If you've ever been in the Chip Davis Technology Studio at the University of Michigan, you know it's not a large space. It's an amazing room, filled with music-making and music-reproducing tech that will melt your brain, but it's not the kind of space that could host a music festival featuring more than 25 artists over two days.

Except when it does.

Again.

The second Spaceout International Ambisonics Festival runs October 16-17 at the Chip Davis Technology Studio, featuring an international and local cast of creatives who make music in a 3D audio format.

The studio's 32-speaker immersive audio system allows performers and presenters to envelop your ears, turning sounds into hallucinatory spectres that attack your cochleas from all angles.

Over the course of three concerts across two days, artists from Japan, Turkey, Italy, Chile, Brazil, Norway, Canada, Germany, India, the USA, and more will perform ambisonic compositions that incorporate multimedia, cybernetics, collaboration, system theory, and cutting-edge technology.

A new “live media festival” in Ypsilanti aims to expand the conversation on what media is, with live experimental works in audio, video, projection, and expanded cinema that goes beyond traditional film.

Those attending the first Media Live Ypsi live performance festival on October 10 and 11 can expect everything from Bring Your Own Beamer projection art displays to a half dozen “durational artists” each delivering their own three-hour sets of storytelling and other nonlinear performances that could incorporate audience participation.

It’s all intended to shake up how people perceive the “live” performance, Media Live Ypsi co-organizer Abhishek Narula said, while emphasizing the need to be present to truly experience the media being displayed.

"I think a lot of art today is experienced online—on Instagram, on YouTube, and all that,” said Narula. “It's hard to sort of document; it's hard to capture these things. We really want to have that experience for the people that are in Ann Arbor and Ypsi and to bring people together. I think post-pandemic, people have been interacting online, and we still sort of live most of our worlds online. So, we're trying to break that a little bit by providing the live experiences where you sort of have to be there.”

Hardcore fans of graphic artists will no doubt know the works of Caroline Cash, Lisa Hanawalt, and Julia Wertz.

Cash has won Eisner and Ignatz Awards—the industry's highest honors—for her ongoing series PeePee-PooPoo. Hanawalt has published four books for Drawn & Quarterly, and Wertz's Tenements, Towers & Trash won the 2018 Brendan Gill Prize, an annual award for a work that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City.

These three are the special guests at this year's A2CAF: Small + Indie Press on Saturday, October 11, at the Ann Arbor District Library's Downtown location. The event runs 11 am to 5 pm and features vendors, workshops, talks, and book signings.

But even if these artists' names don't ring a bell for you, there's a chance you know their work—or will know it—through mediums outside of graphic novels:

The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret takes place in Berlin's Kit Kat Klub. As an MC runs the show, an American writer, Clifford Bradshaw, and an English cabaret performer, Sally Bowles, become romantically involved.

But Cabaret is decidedly not a rom-com: The musical transpires in 1929-30, as the Nazis rise to power.

The University of Michigan will present Cabaret from October 3-12 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre.

“What drew me to Cabaret had very little to do with Sally Bowles,” wrote Harold Prince, who directed the first production on Broadway in 1966. “What attracted the authors and me was the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, the march on Selma, the murder of the three young men, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.”

Joe Masteroff’s book for Cabaret was based on a play, John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera, which in turn was based on a 1939 movie, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

A musical about the rise of Nazism in Germany might seem an unlikely candidate for success. Yet it won eight Tony Awards and has been restaged many times, sometimes without a political overlay, sometimes reflecting whatever the problems society was experiencing at the time.

This production, under the direction of André Garner with music direction by Catherine A. Walker, speaks to our country today.

For the next two weeks, several free or mostly pay-what-you-can music fests will dominate the schedules of adventurous Washtenaw County listeners.

In addition to the A2 Jazz Fest (September 27-28) and Refugia music fest (September 28, all day) in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti will host two events that lean into experimental sounds and indie/punk rock: Totally Awesome Festival (September 25-28) and Freak Fest (October 3-5). And if an one-evening-only fest is more your speed, there's the Fred Thomas-curated "Three Mirrors: Excursions in Collaborations" in association with UMS on September 27 at the Ypsi Freighthouse. (Plus, there's the pre-Zach Bryan festival Down on Main Street in Ann Arbor on September 26.)

Totally Awesome—celebrating its 20th birthday—and Freak Fest—now in its third year—have sprawling artist lineups (and more) in various venues; below you can see the full schedule with links to as many artists as we could find so you can plan your visits. (You can check out Pulp articles on A2 Jazz Fest here and Refugia here.)

Additionally, on September 24, WCBN's Local Music Show did a spotlight on this year's artists at Totally Awesome, Three Mirrors, Refugia, and Freak Fest.

Burnout Society Film Club (BSFC) members are advocates of the B-flick, the cult classic, the lost gem, and they show their love at a free monthly screening event called 8 Ball Movie Night.

What started as an indoor gathering at The Blind Pig's basement bar, The 8 Ball Saloon, morphed into an outdoor event during the warmer months of COVID. But BSFC didn't return to a strictly indoor schedule for its movie night after vaccinations opened up the world again, and the group continues to show VHS-era and old-timey flicks outside when the weather allows.

The last outdoor event of 2025—now on the patio outside The Blind Pig rather than on the roof—is scheduled for Tuesday, September 30, at 8:30 pm. Dubbed as "A Future Cop Double Feature," this edition of the 8 Ball Movie Night features films by two '80s and '90s action megastars: Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer.

Here's the info listed on the FB event page:

Octaves by Tyler Dunston moves through a world where “As always / uncertainty is ours.” 

These poems bring in earthly realities like death and the dullness of the noon hour while also reaching more broadly to the skies in which “the moon and stars wilted / through layers of floor-to-ceiling glass.” The realms collide or overlap. A tangible structure interacts with the sun when “I looked outside / at a slab of brick buttered with light.”

The poet’s perspective is clear in the appearances of the first person “I” across the poems, as the poem called “On W.G. Sebald’s natural history of the herring” declares that “I always thought death was ashen gray.” First person plural expands the outlook to involve the reader through meditating “On emptiness” with the lines, “We understand the weight of ladled things, / time maybe most of all, easy to waste / and hard to throw away.”

In Dunston’s poems, his visual art background shows through because the poet is never only fixed on his own experience but rather takes in the full scene and notices the details. The whole time, “I’m feeling my way / in the dark toward you, the sea in my ear.”

Dunston is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He previously earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University. Octaves was also a finalist for the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest, and as the title suggests, many of the poems contain eight lines. 

Fellow poet Jason Barry joins Dunston in conversation to celebrate the release of Octaves at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:30 pm.

Dunston and I spoke about Octaves, visual art, his PhD studies, what he's reading, and what he's working on next.

This story originally ran on December 5, 2024. "The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry" continues documenting Michigan poets, and on Monday, September 22, there's a live poetry reading at the Downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library showcasing four poets from the project: Owólabi Aboyade, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Bryan Thao Worra, and Rebecca Biber.

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry:

The A2 Jazz Fest began as a one-day event in 2016 and highlighted the area's deep talent pool. It ran for four years, took a break from 2020 to 2022, and resumed in 2023 with the longtime touring trio of Larry Goldings, Peter Bernstein, and Bill Stewart as headliners. The fest expanded again in 2024 with superstars Joshua Redman, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Bill Charlap headlining the four-day event.

For the 2025 edition, the A2 Jazz Fest is going back to its foundations. It's two days, free, and focuses on Michigan-residing artists, with a special set from international trumpet star Theo Croker, who also performed at the fest in 2019. His influences run from modern-day hip-hop and R&B, 1970s fusion, 1960s experimental, 1950s hard bop, and even the Dixieland swing of his influential grandfather, trumpeter Doc Cheatham.

The 2025 edition of the A2 Jazz Fest runs Saturday and Sunday, September 27-28, at two downtown Ann Arbor locations: First Congregational Church on East William Street and The Ravens Club on Main Street.

Another key aspect this year is education, which is a passion for bassist, Blue LLama Jazz Club artistic director, and A2 Jazz Fest originator Dave Sharp.

"Dave wanted to blow out the educational programming, so that was very attractive to me," said Dr. Anna C. Gersh, who has worked extensively in education and joined her husband in organizing this year's festival as the administrative director, along with drummer-educator Sean Dobbins and Jennifer Pollard, a jazz vocalist and creator of the Lifting Up A2 Jazz page on Facebook.

"Professional musicians are running the educational workshops on both days of the festival," Sharp said, "so Anna's experience. fits really well with those elements of the festival. And you know, in jazz, in general ... is very mentorship heavy." (Students can sign up here to participate.)

Below is the full lineup of the 2025 A2 Jazz Fest, as well as music from some of the featured musicians:

Press Release:

Downtown Ann Arbor will come alive this fall with the launch of the Down on Main Street Music Festival, a brand-new celebration of Americana, country, and rock music. The festival will take over Main Street on Friday, September 26 from 4 pm to 10 pm, transforming the downtown corridor into a vibrant, walkable stage for an unforgettable evening of music, food, and community.

At the heart of the festival is Matthew Altruda, a beloved Ann Arbor music curator and radio personality known for championing local and national talent. With Altruda’s expertise, the lineup features a carefully selected group of artists that embody the spirit of Americana and rock: The Michigan Rattlers (headliner), Louie Lee, Audrey Ray, and The Minor Pieces.