The event producers who debuted multiday gothic music festival Sanctum in Chicago last November are now attempting to make April Fool’s Night a thing with the 2023 Vampire Ball. The ball, which features a curated lineup of dark art and music, takes place at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, the near-west-side cultural center built […]
Category: Music
Posted inMusic
Joliet band Molder dig death metal right down to its bones
Joliet four-piece Molder know what’s awesome about classic death metal—and that includes its deliberately disgusting aesthetics. “I think some of it goes a little overboard and it’s a little silly, but to each their own,” guitarist and vocalist Aaren Pantke told Invisible Oranges last July, when Prosthetic released Molder’s second album, Engrossed in Decay. “It’s […]
Posted inMusic
The ladies who sing from the back
The 2013 film 20 Feet From Stardom tells the stories of background singers who’ve supported stars such as the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Ray Charles, and Donna Summer. The movie, which won the best documentary Oscar the following year, focuses mostly on singers based in Los Angeles and to a lesser degree New York, among them […]
Posted inMusic
Improvisers Mats Gustafsson and Joachim Nordwall make blockbuster-worthy music on a new collaborative album
Free improvisers, experimental musicians, and foley artists differ in their methods, but practitioners of all three arts can unite around their attraction to sounds that’ll raise your hackles. This collaboration between improvisational woodwinds player Mats Gustafsson and electronic musician Joachim Nordwall (of the Skull Defekts and the iDealist) could soundtrack a bookshelf full of straight-to-video […]
Posted inChicagoans of Note
Ash Dye, music scene photographer
In 2013, photographer Ash Dye moved to Chicago from Athens, Ohio, where she’d first become involved in an underground music scene. Within a few months of arriving here, Dye landed an internship at the Empty Bottle, which she used to launch an interview series called Empty Exchange; in 2014, she became a bartender at the […]
Posted inMusic
Algiers bring the sounds of Atlanta’s strident past and joyous present to Sleeping Village
The cover imagery on Algiers’s new album, Shook, can be interpreted as empowering or forsaken. A black wolf with feral or fawning eyes—you decide—stands in profile with its head lowered, a chain dangling from its mouth. I like to think that the wolf isn’t genuflecting but rather holding the tools of its oppressor between its […]
Posted inMusic
Acid King return to form with the powerful Beyond Vision
Acid King’s new full-length, Beyond Vision (Blues Funeral), wasn’t originally intended to be an Acid King record at all. As lead guitarist, front woman, and sole permanent member Lori S. (aka Lori Joseph) told Guitar World magazine in a February interview, she meant to make an experimental collaborative album with guitarist Jason Landrian of Black […]
Posted inGossip Wolf
Late jazz pianist Bob Dogan gets a tribute show at Elastic Arts
When Chicago pianist and composer Bob Dogan died in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2020 after a brief illness, our city lost a jazz giant. In 2005, longtime Reader writer Neil Tesser hailed his small-group compositions for their “strong, meaty lines with attractive harmonic schemes that engage and propel the soloists,” while also noting the airy, economical […]
Posted inMusic
TmbaTa Orchestra electrify Armenian folk tradition
Armenian folk music has retained its compelling singularity for centuries, through all the tribulations faced by the nation and its people, but TmbaTa Orchestra show that a deep respect for this tradition does not preclude reinventing it. The band, whose name derives from a musical exercise, grew out of an education program launched a decade […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago’s Djunah meld poetry and hard rock to power up Femina Furens
I wish more hard-rock bands played with the fervor and aggression of heavy Chicago two-piece Djunah. The duo’s music blazes with such bracing intensity that I’d half expect a vinyl copy of their 2019 album, Ex Voto, to scorch my fingers. Front woman Donna Diane delivers much of the band’s power, in part because she […]
Posted inMusic
With an album-release show at Adler Planetarium, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra plot an intergalactic return to Chicago
Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra sounds like a tributary of Chicago’s avant-jazz traditions. In 2005, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute of Chicago commissioned the multidisciplinary artist and trumpeter for a concert at Pritzker Pavilion, which inspired him to assemble a supergroup of the city’s bleeding-edge creative musicians. Together, they bundle the cosmic […]
Posted inMusic
They Are Gutting a Body of Water make a case for wackier shoegaze
Philadelphia band They Are Gutting a Body of Water toy with shoegaze like Van Leeuwen screws around with ice cream—their delightfully askew music draws me in, though, while Van Leeuwen’s Hidden Valley Ranch flavor repels me. TAGABOW have made a lot of creative choices that depart from shoegaze’s traditional wall-of-sound warmth. They’ve collaborated with Chicago […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
It’s never too late to give soul-blues master Bobby Jonz his flowers
We Americans don’t seem to want to deal with this pesky pandemic anymore—not to take precautions and certainly not to grieve our country’s losses, which topped one million lives almost a year ago. Even our president, who at first seemed to have our backs, has declared the crisis over. Meanwhile the body count keeps climbing, […]
Posted inGossip Wolf
Gossip Wolf: Chicago Afro-soul singer Nola Adé releases her long-awaited second EP, Royal
For the better part of a decade, Chicago native Nola Adé has released standout music, including her 2016 debut EP, The Love Dance, and a smattering of well-received singles on which she wrapped her luxurious voice around popping, radio-ready Afro-soul production. (Gossip Wolf remains especially partial to her track “Make Move,” a booming love song […]
Posted inMusic
Kora master Sona Jobarteh channels traditional Gambian music through a modern mindset
Sona Jobarteh was born in London to a family of Gambian griots, musicians and storytellers who maintain the oral tradition that keeps the histories of their people alive. Jobarteh’s family is one of five in West Africa associated with the kora, an instrument that combines features of a harp and a lute, with a large […]