For the past week, Chicago’s indie-rock scene has been mourning the unexpected death of Ryan Deffet, who played guitar and sang in Space Gators and Faux Furrs. Deffet moved here from Dayton, Ohio, and enmeshed himself in the northwest-side underground scene in the 2010s; for years he organized Deff Jam, a DIY festival that presented bands from Dayton and Chicago at shows in both cities.
Footballhead main man Ryan Nolen met Deffet at the Mutiny in 2016. “He was someone who I could tell I wanted to be more like,” Nolen says. “That was pretty instant—he had this cool Britpop swagger about him. I could tell almost immediately, from his guitar playing and his performance, that he was much more cultured than I ever will be. Ryan brought the house down that night and every fucking show after that too.” In 2018, Deffet asked Nolen to play guitar in Faux Furrs. “Ryan’s my olive branch to everyone,” Nolen says. “He’s the reason why I do anything. There’s no Footballhead without Ryan.”
Nolen describes Deffet as an organized and prolific collaborator. “Ryan is one of those guys who squeezed the hell out of 24 hours in a day, but he really needed 25 to get all his passions and creativity completed,” he says. “Because he was that talented and that inspired.” Deffet finished a new Space Gators album last month, but he never sent the audio files to Doug Malone at Jamdek Recording Studio for final mixing and mastering.
Last week, a friend of Deffet’s launched a GoFundMe to benefit his parents, brother, and fiancée, and it surpassed its initial $20,000 goal within 24 hours. The outpouring of love for Deffet doesn’t surprise Nolen—he’s seen his friend light up the faces of complete strangers with his encouragement. “One of the phrases he commonly used when meeting new people, he would say, ‘Everybody’s a space gator,’” Nolen recalls. “They’d say, ‘I can’t dance, I can’t sing, I can’t play the tambourine, I can’t fucking hit a bongo.’ Ryan would want you onstage—because everybody’s a space gator.”
Recent releases by Ryan Deffet’s bands Space Gators and Faux Furrs
Afrofuturist Weekend, an annual festival presented by Elastic Arts, is always among the most anticipated events on Gossip Wolf’s music calendar. The eighth weekend in the series runs for a jam-packed five days, from Wednesday, October 4, through Sunday, October 8. Too much is happening to fit it all in this column, but even a few highlights should make a strong case! Shanta Nurullah and DJ Rae Chardonnay perform at a kickoff event on Wednesday, October 4, at FourtuneHouse Art Center in Bronzeville. El La Katrina and Fabulous Freddie host an Afrofuturist Ball on Friday, October 6, that includes DJ sets, a panel discussion, and a fashion show. On Saturday, October 7, soundtrack composer and sound artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe shares a bill with a trio of flutist Nicole Mitchell, filmmaker and animator Jonathan Woods (cofounder of the Afrofuturist Weekend), and drummer Grover Stewart. On the afternoon of Sunday, October 8, Angel Bat Dawid’s Watoto Festival for kids begins with a Watoto Sound Bath from Jonn Wallen of Oui Ennui and concludes with Dawid’s “Afro Cosmic Future Musical” The People Could Fly. Sunday also features an AfriClassical Futures program that includes a concert by chamber group D-Composed. All festival events are free and open to the public, but if you want to be guaranteed entry, you should RSVP via elasticarts.org.
Local punks Aweful can’t help but remind Gossip Wolf of a bygone era, when the likes of the Ramones and the Misfits sharpened their blistering chops with a keen sense of visual identity. As the Reader’s Salem Collo-Julin wrote in 2019, Aweful imagine “a better universe where one spin of a Buzzcocks record would replace everyone’s anxiety meds and photo-filter apps with grit, grime, and the truth.” The trio, which consists of singer and bassist Traci Trouble, drummer Izzy Price, and guitarist Lucy Dekay, have a knack for kicking out the jams and crafting eye-catchingly spooky music videos. They’ve been cooking up their debut album for more than a year, and on Valentine’s Day they dropped its second single, “Open Heart”—a heartbroken, razor-edged ballad whose video literally puts the entire band in an operating room during a disastrous cardiac surgery (even though only Trouble is on the table, so to speak). The single has sharpened this wolf’s appetite for their self-titled album, which is coming out on What’s for Breakfast? Records. If all goes to plan, the vinyl will be on hand when Aweful celebrate with a record-release show at the Empty Bottle on Wednesday, October 11. The night also includes two other bands endorsed by this column, openers Lollygagger and Beastii, plus a set or three from DJ Ivanna Riot.
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