Category: Post No Bills

Tania Bowers/From Sydney for Love

Children’s Hour/Billy’s Buds

Randy King/Good Mix or All Mixed Up?

Big Names on the Street When I moved to Chicago in the mid-80s, neighborhood street fairs mostly featured second-rate acts destined never to expand beyond a local audience–does anyone remember Phil ‘n the Blanks or Heavy Manners? Though music was an integral part of these summertime events, the programming seemed like an afterthought. Today local […]

Tim Kinsella/Two Bands in One

.22 The Worker (Roydale) I wince when folks talk about the “Chicago sound”–there are just too many different kinds of music in town for such a generalization to make sense. But some styles do prevail more than others. For instance, elements of the first Tortoise record–nimble bass melodies, wide-open drumming–have spread like dandelion seeds over […]

L.C. Thurman/Switching Landlords

Hothouse/Mixed Signals, Prodigal Son/Right Neighborly

Garage on Fire! When the creators of Horizontal Action xeroxed the first 251 copies of their zine in 1997, they had no greater ambition than to plug their favorite bands and score some free records. “It’s fun for us, and I guess we have a lot of energy,” says cofounder Todd Killings (aka Todd Novak). […]

Watchers/Fractured Funk

John Dal Santo/Birthday Bust

Eric Johnson and Gillian Lisee/No Hard Feelings

Janet Bean/In Control

Label Savers/Justin Sinkovich and Stephen Schmidt