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Find the best music events and make the most of your time in Rock Island. From music to history and more, we have the biggest event range and best discovery experience, there's something for everyone.
Cairo-based Maurice Louca’s genre-defying music bridges psychedelic Egyptian shaabi, cosmic jazz, and free improvisation. He co-founded Lekhfa, performs with The Dwarfs of East Agouza, and leads the 10-member Elephantine ensemble. Fera is the latest album from Egyptian composer and multi-instrumentalist Maurice Louca, released on Simsara Records in May 2025. The nine-track record centers on polyrhythmic grooves and vibrant acoustic textures; violin, synthesizers, custom-built microtonal guitars, and percussion. Jack Lion’s members unearth the early ’00s interest in connections between jazz and electronic music and refashion it for this current era. Striking a balance between jazz composition, down-tempo break-beats, and hazy atmospherics they have made their mark as one of Iowa City’s headiest and most adventurous bands.
Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 2010; they evolved from the experimental collective Teeth Mountain and began as a trio with drummer Sam Haberman, guitarist Owen Gardner, and bassist Max Eilbacher, soon adding alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to the core ensemble. Though Horse Lords grew out of the fertile Baltimore noise and leftfield rock scene, a storied environment for artists and weirdos that has nurtured many an influential outsider band (Lungfish, Matmos), their approach is more omnivorous than the stippled rhythms of instrumental electric rock would indicate. support TBA
ALASH are masters of Tuvan throat singing (xöömei), a remarkable technique for singing multiple pitches at the same time. What distinguishes this trio from earlier generations of Tuvan throat singers is the subtle infusion of modern influences into their traditional music. One can find complex harmonies, western instruments, and contemporary song forms in Alash’s music, but its overall sound and spirit remain decidedly Tuvan. For this show Alash will play two sets with an intermission. *this show is supported by the Illinois Arts Council
The trio of **Yea Big, Jon Byler Dann, and Nakatani** (winds, double bass, and percussion respectively) first performed together a couple years back when YB booked the Nakatani Gong Orchestra (which YB and Dann both performed in) and arranged with Nakatani for the trio to open the concert. YB and Nakatani had met and played together the previous year as part of YB's improvised music series in Bloomington, IL. The night they first performed together, the trio resonated and made plans to do it again. On Nakatani's subsequent tour the trio not only performed together again but also set aside a day for a recording session. The results of that session can be heard on their newly released CD, To Lower the Fever of Feeling, out now on Yea Big's new label, Black Flag Bonsai Club. This Spring, Nakatani's nationwide tour will find the trio performing together at four Illinois dates. **Ishmael Ali** and Bill Harris will play an amalgamation of music celebrating Ali's solo release Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper. The duo will shift through different modes, incorporating acoustic improvisations, poetry, electronics, and singable tunes.
Emily Rach Beisel is a Chicago-based improviser, composer, educator, curator, and woodwind specialist whose work is celebrated for its visceral intensity and innovative blend of techniques. Beisel's music centers on the bass clarinet and incorporates voice, electronics, extended techniques, and other wind instruments creating a complex and nuanced soundscape in which the origins of sounds are often obscured. A Light Among Many is an ambient doom-drone act, originally from Denver, Colorado and fronted by Frank Binder. ALAM has played multiple national tours and released four full-length albums in the past ten years. Drawing influence from Sunn O))), Bell Witch, Boris, and Primitive Man, ALAM is all about dark ambient textures mixed with messages about mental illness and recovery. Though largely considered a solo project, Binder has recruited guest musicians in the past and is currently performing alongside Quad Cities noise music extraordinaire Alex Mahaffey.
ELI WINTER is a composer, self-taught guitarist, essayist, and Houston native. His music synthesizes aspects of folk, rock, jazz, and devotional music, maintaining a waggish disregard for genre constraints emblematic of Chicago, his adopted hometown. His new album, A Trick of the Light, is an elegantly crafted and vibrant collection that finds the bandleader at the height of his powers: the dazzlingly intense arrangement of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s “Arabian Nightingale” that opens the album, Winter’s muscular, dreamy originals, and his daring arrangement of Carla Bley’s “Ida Lupino.” His trio features Chicago improvisers Sam Wagster of Fruit Bats (pedal steel guitar) and Tyler Damon of Circuit des Yeux (drums), with performances at prestigious music festivals like Primavera Sound and Big Ears, and collaborations with a wide range of artists live and on record, including Danny Brown, Quadeca, Yasmin Williams, jaimie branch, Caroline Rose and Ryley Walker. MARC HANS SHOWALTER is a visual artist & folk musician from Rock Island, Illinois. The last 25 years playing live at coffee shops, record stores, house shows & public libraries. Marc Hans Showalter has 10 releases available of Free Folk, Experimental improv, Primitive Guitar instrumentals.
Jason Stein — Damon Smith — Adam Shead (often billed as Stein/Smith/Shead) is a Chicago-rooted improvising trio uniting bass clarinetist Jason Stein, double bassist Damon Smith, and percussionist Adam Shead. Since forming in late 2021, the group has toured extensively across the Midwest and beyond, becoming a fixture in the creative music circuit and collaborating with influential figures such as Roscoe Mitchell. Their recorded work documents a remarkably productive period, encompassing four releases: Volumes & Surfaces (2022), Hum (2023), spi-raling horn with Marilyn Crispell (2024), and Live at the Hungry Brain with Marilyn Crispell (2025). Together, these albums trace the group’s evolution from kinetic, small-ensemble interplay toward expansive collaborations that bridge generations of avant-jazz practice. Described by The Road to Sound as making “shadowy music that prickles on your skin” and “unafraid to be anything at all”, Gabi Vanek is a bassoonist who exists in a world of harsh noise and drone/doom. She’s performed as both an ensemble member and soloist at small and large festivals such as the Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse, International Double Reed Society, Oh My Ears, and exhibited at the Osaka University of the Arts Electro-Acoustic Music Festival. More likely, you’ll find her making noises in more “unconventional” spaces, like your local dive bar.
Water is the Sun is the inevitable union of Mkl Anderson (Drekka), and Adam Parks (Timber Rattle / Lightning White Bison). Together they play an alchemical amalgam of their primary projects, resulting in cinematic / landscape textures that give slow birth to psyche-pastorals and intoned ritual songs; a music as informed by the devotional chants of West Coast cults and Appalachian hymns as it is by the dark new age and ambient resonance of the experimental scene that has embraced and supported both musicians for many years.
Jamal Moss has been making music in Chicago under the moniker Hieroglyphic Being since 1994. His music is deeply rooted in the influential house and techno scenes of the city but also draws on the avant-garde and jazz. His music is both dark and transcendent, mechanical and organic. The man behind the Sound In Space series, Samuel P. is a local QC record-collector & DJ. A music enthusiast from a young age, he fell in love with record collecting during his time living in Chicago. When Samuel's behind the decks you can expect to hear everything from jazz to disco to house music with a few surprises mixed in.
Born in Hamburg, Germany to Turkish parents, **Derya Yıldırım** grew up learning to play various instruments, including the bağlama, a seven stringed Turkish lute, which is her instrument of choice. In 2016, she met French musicians **Graham Mushnik** and **Antonin Voyant** from Catapulte Records and formed the band Grup Şimşek with **Helen Wells**, a drummer from Cape Town, South Africa joining in 2021. The outernational band's forthcoming album *Yarın Yoksa*, which translates to *If There’s No Tomorrow*, Derya continues her journey revitalizing Anatolian folk music and instrumentation by infusing timeless melodies with a modern psychedelic flair. After self-producing multiple albums, they signed with New York’s Big Crown Records in 2024 and teamed up with Grammy-nominated producer Leon Michels (El Michels Affair) for *Yarın Yoksa*. The new album embodies their balance of preservation and innovation across nine original compositions and three traditional folk songs. It is a record that will enchant any listener regardless of language barrier with Derya’s passion and authenticity front and center and music too moving to deny.
Marisa Anderson will be touring her new album, called Volume 1. The record will be released May 2026 on Thrill Jockey as part of a larger multi-year release project connected to her ongoing work curation of what she calls the Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music. This curated collection draws from nearly one thousand songs sourced from the private record collection of Harry Smith, where she is focusing on music from regions where the United States has engaged in conflict since 1970, including Southeast Asia, the former USSR, and the Arabic and Islamic world. Liv Carrow is a singer, songwriter and guitarist based in the Quad Cities and brings you folk songs for a strange present and a low tech future. Influenced heavily by traditional Appalachian music, British folk ballads and early popular music, she weaves evocative lyrics in a voice “from an old radio” with her unique fingerstyle guitar playing.