Event

Al Scorch’s Big Fantastical Residency: With Charles Joseph Smith

Jun 118:00 PM$25.58+

About this event

Al Scorch's Big Fantastical Residency returns to the Hideout after a well loved 2025 run! The Return of the Big Fantastical Residency brings a wide array of musical guests from across Chicago and the country-at-large to join the show every month. Along with a set from Al Scorch and his rotating line-up of musical-wizard-friends, this run of shows features surprise guests, holiday specials, and an overall community-building musical hang. And as always, Chicago's own DJ Scrabblor spins House, R & B, Juke, Footwork, and more before and after the show. With a set from Charles Joseph Smith ! "The savant of the basement show" (Chicago Reader) and "a subculture in and of himself" (The Tonearm). Dr. Charles Joseph Smith’s remarkable story begins with a mute child’s gift for music, and the purposeful way he nurtured this talent to become both life practice and raison d'être. Charles recounts this artistic journey in his autobiography, The 88 Keys that Opened Doors, a self-published book that chronicles a life in which music was (and still is) the primary key to overcoming immense challenges posed by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). His life and work were recently honored at the Spring 2026 Chicago Humanities Festival. His career as a musician starts in the church, reaches into the international concert piano circuit, and eventually settles to bear strange fruit in Chicago’s experimental underground. Along the way, Charles Joseph Smith’s compositional voice absorbed and metabolized popular music spanning pop to jazz, the gospel of the church, the canon of the classical conservatory, modern dance scores, and the rule-shattering experimentalism of his city’s DIY subculture, where he has been a mainstay for over 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, Charles has been performing, dancing, and selling his self-published musical and written works in person, often at the local shows he frequents. He is known around Chicago as a living symbol of the power of music, and of the beloved spirit of community at the heart of DIY. On April 3, 2026, Chicago indie label Sooper Records released Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts, marking Smith's first official release with a label, and the label's first aechival release. This 90-minute collection is compiled from 30 years of Charles’ self-released music spanning concert piano, electroacoustic experimentation, electronic beats, free improvisation, and two instrumental realizations of his evolving sci-fi opera, War of the Martian Ghosts (a 2023 electronic realization, and a 2018 piano realization). This double Vinyl / Triple CD Collector’s Edition includes an extensive liner note booklet containing 9000 words about the artist’s life and work, as well as poetry, interviews, quotes, and 30 archival photographs. This is the definitive collection of his original recordings—though it would be impossible to ever encompass the galaxies of music, poetry, and prose penned by the prolific Dr. Charles Joseph Smith.

Artists