DJ and producer Ariel Zetina has become a major player in Chicago nightlife in no small part because she works in more than one medium. Zetina moved to Illinois in 2008 to study theater and creative writing at Northwestern University, and she’s flourished as a playwright. Her reimagining of the tragic life of computer scientist Alan Turing, Pink Milk, has opened at Long Beach’s Garage Theatre and Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre, and a few years ago the Trans Theatre Festival in Brooklyn staged British Honduras Fantasy, her semi-autobiographical play about a trans girl who travels to Chicago from Florida. Theater also provided Zetina with the impetus to start making music in 2013, because she wanted to supply her trans performance group, Witch Hazel, with dance tracks that meshed with the kinds of stories she wanted to tell. She’s since earned a reputation in the wider world of dance music while spearheading several club nights in Chicago, including Smart Bar’s Diamond Formation, which she launched in 2018.
Zetina brings her work in both fields to bear on her new debut album, Cyclorama (Local Action), which takes its name from a large concave curtain or wall that serves as a background in many theater productions. A cyclorama is essentially a huge canvas—it often represents the sky behind the action—and that’s fitting for Zetina’s ambition and the scope of her album. She builds arena-size landscapes with animated percussion that fuses the hard-edged attack of techno and the layered, danceable polyrhythms of punta, a Garifuna folk music popular in Belize (in her youth, Zetina sometimes spent the summer with her mother’s family in Belize). Cyclorama foregrounds Zetina’s experience as a trans woman of color, spotlighting members of her chosen family both in Chicago (Cae Monāe, Dannn) and outside it (Bored Lord). They deliver narratives about their experiences as trans people that leave room for others to see themselves in the songs. On “Slab of Meat,” Zetina’s blunt lyrics and dry delivery skewer bigots and fetishists who see trans women as objects, over a chest-thumping beat aimed right at the soft spots of industrial-music heads and postpunk fanatics.
Ariel Zetina’s Cyclorama is available through Bandcamp.
