Eris Drew

Toil Trees

Friday

Eris has been playing and programming keyboards since she was a child. A long-time resident at Chicago's Smart Bar and DJ for the Bunker NY, she starting mixing records in 1994 at the age of 18. Her experiences as a musician and dancer showed her that rave is a powerful apparatus which can be used to transform individual lives and communities. In an effort to contextualize the rave experience, Eris gives talks around the world on the connections between dance music culture and other ecstatic traditions such as shamanism. In addition, she is an advocate for trans/non-binary/queer people and mentors aspiring DJs and electronic musicians.

When Eris was 18 she had an intensely disruptive spiritual awakening. House music cracked her open and revealed a mystery contained within sound. This “Motherbeat”—as she would call it—was first beheld by Eris following a rave in 1994 at Chicago’s Oak Street Theater. She has helped Eris to heal, create art and find her friends for over 23 years. Motherbeat is a fundamental primordial pulsation; a whispering geometric wind with the power to heal; the archetype of a goddess ascending. She is there to remind us that:

I. Ritual dance music has been here since the beginning, before historical time.

II. Each of us is made for better things than the cultural download we receive provides.

III. We can use the music as a technology to unlock our bodies, dissolve boundaries and models, and find each other.