Marina Herlop’s primary interest is aesthetics. She’ll say her songs aren’t autobiographical, and the pianist’s penchant for dropping made-up language into digitally manipulated audio environments can make it difficult for listeners to ground her work in something familiar. But with enough scrutiny, you can follow clues that situate her evolving output within a number of […]
Category: Music
Posted inMusic
Chicago’s Viva Acid fest brings Eris Drew back to town
Eris Drew’s debut album, 2021’s Quivering in Time, embeds lots of attention-grabbing details in its collagelike, psychedelic-tinged dance tracks—among them sounds of turntable scratching. There’s one near the end of “Time to Move Close,” after a slyly funky and somnolent synth melody guides listeners through six minutes of Hi-NRG percussive loops and several divergent synth […]
Posted inGossip Wolf
Chicago indie rock mourns Ryan Deffet of Space Gators
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 […]
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Get Smart! can teach you more about punk’s past in person
If it hadn’t been for the COVID pandemic, power-poppy Kansas punk trio Get Smart! would’ve played a 40th-anniversary show—their first gig in three decades—in November 2020. That date ended up pushed back to November 2021, and luckily for us, it didn’t turn out to be a one-off affair. The band formed in Lawrence in 1980 […]
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival reached new heights in 2023
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival is one of the best-programmed events of its kind anywhere, thanks to the resilient and resourceful people, many of them volunteers, who organize and coordinate it. It’s also one of the most frustrating, because there’s so much good stuff to see that schedule clashes are inevitable—especially on Saturday, when 31 […]
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In the vast universe of cosmic jazz, Rami Atassi’s Dancing Together spins in its own orbit
Rami Atassi gets around: he’s a prolific music educator, a guitarist in local alt-rock projects the Curls and Ester, the bandleader of Blow Wind Blow, and a trusted collaborator of Chicago bassist Tatsu Aoki, with whom he recorded 2020’s criminally underrated duo album Atashi Wa Rami. But so far he’s never had the spotlight to […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
All-girl garage band the Same got short-changed by the grown-ups in the room
Sometimes you have to play the long game. I’ve been trying for years to get the story of local 1960s girl group the Same. My interview requests didn’t lead anywhere, and I couldn’t track down much info about their only release—the 1967 single “Sunshine, Flowers and Rain”—or about the women who’d created it. Thankfully, Chicago […]
Posted inGossip Wolf
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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Scottish hip-hop group Young Fathers embrace their light on Heavy Heavy
Update Tue 9/27: Young Fathers have postponed this show till April 11, 2024. The new date is also at the Vic, and all tickets already bought will be honored or refunded. For about a decade, Scottish trio Young Fathers have been releasing subterranean-sounding experimental hip-hop songs whose strange arrangements combine brawny percussion, squeaky synths, polyphonic […]
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Thantifaxath and Sunless explore two different realms of metal
Toronto-based black-metal trio Thantifaxath (whose members are deliberately anonymous) released a startling, unusual debut album, Sacred White Noise, in 2014. Since then, though, their recorded output has been tantalizingly sparse: just one EP in 2017. So their second full-length, Hive Mind Narcosis, which they released in June on Dark Descent, had plenty of time to […]
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Shoegaze pioneers Slowdive drop a new album just in time for the colder days ahead
I realize I’m in the minority when I say I love the days when autumn bleeds into winter. I love the crisp air that descends with the first seasonal chill; I love the smell of trees shedding the last of their leaves; I love that it all reminds me to embrace the warmth of cozy […]
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Rapper and fashion mogul Reese LaFlare is on his way to becoming a household name
Update Fri 9/22: This concert has been canceled. According to the man himself, Reese LaFlare doesn’t get the credit he deserves—but the way things are going, that could change any minute. The rapper and record producer also known as Maurice Williams has been a more influential force in the modern Atlanta trap scene than many […]
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How do Delaney Bailey’s intimate songs speak to you?
The earliest Spotify track uploaded by Indiana-raised singer-songwriter Delaney Bailey is the gentle 2020 song “Loving & Losing,” whose delicate, cycling acoustic guitar melody sounds like wind chimes in the breeze. Before the official release of the song, Bailey uploaded a TikTok video where she performs part of it in a dim, cluttered room. Lyrics […]
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival’s richly varied program opens doors to musical growth with new alliances
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival may bear the name of a single neighborhood, but it’s a world-class event. The programming draws heavily from local talent, but Chicagoans such as saxophonist Ari Brown and vocalist Dee Alexander have earned international profiles. And the performers from elsewhere include the likes of Detroit drummer Louis Hayes and Philadelphia […]
Posted inChicagoans of Note
Josh Horton, music videographer
I discovered the work of videographer Josh Horton through local music-media outlet Real Ones, which began as a podcast in 2020 and evolved to produce concerts and shoot interviews with local and national artists. Horton has shot Real Ones interviews at several festivals. He immersed himself in Chicago’s overlapping hip-hop and R&B scenes after graduating […]