system, making the venue’s particular infrastructure part of the event itself.[2][5]

Plan the two-night visit

Both shows take place at Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208. Thursday’s Improvised Music Series begins at 8:30 p.m.; Friday’s CLEAT Series begins at 8 p.m. Each is listed at $15, or $10 with student ID, with door tickets indicated by the venue. Recheck Elastic Arts’ official event pages before heading out, since times, admission and lineup details can change.[1][2]

These concerts happened on 13–14 August 2026

The next dates at these venues: Elastic Arts

Sources

  1. Improvised Music Series: Ken Ueno, BananaAcid — Elastic Arts Foundation
  2. CLEAT Series: Suzanne Thorpe's 'A Serenade for Settling' w/ Bonnie Jones & Stephan Moore, Binary Stitches — Elastic Arts Foundation
  3. Ken Ueno — UC Berkeley Department of Music
  4. Suzanne Thorpe — Manhattan University
  5. Programs — Elastic Arts Foundation