My mother always told me, “When you get older, you’ll begin to see the world in shades of gray.” Generally speaking, she was right (as usual), but I often find that idiom falling short of my personal experience. Listening to the prismatic 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017, I finally understood why: I’d much rather see the […]
Author Archives: Hannah Edgar
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Arc Mountain is the underground-label collaboration you’ve been waiting for
Like doesn’t necessarily breed like—just ask all the friends for whom I’ve tried (and failed) to play cupid. But similarity is bliss for underground labels Deathbomb Arc and Hausu Mountain, which collaborated to release the compilation Arc Mountain on May 7. Based respectively in Los Angeles and Chicago, these eclectic, irreverent labels might be separated […]
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Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble’s Now is an essential album of the moment
Flipping through television channels. Flicking through radio stations. They’re quotidian actions—until they’re not. When you’ve lived through a year like 2020, every frequency delivers the same nightmare from a different angle. On Now (International Anthem), Chicago sound collagist Damon Locks and his Black Monument Ensemble confidently grasp the tuning dial of history. Like 2019’s Where […]
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Serpentwithfeet’s Deacon soars with subversive joy
Experimental musician Serpentwithfeet (born Josiah Wise) is many things, including a man of his word. “Life’s gotta get easier / Can’t carry a heavy heart into another year,” he vows on “A Comma” from last April’s EP Apparition. If you take the new Deacon (Secretly Canadian) at face value, he hasn’t: the album is the […]
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Will Liverman and Paul Sánchez celebrate Black composers and writers on a collaborative album
While listening to Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers, the most recent release by operatic baritone Will Liverman with pianist and recital partner Paul Sánchez, I realized with a start that time had ground to a halt. But when? Had the clock stopped with H. Leslie Adams’s churning 1992 composition “Amazing Grace”? […]
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The remarkable life of Art Castillo and Moulin Jimmy’s
Tacked to the wall of a beloved Hyde Park dive, a time capsule hides in plain sight.
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With Swirling, the Sun Ra Arkestra wills a better world into existence
“The satellites are spinning / A better day is breaking / Great happiness is pending / The planet Earth’s awakening.” The first lyrics on the Sun Ra Arkestra’s long-awaited Swirling (Strut), sung by Tara Middleton, sound like a dispatch from a world infinitely more promising than our own. That dogged optimism carries the entire studio […]
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Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living upends the timeline to stake out a fresh vantage point
The through line of Spektral Quartet’s first studio release in four years, Experiments in Living, is that there is no through line—at least on the surface. The double album covers 150 years of history, from Brahms to living lions such as George Lewis, but rather than foist a chronological or thematic flow onto the recording, […]
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The generation-spanning Fountain of Time is an intriguing peek into Chicago new-music lab the Grossman Ensemble
The Grossman Ensemble could be thought of as a new-music incubator. The resident ensemble of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition (CCCC) at the University of Chicago, the 13-piece group—which comprises some of the best contemporary players in the city—rehearses extensively with composers over the course of several weeks. Some of their commissions emerge collaboratively […]
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The Pacifica Quartet fortify new foundations with Contemporary Voices
It might seem backhanded or cute to say that a Grammy–winning string quartet’s 16th record has the feel of a second act. But that more or less describes the Pacifica Quartet’s new release, Contemporary Voices. The album is the ensemble’s second since they changed up their ranks; violinist Austin Hartman and violist Mark Holloway replace […]
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And then there were four: Kneebody settle into life as a quartet
As far as album titles go, Kneebody’s Chapters is pretty damn on the nose. The record, which came out in October, is the instrumental avant-pop-jazz omnivores’ first full-length since they announced the departure of founding bassist Kaveh Rastegar last February, along with their transformation from a lean five-piece into an even leaner quartet. It’s the […]