Eris Drew (T4T LUV NRG | Chicago)
Eris Drew is a DJ, producer, and ecstatic trans woman from Chicago. She runs the T4T LUV NRG label with her partner Octo Octa from a cabin in New Hampshire. Eris records for her own label, as well as for Interdimensional Transmissions (Detroit) and Naive Records (Lisbon). She leads the Psychedelic Rites of the Motherbeat with her friends at Hot Mass in Pittsburgh and Room 4 Resistance in Berlin.
Eris has been playing and programming keyboards since childhood. A longtime resident at Smart Bar in Chicago and a DJ for The Bunker NY, she began mixing records in 1994 at the age of 18. Her experiences as a musician and dancer have shown her that the rave is a powerful apparatus that can be used to transform individual lives and communities. To contextualize the rave experience, Eris gives lectures around the world on the links between dance music culture and other ecstatic traditions. Furthermore, she advocates for trans, non-binary, and queer people, and mentors aspiring DJs and electronic musicians. When Eris was 18, she underwent an intensely disruptive spiritual awakening. House music opened her up and revealed a mystery contained within sound. This “Motherbeat”—as she would call it—was first perceived by Eris following a 1994 rave at the Oak Street Theater in Chicago. It has been helping Eris heal, create art, and find her friends for over 23 years. The Motherbeat is a fundamental primordial pulse; a whispering geometric wind endowed with the power to heal; the archetype of an ascending goddess.
She is here to remind us that:
I. Ritual dance music has been present since the beginning, before recorded time.
II. Each of us is made for better things than what the cultural download we receive offers us.
III. We can use music as a technology to unlock our bodies, dissolve boundaries and patterns, and find one another.
Stage
Duplex
