Aria Pedraza launches the Midwest Rave Culture Archive with a Ping Tom Park party – Chicago Reader

On Saturday, July 5, the brand-new Midwest Rave Culture Archive will host a launch party and fundraiser in Chinatown’s Ping Tom Memorial Park. The daylong event, called Hometown Heroes, features a wild array of dance DJs, including Redline regular Kula, U.S. drum ’n’ bass pioneer RP Smack, Teklife members DJ Manny and DJ Phil, and experimental house producer Hieroglyphic Being. MWRCA founder Aria Pedraza hopes to raise $5,500 to begin its efforts to digitize midwest rave recordings and ephemera, which will be cataloged and stored in the cloud by the Internet Archive as well as backed up locally. Pedraza envisions the MWRCA as a collective endeavor. “This project is really about mass participatory efforts,” she says. “It’s not from one perspective, and that’s something that’s different for this subculture. It’s not a blog; it’s not an opinion.”

Pedraza grew up in Pilsen with parents deeply involved in dance music. RP Smack is her father, and she says he helped plant the flag for drum ’n’ bass stateside in the early 90s. Her mother, Lori Riegler, cofounded house label Gourmet Recordings and sublabel Fresh Meat in the 2000s; according to Pedraza, Riegler was also the first person to book legendary house producer and DJ Paul Johnson for a rave party and served as his booking agent for years. Her parents’ histories predisposed Pedraza toward the dance-music culture from an early age—she’d dig through boxes of rave flyers the way other kids might study family photo albums. “I remember connecting with those boxes and thinking they were really cool and hearing my parents’ stories going through them,” she says. After Johnson died from COVID-19 in August 2021, Pedraza felt compelled to do more to study and document that history. 

She came up with the idea for the MWRCA after seeing Tommie Sunshine when he was in town for a gig a couple years ago. He’d been close with Riegler since they were teens, and while Pedraza was growing up she’d always seen him as an uncle. They did some catching up, and she learned that Tommie had a collection of vintage dance flyers. “He said, ‘I still have all those flyers,’” Pedraza recalls. “‘They’re just in a box somewhere. I tried giving them to the Chicago History Museum, but they didn’t want them.’ I was like, ‘What? That’s crazy—that’s so valuable.’” Pedraza began to shape her idea for the MWRCA in conversations with mentors, including DJ Lady D and Viva Acid founder Luis Baro; she also sought advice from professional archivists and preservationists involved in the National Public Housing Museum and Maxwell Street Foundation.

Because Pedraza and RP Smack had helped throw summer dance events at Ping Tom Park in 2023 and ’24, they had no trouble securing a permit for another rave this year—and Pedraza’s dad encouraged her to treat it as an MWRCA kickoff. On June 14, Pedraza announced the MWRCA and launched a GoFundMe to collect donations digitally. Hometown Heroes doubles as a release party for a new zine Pedraza has been working on, also called Hometown Heroes, and Gossip Wolf has high expectations—last year she published the excellent 1438: Midwest Jungle, Techno, & Rave Culture.

Elastic Arts assistant director Ben Billington (who also stays busy as a drummer and synthesizer player) stepped into the role of interim executive director on July 1. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime working for the artists in the Elastic Arts community this past ten-plus years, and I look forward to continuing this journey,” Billington says. “With Adam’s mentorship and heart-forward leadership during his tenure, we are left in the perfect position to continue expanding our support for our artists and maintaining Elastic’s welcoming and loving spirit for adventurous arts in Chicago.”

Veteran music-industry publicist and writer Cary Baker began his career in the biz when the Chicago Reader published his first piece in January 1972. The teenage Baker wrote about Blind Arvella Gray, a bluesman who played regularly at Chicago’s storied Maxwell Street Market. Baker’s lifelong love of buskers also inspired his first book, Down on the Corner, which Jawbone Press published in November. On Tuesday, July 8, Baker will talk about Down on the Corner with Caropop podcast host Mark Caro at the Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln); the event begins at 6:30 PM.

^{Lipsticism headlines the Empty Bottle on Thursday, July 3.}

Last month, UK label Phantom Limb issued Wanted to Show You, a dreamlike pop album from Chicago singer-songwriter Alana Schachtel, better known as Lipsticism. Schachtel belatedly celebrates Wanted to Show You with an Empty Bottle show on Thursday, July 3. It’s been even longer (three months, to be exact) since cheeky Chicago math-rock group Snooze released I Know How You Will Die, but it’s never too late to celebrate it—it’s one of the best albums this wolf heard all spring. Snooze headline Beat Kitchen on Wednesday, July 9.

^{Snooze play at Beat Kitchen on Wednesday, July 9.}

Update Tue 7/1 at 6:52 PM: This story has been corrected to more accurately describe Lori Riegler’s professional relationship with Paul Johnson. She booked him for concerts but did not serve as his manager.