BRIDGEPORT -- It began two years ago in Nashville. Alex, known by the pseudonym Demifiend, was an organizer of the now-defunct Tennessee Tunnel Authority, an underground music organization that would throw raves in abandoned tunnels and sewage drains around the area.
Tracie King, a DJ known as Kittenhouse and friend of Alex, pitched him an idea: "[Tracie] had been really wanting us to do a furry rave, because a lot of her friends were furries. So we did one," Alex said.
Shows were difficult to plan in Nashville due to lack of a concrete electronic music scene and a strict "no fursuits" policy for many venues. They held their first-ever furry rave at the Graveyard Gallery in Murfreesboro, a smaller suburban area within the Nashville metropolitan area.
"It was one of our first paid shows, and we made an insane amount of money off of it," Alex said. "Looking back it's not a ton, but we made enough that I was like, 'Oh, we can actually keep on doing these.'"
A year prior, in 2022, Care, a Chicago-based breakcore producer and DJ, was formulating the idea for what would become Mages Guild, an indie label for local producers. Care held Noob Fest, a hybrid show hosted both in-person and on the virtual platform Roblox in early 2022.
Mages Guild officially formed in 2023. The group has held one to two shows a month since its inception.
Fast forward to March 2025 and that small show in Tennessee has become Ravefurrest, a band of DJs that travel the country, hosting pop-up raves in conjunction with local artists.
On March 8, Ravefurrest teamed with Mages Guild for the second time to host Ravefurrest Chicago - Part 2 at the Archer Ballroom, 3012 S. Archer Ave. in Bridgeport. The event was a stop on Ravefurrest's Winter Tour 2025, which ranges from Denton, Texas to Brooklyn, New York.
The lineup at the Chicago event included Ravefurrest regulars such as Demifiend, Mailpup and Kittenhouse alongside Chicago locals like sulffffffur and D4 DAMAGERS.
Vendors lined the walls of the main room -- a large apartment reformatted into a music venue -- as a large crowd of people adorned in various levels of fur suits took center stage.
Most wore just ears (mostly drooping dog ears or alert cat ones) and a few hooked tails onto their belts. One fashionable furry had a fully plush tail resembling Appa from "The Last Airbender" Nickelodeon series. The bravest donned heads and a full suit, though they didn't stay on the floor long for fear of overheating.
At the long end of the hall, two folding tables pushed together to support a large mixer were flanked on either side by two large speakers, each about 6 feet tall. A flag bearing the colors of the transgender flag, with a hammer and sickle and the Islamic text of the Shahada over the top, was taped to the wall behind the kit.
Over the kit stood Demifiend, donned in Ravefurrest merchandise and mixing breakcore drums with bass-heavy electronic bwooms. To his right was his emcee, Sydney Léonie Pritchard, aka sulffffffur, a bald trans woman wearing black cat ears and a skirt.
Later in the night, Pritchard and King held a back-to-back set, collaborating live on a mix.
"I was spearheading Absolute Audio for a minute, I was really repping Chao Gardem while it was around and now I'm a part of Mages Guild," Pritchard said. "[Ravefurrest] reached out to me at some point in 2024, I guess because they'd seen what I and the crew had been involved in."
"I am obsessed with sulffffffur," King said. "I knew all of the people that I wanted to work with when I started this. I've just been checking them off the list."
King and Alex mostly find their collaborators through online spaces, primarily Instagram, Twitter and Soundcloud.
Kit Felts, known by their handle op0ppet, was a vendor at the rave who also did the poster art illustrations for the event. They found out about it through an Instagram mutual friend.
"I started my business in 2018 and I've been drawing the same furry mascots over and over and over. I've gained a following from that," Felts said. "I asked one of my friends, sparklecats2009, how they got into this kind of thing. They then asked if I wanted to design the cover art."
As many of their shows are underground, Ravefurrest and Mages Guild are concerned about safety, though King said they take proper precautions.
"For [Ravefurrest]'s home-based shows, we always have an armed security team that we've worked with. For the past five shows we've had [overdose treatment] Narcan, we make sure everyone is drinking water, that sort of thing," said King, who now operates as Ravefurrest's social media manager. "We rarely run into problems. The furries know how to handle themselves, but when things do come up we try to be prepared."
Such was the case on Saturday night. Around 11 p.m., King announced to ravers that no new entrees would be admitted; drywall had begun to crack on the ceiling of the venue's first floor, spurred by the 270 attendees dancing on the floor above.
The rave was cut short from its planned 4 a.m. run after the crack was discovered to prevent further damage to the property and maintain safety. No injuries were reported.
Mages Guild organizers have offered full refunds to anyone who bought a ticket and was unable to attend. The group plans to rent a permanent venue that can sustain the increased demand for the events, organizers said.
Despite the event being cut short, attendee and frequent raver Salem Downey was excited by the turnout, they said.
"I think it's a sign that it's growing, and a sign that this is a niche that needs to be filled in the community," Downey said. "It clearly has an audience, and someone should jump on that."
For Downey, being a furry coincides with their identity as a queer person.
"I was making Sonic OCs [original characters] when I was like, really little, so I've kind of always been a furry," Downey said. "I was a queer person in a rural area who didn't even have the words for being queer yet. It was a way to express that I was different from what my body looks like, but in a more accessible way for where I was at."
This was a common refrain among other longtime furries at the event.
"You really just get to be yourself," Alex said. "It's a safe space for everybody. Especially with Trump being in office now, I feel like we have a responsibility to keep this going because of how bad things are getting. We're providing a little relief from that for everybody."
"(I like) the way everybody is, how comfortable people get with each other. It's just a comforting crowd," Felts said. "It feels like home to me."