I love Third Coast Percussion—I ranked their 2018 release Paddle to the Sea number one on my list of the best Chicago albums of the 2010s—and I’m a big fan of Jlin. So when I heard that TCP had commissioned music from my favorite experimental footwork producer, I started counting down the days till they’d […]
Category: Music
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Forty-two Reader-recommended releases for your Bandcamp Friday
Friday, May 6, is the 22nd Bandcamp Friday—a 24-hour period where the retailer passes its usual cut of sales revenue along to the independent labels and artists who sell their music and merchandise through the site. Bandcamp typically announces forthcoming Bandcamp Fridays in three-month chunks, and this Friday is the last one that’s been made […]
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Groovy jazz trio the Three Souls produced a legendary basketball coach
The Secret History of Chicago Music has produced plenty of offshoots over the 18 years that it’s run, and I’m pretty proud of some of them. I published the book My Kind of Sound: The Secret History of Chicago Music Compendium in 2016; I’ve facilitated reissues and archival releases of music by artists I’ve covered […]
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Sound artist Rocio Zavala debuts with an album of otherworldly drone
In May 2020, during the isolating depths of the first large-scale U.S. COVID-19 lockdown, Gossip Wolf caught a live online performance by Rocio Zavala as part of Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts series. A sound and visual artist from Mexico who’s now based in Chicago, Zavala crafted an alluring, otherworldly drone with her own handmade […]
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Moritat find ecstasy in art-rock’s odd angles
Moritat’s new self-released album, Vermilion, settles in like the night. The Chicago art-rock band’s subtle, magnetic polyrhythms simmer with the allure of a backyard bonfire or an open-air midnight dance party, and their cool, melodious synths feel like a predawn drive on an empty road lit only by stars. Moritat’s core members—Venus Laurel, Corey McCafferty, […]
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Helado Negro’s down-home pop is as invigorating as it is intimate
For more than a decade, Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange has crafted down-home pop music as Helado Negro. Each of his seven albums has shown a graceful evolution of his sonic palette, introducing scrappy psych-folk excursions, midtempo synth-pop odysseys, and other elements, but they’re all connected by an overarching gentleness at their core. Lange’s music […]
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Chicago rapper Supa Bwe demonstrates the unity of the personal and political on No Thanks
Supa Bwe’s ear for melody and taste for sweet hooks make him one of the city’s best rappers. Since breaking out in 2014, he’s amassed a cult audience with performances that blend screamo intensity and R&B sensuality, and he was doing it years before Soundcloud rap introduced a cohort of shouty rappers who sounded like […]
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Vijay Iyer builds a superpowered septet in tribute to Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard
The creative and intellectual spheres of Eve Ewing and Vijay Iyer are so expansive they’re pretty much impossible to abbreviate. So the news that Iyer is in town for the pandemic-deferred premiere of his musical suite inspired by Ewing’s writing, Ghosts Everywhere I Go, should inspire eager anticipation and knowing nods. Ewing and Iyer are […]
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The sum of Patti Smith’s work has more weight and depth than ever
Patti Smith hasn’t released a new album since 2012’s Banga, but the Chicago-born punk singer and poet has stayed extremely active as a photographer, activist, and author. She’s published six books in the past decade, and her latest, 2019’s Year of the Monkey, is a riveting memoir. Set in 2016, it’s a picaresque ramble through […]
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Underground rapper Defcee connects with Closed Sessions producer BoatHouse on For All Debts Public and Private
If you need an introduction to Defcee, you haven’t been paying attention to underground hip-hop in Chicago. The rapper had a banner year in 2021, thanks to three collaborative releases that nudged him further into the national spotlight: June’s We Dressed the City With Our Names, a collaboration with beat maker August Fanon; September’s Sunday […]
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Indie-pop goofballs Baby Teeth ratchet up their reunion with another single
Gossip Wolf doesn’t like to speculate about which band breakups will stick (it’s no fun to be wrong), but when local indie-pop goofballs Baby Teeth announced their final show in 2012, it seemed unlikely that Chicago had heard the last from them. In the years that followed, singer-songwriter Abraham Levitan, front man of the trio, […]
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Congotronics International is a supergroup as big as the world
Congotronics International is rooted in Konono No. 1 and the Kasai Allstars, two bands from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that released music through legendary Belgian label Crammed Discs in the mid-2000s. Those groups’ hyperamplified, percussion-heavy sounds, which Crammed released in a series dubbed Congotronics (also the title of Konono No. 1’s 2004 album […]
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Cynthia Plaster Caster broke the mold
Kind. Funny. Genuine. A sweetheart, an artist, a legend. If the true sign of a life well lived is a tidal wave of emotional tributes when you die, then Cynthia Albritton—better known to the whole wide world as Cynthia Plaster Caster—lived a very good life. So much so that writing about her after her passing—she […]
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Celia Rose, cofounder of music agency What Up Pitches
Celia Rose is one of the three founders of What Up Pitches, a music agency that combines a production house and a sync-licensing operation. Her colleagues, Mariela Arredondo and Pei Pei Chung, are both based in Los Angeles, but Rose lives here in Lincoln Square. They launched What Up Pitches a little over two years […]
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Cellist and former Chicagoan Fred Lonberg-Holm revives some local projects
Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm lived in Chicago for 22 years. During that time, he was ubiquitous on the city’s improvisational music scene, playing in bands and ad hoc groupings with so many essential players that any list that could fit in this preview would be ridiculously incomplete. He was also a tireless touring musician who represented […]