estlin usher (b. 1990) is a sound artist based in Chicago. His work spans composition, installation, and sculptural objects, often using synthesis, field recording, and manipulated media to construct spatial listening environments. He is especially interested in our encounter with objects in the world and how aural experience relates to history, politics, and concepts beyond the traditional notion of music, sound, and noise. 

estlin’s recent direction explores the presence and continuity of technological objects, especially those discarded through planned obsolescence and media decay. His current project reconfigures outdated digital devices—cracked iPhones, deconstructed monitors, repurposed e-waste—into audiovisual installations that confront the relationship between sound, image, consumption, and technological atrophy. Drawing on the art-historical tension between the image-as-window and the image-as-screen, the project stages a poetics of breakdown and mediation.

In addition to his solo practice, estlin collaborates with X. A. Li as Post Consumer Material. Previously, he has recorded and performed with Rush Falknor as the proletarian kitsch-techno group IG Metall and with Andy Klingensmith as Field Dept., a project that examines sonic materiality through object manipulation and process-based compositional strategies. He has written music for film and string quartet, including arrangements on Circuit des Yeux’s albums Overdue (2013) and Reaching for Indigo (2017)

He has performed and/or exhibited at various venues across the United States, including on the 16-channel CLEAT system at Elastic Arts; at the Empty Bottle; W.I.H.S.H. Projects; Experimental Sound Studio; the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago; TriTriangle; Tack Room; Mana Contemporary; CURRENTS New Media Festival; the International Museum of Surgical Science; and more.

He co-directs Leisure, an artist-run project space in Humboldt Park, and founded the occasional, experimental criticism and essay site postcapital.club in 2020.

He can be reached on ig @ex.esn or by email at [full.name]@gmail.com.