Lykanthea’s Dawn Birds welcome the autumnal equinox with song

Update: Due to a stormy forecast for Tuesday morning, the performance of Lykanthea’s Dawn Birds has been rescheduled for Wednesday, September 22, at 6:30 AM.

Lakshmi Ramgopal, who makes music as Lykanthea, moved to the east coast in 2016 (she’s an assistant professor of history at Columbia University in New York), but she still considers Chicago her spiritual and musical home. “I visit the city at least once a month,” she says, “so a substantial part of my life happens there.” That’s led to a series of unforgettable site-specific pieces, including a revelatory 2017 sound installation at Comfort Station and a nine-member ensemble she assembled for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s MCA 50 series later that year. On Tuesday, September 21, Ramgopal will lead a performance called Lykanthea’s Dawn Birds (with violinist Johanna Brock, cellist Erica Miller, and dancer Asha Rowland) at the Garfield Park Conservatory’s City Garden. She says the 6:30 AM sunrise show will celebrate the following day’s equinox and feature music from the forthcoming album Some Viscera, including a “lullaby that I wrote for myself, a work in progress called ‘Water, Wind, Waves, Snow’ that we’re excited to share.”

Gossip Wolf faves Ozzuario blend clanging industrial rhythms and grimy black-metal guitars, and their album Existence Is Pain has been in constant rotation since its LP release last summer. This month the duo dropped a follow-up, Mental Hell, that they call a “post-traumatic journey through a world decimated by a crushing pandemic, murderous authoritarian governments, institutional racism, never-ending wars, religious extremism, climate change, and predatory capitalism.” Needless to say, “March of the Pigfucks” and “Attack and Dethrone God” sound timely! The band’s label, Distort Discos, is selling LPs and downloads via Bandcamp.

^{Mental Hell is dedicated to the memory of Alejandro Morales of Running and Riley Gale of Power Trip.}

On Friday, September 17, Spirits Having Fun, a joyfully artsy indie-rock band based in Chicago and New York, headline Golden Dagger. It’s a release show for their new album, Two, which Born Yesterday issued this month; Moontype and Floatie open.

^{The Chicagoans in Spirits Having Fun are drummer Phil Sudderberg and guitarist-vocalist Andrew Clinkman.}