It’s probably not possible to give a brief overview of Kahil El’Zabar’s resumé—the Chicago jazz percussionist has been a crucial part of the city’s musical heritage since he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians at age 18 in the early 1970s. (He also served the AACM as its chairman for a few […]
Category: Music
Posted inMusic
Sammy Lawhorn might be the most widely recorded blues guitarist lost to time
Folks often ask me how I’ve come up with subjects for the Secret History of Chicago Music month after month. I have lots of answers, all of them true, including digging in record bins, falling down Internet rabbit holes, and cultivating knowledgeable friends. I’m tight with experts in several genres well represented in Chicago: big-city […]
Posted inMusic
New-music feast the Frequency Festival returns after taking a COVID year
Former Reader staff writer Peter Margasak has been programming the Frequency Series at Constellation since 2013, bringing in artists from across the wide spectrum of experimental and new music for weekly showcases. Since 2016 Margasak has also booked the annual Frequency Festival, which skipped 2021 for obvious reasons; the festival will return for its sixth […]
Posted inMusic
Earthless return to form on the psychedelic Night Parade of One Hundred Demons
Earthless started releasing anachronistic 40-minute jams steeped in 70s hard-rock riffing at a time in the early 2000s when spindly postpunk seemed to dominate the underground rock landscape. A new wave of psychedelic metal was also beginning to take shape, though, and the Southern California trio’s studio debut, 2005’s Sonic Prayer, opens with a track […]
Posted inMusic
Atom & His Package tweaked the punk scene where it counts
I still often think about Atom & His Package, the one-man, one-sequencer band that charmed and annoyed the U.S. punk scene from 1996 till 2003—that is, mostly before I knew how to find my way into that world. I love the novelty factor of the act: bespectacled Philadelphia punk Adam “Atom” Goren would yelp over […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago Americana outfit Dogs at Large flirt with the comforts of lo-fi sounds
Since the mid-2010s, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Sam Pirruccello (aided by a shifting group of collaborators) has been releasing languid, Americana-inflected indie rock as Dogs at Large. In 1975, Pirruccello’s father, Bo, and Bo’s brother Frank (Pirruccello’s uncle) cofounded the delightful country-rock band Ouray, and the music of Dogs at Large has a noticeable twang too. Dogs […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago rapper Vic Spencer sticks to his ideals on Spencer for Higher 4
Chicago rapper Vic Spencer has built a catalog worthy of a book-length exposition, but for the time being I’ll restrict myself to a handful of observations about December’s Spencer for Higher 4 (Old Fart Luggage). One: UK rapper-producer Sonnyjim, who had a hand in every beat on the album, employs sumptuous sonics that help even […]
Posted inMusic
Singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada conquers heartache on her debut Marchita
On her exquisite debut album, Marchita, Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada dissects the many bruised facets of a breakup in 11 intimate, elegant tunes. Estrada colors her compositions with her experiences growing up in a family of classical musicians and luthiers as well as her jazz studies at the University of Veracruz. On Marchita, she traces […]
Posted inMusic
Elton ‘L10MixedIt’ Chueng, recording engineer
Elton Chueng, 33, began his career as a professional recording engineer with an internship at Classick Studios in 2011. He’s since worked with some of the brightest stars to emerge from Chicago’s hip-hop scene in the past decade, including Saba, Noname, Smino, and Chance the Rapper. In November his contributions to Yebba’s 2021 debut, Dawn, […]
Posted inMusic
Semiratruth’s Moonlandin’ elevates her music to a new plane
Semiratruth Garrett remembers the exact day her creative life opened up. It wasn’t the afternoon in 2014 when she first recorded a song at Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia lab, or the day several years later when she rapped her way onto Netflix’s 2019 hip-hop competition, Rhythm + Flow—though both those moments are also burned into […]
Posted inMusic
Local drummer and bandleader Tim Daisy introduces two new bands
In January 2021, I profiled local percussionist Tim Daisy by detailing his creative response to the limitations imposed by COVID-19. At the time, he had just issued a virtual collaboration with electronic musician Ikue Mori on his own label, Relay Recordings. While Daisy has continued to exploit the potentialities of home recording and technologically facilitated […]
Posted inMusic
Lyra Pramuk makes cybernetic Gregorian rave music
Lyra Pramuk’s music has a sparklingly ethereal, woodland quality—like disco meets Midsommar (minus any residual fascism). The Berlin-based artist was born in Pennsylvania and grew up singing in small-town church choirs. While going through the motions of performing as a boy content to sing religious songs in the round, she developed a rich, private online […]
Posted inMusic
Cloakroom tap into their dreamier side on Dissolution Wave
On the untouchable 2017 LP Time Well, Cloakroom dialed in and perfected their take on modern slowcore, blending Hum-flavored space rock and atomically heavy walls of guitars with syrupy, dreary, and heart-wrenchingly sad vocal melodies. The Northwest Indiana trio have since undergone a lineup shift, and some members have also spread their wings in other […]
Posted inMusic
New-music combo Honestly Same debut their improvised meditations
Update Thu 1/20: The Honestly Same concert tonight has been canceled because one of the group’s members has been exposed to COVID. Gossip Wolf has yet to hear a note from Honestly Same, but the temptation is strong to refer to the five-piece improvising collective as a supergroup—kind of like Temple of the Dog for […]
Posted inMusic
Progressive death-metal band Monochromatic Black deliver the brutality on Vicissitude
In 2018, Long Island progressive death-metal band Monochromatic Black threw down the gauntlet with a video for their debut single, “The Herd,” announcing themselves as a force to be reckoned with. The following year, they released their first EP, Pneuma, to considerable acclaim: it’s an intense, versatile, and strikingly assured burst of brutality that hit […]