Dirty Epic welcomes aboard @shantievanti for the 127th installment of Amplify Series. Shanti has made textured waves in Chicago’s techno scene with her curation of dark, sinister, and ethereal soundscapes. Music has always been a means of coping with the otherness and hybridity Shanti experienced throughout her life. She has been deeply moved by the transcendent ability of music to express concepts, states of consciousness, and conflicting emotions. Shanti’s sets weave a story of the simultaneous despair and yearning that are intertwined with the human condition and illustrate an intentional trajectory through combining and cultivating surreal, atmospheric, and haunting sounds. Enamored by the liminal dynamics of sound, she cohosts Otherworldly Ambiguity with Scum.ee –an experience that is centered around the phenomenon of existing in between and outside of pre-existing concepts and rigid categories. She is also a member of techno collective Research & Development and hosts a monthly radio show, “Liminal Radio” on WIIT 88.9 FM featuring thoughtful artists at the core of Chicago’s underground music scene. Experiencing music outside of the confines of a club or the underground is extremely important to Shanti as she had initially discovered her favorite artists through online podcasts and radio. The universalizability of podcasts and radio enable music to be experienced by more humans situated in different contexts. This is why she has contributed to many notable online mix series and radio channels. Her mixes have been featured on The Black Lodge Radio, SutroFM, Mutant Radio, PPRZ, Distant Signals, Death Decay & Magic, Braid Records, Low Visibility, Dance All Day, and m50’s etc radio among other podcasts and shows. "For this closing set, I wanted to cultivate an atmosphere of releasing the turbulent emotions we have been experiencing in Chicago as a community. I anticipated the desire for this release but experiencing it in the subterranean context of Smartbar - in the darkness - in real time- felt so powerful and transcendent. This experience was not merely an escape, but a channeling of the heaviness within us - how do the mind and body cope and grasp what is happening? I was fueled by the defiantly heavy energy from the dancers and it was such a testament to the healing power of music during these dark times." LINKS: SHANTI: Soundcloud: @shantievanti Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shantiism/ RA: https://ra.co/dj/shanti DIRTY EPIC: Website: www.dirty-epic.com Merch: shopby6am.com/collections/dirty-epic-collection Facebook: www.facebook.com/DirtyepicLA Twitter: twitter.com/dirtyepicla Instagram: www.instagram.com/dirtyepicla/