For the past week, Chicago’s indie-rock scene has been mourning the unexpected death of Ryan Deffet, who played guitar and sang in Space Gators and Faux Furrs. Deffet moved here from Dayton, Ohio, and enmeshed himself in the northwest-side underground scene in the 2010s; for years he organized Deff Jam, a DIY festival that presented […]
Author Archives: J.R. Nelson
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Future Rootz teams up to reissue a rare album of trippy 70s Afro-Cuban funk
Last week, Chicago Latinx artist collective and label Future Rootz teamed up with Toronto counterpart Canal Sounds to reissue Yoyi, a trippy Afro-Cuban album that Cuban multi-instrumentalist Jorge Soler León released under the name Grupo los Yoyi in 1977. Yoyi originally came out on the Areito imprint of EGREM, which for decades was Cuba’s only […]
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Hammered dulcimer player Joel Styzens celebrates a lushly orchestrated new solo album
Gossip Wolf first became acquainted with multi-instrumentalist Joel Styzens via his remarkable hammered dulcimer playing on the Elijah McLaughlin Ensemble album III, which Reader writer Bill Meyer praised in May for its attempts at “musical transcendence.” As you might expect from that record’s shimmering acoustic textures and accessible melodies, Styzens’s own compositions play out across […]
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House veteran Craig Loftis needs help to keep the music going at the Lodge
In late August, veteran Chicago house DJ and organizer Craig Loftis launched a GoFundMe to try to save the Great Lakes Elks Lodge in Washington Park from closure. Loftis says the building is more than 100 years old, and that the Elks have occupied it for 86 years. He also runs an underground house club […]
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Jazz pianist Pat Leary celebrates a sleek, bustling electric trio album
Pianist Pat Leary has played in so many local ensembles it’d be easy to lose count. These days he tickles the ivories in Latin R&B band Partywatcher and indie country outfit Thompson Springs, accompanies jazz singer Livia Gazzolo, and improvises in free-jazz quartet Heuristic with saxophonist and flutist Eric Novak, bassist Jeff Wheaton, and drummer […]
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Dave Rempis steps away from Elastic Arts after more than 20 years of service
For more than two decades, saxophonist Dave Rempis has been a key community builder in the improvised-music scene, both locally and internationally, working behind the scenes as well as onstage. He’s made incalculable contributions during his long association with Chicago nonprofit Elastic Arts: since 2002 he’s booked its Thursday-night Improvised Music Series, and he’s served […]
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Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse have finally decided their new album is done
It’s been years since the duo of Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse (aka Jennifer Polus) dropped the name “Good Fuck” and began recording and performing under their own names. Their industriousness remains undiminished: they began developing the new Giddy Skelter, their debut full-length for Kill Rock Stars, nearly three years ago, and they made a […]
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Lovely Little Girls drop a dazzling new album of grotesque, theatrical prog rock
In 2016, Reader music editor Philip Montoro profiled local progressive-rock weirdos Lovely Little Girls upon the release of the album Glistening Vivid Splash, describing their “absurd and jarring contrasts” and “knotty, intricate songs” that “heave and dance and skitter, sometimes gracefully dexterous and sometimes grotesquely lumpy.” The band have been steadily evolving since their confrontationally […]
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Cemetery founder and front man Danny Gallegos dies
Danny Gallegos, who cofounded Cemetery in 2010 and fronted the Chicago death-rock band for its entire history, died on Thursday, July 27. “Danny had so many ideas. Too many,” says guitarist Dez Knuska, who became friends with Gallegos in 2007 because they went to a lot of the same punk shows. “He wanted to be […]
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Globe-trotting groove wizards Magic Carpet drop their FPE Records debut
Update 8/6/2023: The Back Alley Jazz event in Hasan Park on Sunday, August 6 (see third item below), has been canceled due to forecast weather. The Hyde Park Jazz Festival will announce a new date for the event. For more than 20 years, Chicago ensemble Magic Carpet have blended jazz, funk, reggae, and various flavors […]
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Two former Electric Eels show up to celebrate an obsessively curated new compilation
Cleveland protopunk band the Electric Eels existed for just three years in the early 70s, playing all of five gigs, and didn’t release a record till long after they’d broken up. But the legend of this notoriously self-destructive band keeps growing—maybe because founding guitarist Brian McMahon published a masterfully cantankerous memoir, Jaguar Ride, via HoZac […]
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WHPK faces a funding crisis that could take it off the air
On July 14, student organizers at University of Chicago radio station WHPK released a public letter to university leadership requesting more financial support for the upcoming school year—in part to mitigate an oncoming crisis of equipment maintenance. In April, the student-run Program Coordinating Council, which allocates student government money every year, gave WHPK $20,600 for […]
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War Effort drop a scorching EP of ‘first thought, best thought’ D-beat hardcore
The punishing five-song cassette that local D-beat crew War Effort dropped last summer was rumored to have been written and recorded in one day—and the band have maintained that pace on Path to Glory, a scorching seven-inch EP (released last month via Bay Area label Warthog Speak) that ups the ante on the tape’s aggression […]
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Armando Perez of ÉSSO goes solo on oobs Rx
Gossip Wolf has been hailing Armando Perez for his work with local groove-tastic ensemble ÉSSO since 2015. This wolf was especially impressed with the band’s 2021 album, Xicao, and its broad palette of dance-floor-filling sounds. For the past few years, Perez has been working on radically different solo material, playing drums, guitars, bass, synths, and […]
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Froghat fills an amphibian-shaped hole in the surf-rock firmament
Chicago artist Nicholas Clark first popped up on Gossip Wolf’s radar in 2016, when his Minnowland studio made a hilariously oddball Claymation video for “Sad Screaming Old Man,” a song by New York indie-folk musician and comic-book artist Jeffrey Lewis about his travails with a loud elderly neighbor. As it turns out, Clark also makes […]