Music with nobody on stage

Tourists at Cloud Gate hear sound booming off the Pritzker Pavilion lawn, walk over, and find the stage empty. The speakers are the show.

Welcome to Sonic Pavilion

Experimental Sound Studio turns the Millennium Park lawn into its own stage, with installations built specifically for the park's criss-crossing 24-channel audio system.

Sound art leaves the gallery

Co-directors Adam Vida, Olivia Junell and Alex Inglizian have spent years putting the medium in free public space, from Millennium Park to the Lincoln Park Conservatory.

“I still keep in touch with people that have previously been tourists and just walked into these things”

Forty years in

ESS hits 40 this year. Its most essential work now happens off stage: quietly propping up the artists who make the sound in the first place.

A vault most schools would envy

The group keeps a sound archive holding rare tapes of Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra and a string of Chicago free jazz figures.

Residencies and strange rooms

ESS runs artist residencies and stages site-specific concerts, including a sold-out show at Wisconsin's Yerkes Observatory with Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra.

Retirement money for musicians

The group helped drive Golden Egg, which put $50,000 into local musician retirement funds last year. It is on hiatus while organizers look for a second round of funding.

The number that landed hard

Reading 253 Golden Egg applications, Junell and colleagues saw the reported average salary: just under $26,000 a year.

“Chicago musicians were living on much less than we expected, even”

Free hours in the booth

This year ESS is piloting free and discounted studio time at its Edgewater headquarters for Chicago-based artists, because studio hours are exactly what people cannot afford.

“Artists really need free sessions because they're living on so little.”

When to show up

Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park. Sept. 12 and 13 from 1 to 4 p.m., Sept. 14 from 5 to 8 p.m. Free, with the full schedule at ess.org.

Born in a Wicker Park loft

Founded in 1986, ESS was among the first nonprofits devoted entirely to audio art and is still the only one of its kind in the Midwest.

“There were some presenters of experimental music, but nobody was both a hub for the artists to produce work and network, as well as doing presentations”

Train sounds came first

The festival started in 2021, but ESS had been taking over the park since 2008's "Train Time," a collage of train recordings from around the world.

The man who built the system

Jonathan Laney, the acoustic technician who designed the Millennium Park sound system, has worked with ESS for years to fit each installation to the park.

Pick an American community

Backed by an America250 grant from the NEA, this year's artists drew on communities of their choosing: Pittsburgh steel, an Appalachian fiddle convention in West Virginia, freighters crossing the Great Lakes.

Twelve minutes, on repeat

Every piece runs exactly 12 minutes. The set loops over 90 minutes and plays for three hours a day, so there is no wrong time to arrive.

The Chicago Wind Map

Saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond open each cycle by assigning all 24 channels a neighborhood: South Side at the lawn's south end, North Side near the pavilion, West Side near the Bean.

Twenty-four players, one melody

Black and Diamond recruited wind and brass players tied to each area. Flutist Kenthaney Redmond takes Austin, trumpeter Mario Abney takes Washington Park, Matt Ulery plays tuba for Norwood Park.

The city gets the last word

Each player also sent a field recording of what their neighborhood sounds like. Those are woven into the final two minutes, so the piece ends with the city and no musicians at all.

“We feel it's impossible for any one person to be a representative of their neighborhood”

Traxman goes spatial

Kikù Hibino remixed a studio session with footwork legend Corky "Traxman" Strong, scattering 24 layers of rhythm and vocal samples across the lawn. An album follows in December.

“I wanted something really pushing the envelope”