Join us for the first of two Elastro series events this week, featuring Los Angeles musician Cate Kennan, Infrathin (Whitney Johnson + Lula Asplund), and Cleared (Michael Vallera + Steven Hess).

Kennan’s self-produced second full-length unfolds with the poetry and immateriality of its title: Shadows. 10 vignettes of keys, strings, reverb, and voice, the songs sway and lope between dream and lullaby, rose-colored but remote. The album was inspired by the dislocation Kennan felt upon returning, after several years away, to the rustic neighborhood northwest of L.A. where she’d grown up: “Wandering through a place where my life once existed but where everything had quietly shifted with time.”

The music conjures a mood of distance, dust, and dazed emotion, alternately lulling and unraveling. From shuffling tumbleweed vignettes (“The Lone West,” “Romantic Strings”) to sepia-tone torch songs (“Shadows,” “Reverie”) to oblique keyboard meditations (“Moonlight,” “Rain”), Kennan’s soundworld moves with a muted, murky beauty, like alluring shapes seen through smudged glass. In her hands, haze is a transformative property, liberating melody and memory into landscapes still untraveled: “What began as a period of nostalgia for me turned into a longing, not for the past, for a place that might exist somewhere beyond the horizon.”

Lula Asplund and Whitney Johnson alchemize their protean practices in acoustic, analog, digital, and code-based sound into a new collaboration. Songs and sounds knock on the door of technology, intent on revealing the ghost in the machine.

Cleared is the longstanding Chicago-based experimental ambient and minimalist project formed around 2009 by percussionist Steven Hess and guitarist Michael Vallera. Known for creating patient, weighted soundscapes, drones, and rhythmic pulses, the duo’s work blends studio improvisations, synthesizers, and field recordings into seamless, atmospheric audio.

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door