An electronic music venue in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood that occupies a former television repair shop and has kept every CRT monitor the previous owner left behind. There are over three hundred cathode ray tubes in the space — mounted on walls, stacked in columns, hanging from the ceiling — and they're all wired into the sound system so they respond to the music with static, color bars, and waveform visualizations. The effect is hypnotic: dancing in Cathode is like dancing inside a signal, surrounded by screens that pulse and flicker with every beat.

The resident DJs are a crew called the Phosphor Collective, who specialize in music that sounds like machines talking to each other — glitchy, rhythmic, full of frequencies that make the CRTs do interesting things. The venue has no BCI integration whatsoever; the experience is entirely analog, which has made it a destination for people who want to experience electronic music the way it was meant to be experienced: through air, through speakers, through screens that could give you radiation poisoning if you stand too close. The drinks are cheap and the cover charge is a dead battery — any kind, any size — which Cathode supposedly recycles, though the pile in the back room suggests otherwise.