ARIEL ZETINA
Affiliations: Diamond Formation, Smart Bar, Pageant Queens
Ariel Zetina (she/her) is a Chicago-based artist, focusing in electronic music production, deejaying, and dramatic writing. She manipulates percussion, vocal repetition, and theatrics, taking inspiration from everything from techno to musical theatre to the queer club scene worldwide. Her several EPs and debut LP Cyclorama received acclaim from top music publications like Pitchfork and Resident Advisor. No matter what, she includes a healthy amount of camp in her work.
Ariel is a resident DJ at the legendary house club Smartbar and has had the privilege to deejay all over the world, including opening for artists like Beyoncé, James Blake, Caroline Polachek, Sevdaliza, Big Freedia, and horsegirl, and playing iconic venues and festivals like De School (Amsterdam), Unsound (Krakow), Planetas Manas (Lisbon), and Pitchfork Fest (Chicago). She is also a resident at Carly Zeng's party Dissident in Berlin, where she plays at least once a year.
In Ariel’s music production and deejaying, she frequently uses vocal repetition and poetic text to amplify and eventually become the sound. With a theatre degree and a performance art background, she immerses herself with theatricality and how highly expressionist symbolism and visuals illustrate the quirky and surreal abstractions of life. What informs her work? The herstory of Chicago House music, the secret oral herstory of trans women in America, and her own herstory as a transgender woman of color who grew up outside Jacksonville, Florida with a Belizean mother and American father, and now has lived and worked in Chicago for over a decade. In 2023, Ariel was named one of the Chicagoans of the Year by The Chicago Tribune.
Mixing of text and music is the essence. In nightclub and performance, she strives for totality always. Nothing is left uninformed and the artist and audience experience a mise en scène unlike the real world. In the created space, you can actually feel the vibrations of a kickdrum thumping.