Earlier this month Enemy hosted its final show, ending a run of nearly seven years for this DIY experimental-music sanctuary. Underground venues tend to shut down as often as new ones pop up—which is to say fairly often—but somehow Enemy stuck around for years, becoming not just a communal space for people with fringe aesthetics but also an integral part of Chicago’s music scene.
It’s difficult to sum up how important Enemy has been to Jason Soliday, the local noise artist who founded the space in 2005. I talked to him for an hour while working on a piece about Enemy for this week’s Three Beats, and it felt like we were just scratching the surface. The same can be said of the e-mail exchange I had with Soliday, during which we pinned down the lineup of the very first Enemy show (Mike Shiflet, Jason Zeh, and Jesse Kudler), went over a short list of names of people important to the loft space, and fact-checked the piece. Soliday poured years of his life into helping organize shows there—and it was also his home.
Soliday had a lot of great things to say about his post-Enemy plans (which include a collaborative project titled The Many Ghosts of Edgar Poe and a soon-to-be-released tape with Omar Gonzales called The One Who Infests Ships) and the future of DIY venues in Chicago, so I decided to publish my entire interview with him. Reading it would make a good warm-up for tonight’s “epilogue” show, which includes performances from Jesse Kenas Collins, a duo of Daniel Fandiño and Jason Stein, and a duo of Soliday and Brian Labycz.