Matt Harmon has a lot on his plate. The 25-year-old DIY musician and concert organizer is the bassist in mathy screamo quintet Suffix and plays guitar and sings for a punk trio called Cloud Mouth, which is about to drop a new six-song 12-inch, That Ghost Is Always With Me (Ice Age), and on July 2 will embark on a monthlong tour of the eastern U.S. He and his younger brother John, who plays bass in Cloud Mouth, also run a newish Logan Square venue called Strangelight, which will host an ambitious indie record fair this Saturday, June 26, featuring more than 40 midwestern labels, crafters, and zine makers.
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Things have certainly picked up for Harmon lately. He and his brother are the only tenants at Strangelight, and ten of the dozen shows they’ve hosted since launching the space in September have been in the past four months.That may not seem like much compared to the schedules at many other house venues and DIY spaces, which book gigs pretty much every weekend, but Strangelight isn’t a typical DIY space. After Algernon Cadwallader, a Cap’n Jazz-flavored emo band from Philadelphia, played a packed show there in February, bassist and singer Peter Helmis praised Strangelight on the group’s blog: “This is definitely one of the most impressive and well organized house venues I’ve had the pleasure of visiting in my years of touring.”
The Harmons host fewer shows in part because they consider it their responsibility to accommodate visiting bands in any way they can. Before the last one, on Sunday, June 20, they gave up their living space for five hours so that Hannah Rosner, bassist for headliners Lautrec, could film interviews for a documentary on the Chicago DIY scene. They’ve had as many as ten band members crash at the space at once, and they usually try to make their guests something to eat before they play. Matt has even gone ahead with a Strangelight show that he booked having forgotten he’d already agreed to play the same night with Suffix at another DIY space.
Harmon takes pains to ensure that Strangelight stays drug- and alcohol-free. At a Victor! Fix the Sun show in March, I saw him confront an attendee who wanted to bring alcohol back to the space, and smoking inside has been banned ever since the brothers got complaints from adjoining storefronts after Algernon Cadwallader. “I hate Strangelight,” I heard a skinny kid in a Dopamines T-shirt say at the Slang show. “I can’t do any vices down here.” Minutes into the first band’s set, though, he was shirtless and dancing.
“We have the option to be out of there come what would be the end of July,” he says. “We do want to stay; it’s just a matter of making some things happen.”
