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Plantasia grows into a two-night affair at Garfield Park Conservatory

Time has only deepened the music community’s affection for Mort Garson’s 1976 flora-themed synth spectacular, Mother Earth’s Plantasia. In celebration of Garson’s enduring legacy, Empty Bottle Presents and Brooklyn label Sacred Bones have created a festival of lush sights and sounds at Garfield Park Conservatory. For the event’s fourth iteration, they’ve expanded Plantasia into a […]

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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 […]

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Drone legends Sunn O))) bring their new concept, Shoshin Duo, to Thalia Hall for one bone-rattling night

Over the course of 24 years and nine full-length studio releases, drone-metal outfit Sunn O))) have cultivated a lofty mystique. In fact, their reputation often precedes them: you’ve probably heard the lore of their 120-decibel live shows, with their glacial cadences and bone-rattling soundscapes. But their first Chicago appearance since a 2019 stint at Rockefeller […]

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Plantasia puts down roots at the Garfield Park Conservatory for its third installment

Bridging the ultrasynthetic and hyperorganic, Mort Garson’s album Mother Earth’s Plantasia is a Moog-powered salve “for plants . . . and the people who love them,” as the cover art notes. Since its 1976 release, Plantasia has become cultural canon, attracting reissues of varying legitimacy and providing grist for several exhaustive cultural critiques. After New […]

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Cat Power brings catalog cornerstones and reworked classics to Thalia Hall

Chan Marshall, who’s performed as Cat Power since the mid-90s (she adopted it from the name of her first band), refreshes even the most weathered motifs with her smokestack voice. While she’s amassed a formidable catalog of soulful originals, she’s most renowned for refracting other artists’ radio hits and obscure B sides through her singular […]

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Hana Vu carves new pop landscapes with Public Storage

Storage units, with their heavy padlocked doors and stockpiles of intimate possessions, are ripe for metaphors about emotional compartmentalization. On her debut album, Public Storage, Los Angeles guitarist and songwriter Hana Vu finds inspiration there, drawing on memories of the storage units her family used during their frequent moves and her subsequent feelings of displacement. […]

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The Body and Big|Brave draw on the Band and Appalachia for Leaving None but Small Birds

The Body and Big|Brave are both known for their takes on pulverizing, minimalist postmetal, but their new collaborative album, Leaving None but Small Birds (Thrill Jockey), gazes at the infinite possibilities of traditional folk music through a warped and weathered all-seeing eye. Crafted in the studio with engineer-producer Seth Manchester (a frequent collaborator of the […]