Magic Tuber Stringband/Photo: Kristin Karch
A new answer has been proposed for the music festival question in Chicago.
Scheduled for September 10-14, Sound & Gravity is a five-day, multivenue music experience curated by Mike Reed, the man who directed Pitchfork Music Festival from 2006 to 2024. This format isn’t new for music festivals, though it’s still far from conventional, and has never been attempted in Chicago at this scale.
Big Ears, for example, in Knoxville, Tennessee, has been happening since 2009 and has built an excellent playbook for the model. That festival came up again and again when speaking with artists scheduled to play Sound & Gravity. Evan Morgan of Magic Tuber Stringband—an Appalachian experimental acoustic outfit from Durham, North Carolina—noted that Big Ears offered “probably the most important show we’ve ever played,” not only because of the crowd size, but because of how the setting and curation amplified the experience: “We were nervous going in, but the sound was incredible, and people kept coming up to us even afterward, saying how much it moved them.”
In a town already colored by a verdant tapestry of both historic and contemporary musical fabric, Sound & Gravity could punch a new notch in Chicago’s cultural belt: a novel and proud badge to wear; less glossy than Lollapalooza, more intricate than Pitchfork, and proudly stranger than both. This festival isn’t structured in a revenue-first posture—it’s firmly an artistic celebration.
Central to the success of Sound & Gravity’s format will be the venues themselves. For a festival like this to work (particularly one with as much buzz as it has received already) the selected concert halls must ooze personality. Logistically, they need to be close together. Ideally, the neighborhood itself must offer its own intrigue.
Mike Reed/Photo: Francesca Patella
Bringing these elements together and booking outstanding artists presents a fresh set of programming challenges. A huge part of what positions this festival to become a potential staple in the Chicago music scene is Reed. His reputation, the fact that he owns Hungry Brain and Constellation, and his multi-decade experience directing Pitchfork Music Festival position him as the best possible person in Chicago to launch and manage such a novel artistic enterprise. (And possibly the only person who could.)
The character of the selected venues bodes well for the new fest. August Forte, a longtime Chicago publicist and fixture in classical and indie circles, noted the significance of location: “Beat Kitchen is legendary. I remember seeing Pelican there in the early 2000s. Hungry Brain is essential for jazz and improvised music. And Constellation? It adapts to the needs of the musician like few others.”
Sound & Gravity unfolds over five days across seven venues, all within a fifteen-minute walk and spanning the Bricktown borders of culturally rich Avondale and Roscoe Village. At the northern edge of the fest, Judson & Moore—a former leather tannery turned whiskey distillery—sits along the Chicago River. Run by local distillers Elise Berman and Collin Moore, the space retains its industrial bones while proliferating wholly bohemian-laced vibrations tastefully soaked in whiskey.
Next door, Rockwell on the River offers two performance spaces: an indoor hall and an outdoor patio. The complex, a repurposed factory, is now an artisanal event hub with a sharp architectural sensibility.
Just down the block, Guild Row is a blended social club, culinary programming center, and event venue in a riverside setting that mirrors the festival’s blend of intimacy and experimentation.
Constellation
Across the river, Constellation anchors the western edge of the circuit. The venue—owned and operated by Reed—offers a black-box theater environment designed for postmodern performance art. A few doors down sits Hungry Brain, an unpretentious bar long known for its experimental jazz programming and cozy setting. Hungry Brain is also a Reed property.
Rounding out the list is Beat Kitchen, a short walk from Hungry Brain. Housed in a structure built in 1889 and open until 2am nightly, it functions both as a genre-agnostic concert hall and a reliable local watering hole, with a rich booking history that spans everything from emerging indie acts to cult punk, hip-hop and comedy.
The new festival is in no way an elegiac tribute to Pitchfork. Reed has said so explicitly in interviews with WBEZ. It is worth mentioning that Pitchfork Music Festival was cancelled as a direct result of the belligerent corporatization by Pitchfork’s parent company, Condé Nast, of both festival and brand.
The media conglomerate attempted to commercialize Pitchfork to replicate the financial footprint of Coachella and Lollapalooza, with profit-forward booking and sponsorship tactics that gutted the core experience. “Festivals have become so predictable,” Reed told WBEZ. “We have a whole generation—or generation-and-a-half—that’s grown up with them. And I’m saying ‘no,’ [the music experience] should be something different.”
So while Sound & Gravity is not a replacement, you can’t not see its origin and its rapid coming together as a response to that loss. Reed is managing Sound & Gravity through his nonprofit, Constellation Performing Arts, which was founded in 2018 to support avant-garde musicians with subsidized rehearsal, performance and recording space supported by the Constellation venue. There are no VIP ticketing tiers available for attendees. It’s certainly not cheap, but in comparison to Lollapalooza (for which resale tickets cost $600–$800 and VIP tiers went up to a ludicrous $4,500), the $252 price for a four-day Sound & Gravity ticket is clearly not a cash grab. In a twist of fortunate irony, it’s fairly simple to surmise that the bureaucratic creeps who platformed Pitchfork to death laid the groundwork for Sound & Gravity’s community-rooted artistic mission.
For Brian Weitz—best known as Geologist of Animal Collective, who performs on Saturday night at Judson & Moore—that mission resonates. “When I’m in a space that makes me feel like I’ve entered into an ongoing conversation, I feel fortunate,” he says. “And when I feel that way, I’m more open, more present. That kind of gratitude—that’s the mindset I want to perform in.”
Weitz previously performed at Constellation as Geologist, and recalls it fondly: “That room really lets the performance breathe. It felt like we were in dialogue with the audience the whole time.”
Magic Tuber Stringband are also returning performers, having played Constellation for their first-ever show in Chicago back in 2023. “We were honestly nervous going in—Constellation has that kind of presence,” recalls fiddler Courtney Werner. “But the sound was incredible, and the audience was so dialed in. It ended up being one of the best shows of our tour.”
The bones of this festival are assembled to support new, experimental and indie artists, full stop. It is not a profit-driven exercise. It is not a replacement for Pitchfork. It is not a street fest. It’s designed to be a comprehensive, immersive music experience that drives visibility to underexposed genres and artists—and creates intimacy through the setting of the actual festival.
Mary Lattimore/Photo: Rachael Pony Cassells
“This lineup is chosen by people who really care,” says harpist Mary Lattimore, who performs twice at Rockwell on the River—first on Thursday evening in a collaborative set with ambient composer Julianna Barwick, and again solo on Saturday. “Not by robots or tech bros. We’re going to have a really good experience together, far away from creepy algorithms for a minute.”
Magic Tuber Stringband, who will perform Friday night at Hungry Brain, echoes that sentiment. “The Chicago experimental scene is the strongest in the country,” says Werner. “And to be welcomed into that, even from afar, feels really special.”
For out-of-towners coming to Chicago for the fest (and it sounds like there will be many), whereas Pitchfork or Lollapalooza might be analogous to visiting the Art Institute, Sound & Gravity will be closer to Chicago’s architectural boat tour. The setting of any multistage story drives the narrative as much as the characters. The atmosphere is set to take the stage just as much as the artists.
“I love the idea of playing in historic places,” says Lattimore. “The ghosts mingling with the weird present day—it’s going to be really special.”
For the artists, this format offers something almost every large-scale outdoor festival tends to mangle: control. “The sound is better. The rooms are built for music. You actually get a soundcheck,” says Chad Taylor of Chicago Underground Duo, who perform Friday at Beat Kitchen. “You’re not melting under stage lights or being rushed in and out like cattle.”
That balance between curation and freedom is part of what makes the format sing. “Everyone’s on equal footing,” says Weitz. “It’s not a hierarchy. You feel like you’re part of a community—not just a performer shipped in for the brand. It sounds reductive, but being able to just do a soundcheck is huge. And the folks who manage the sound engineering do it every night, in the same place—they know how to get it right.”
For fans, there’s an intimacy to Sound & Gravity’s setting that, by nature, outdoor programming can’t structure. “You’ll run into people in the street. See someone who was just on stage. End up at the same bar,” notes Evan Morgan. “The whole thing feels like a conversation instead of a spectacle.”
And maybe that’s the whole point. In a musical ecosystem dominated by algorithmically optimized lineups, Sound & Gravity represents something different. Something analog and built from the inside out. A music experience designed by people who actually make the music.
“These festivals are how we win people over,” Evan Morgan says. “We’re a trio playing acoustic instruments. Longform, deep-listening stuff. Streaming doesn’t do it justice. But live? That’s where it connects. That’s where it breathes.”
Yes, most music discovery today happens online. Discovery is fed through screens and sound is flattened into streams. But real communities are still built by people; together, in real time, in old rooms stained with memory. At concerts, you make friends with folks who like the band you like. At festivals, you create community through shared discovery—a phenomenon more critical for artist exposure than ever. Sound & Gravity insists on the old magic, and with great hope will serve as a new Chicago-anchored example on how to sustain that magic through new methods.
Published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue, with the headline “Sound & Gravity Isn’t Pitchfork 2.0: It’s Something Stranger and More Imaginative.”
