This weekend, Humboldt Park event space Reunion Chicago partners with queer party collective Slo ‘Mo and Web TV platform Open Television for the three-night virtual Pride festival #4theQulture. Reunion founders Elijah McKinnon (who cofounded OTV and just won a Leaders for a New Chicago grant from the Field Foundation) and Kristen Kaza (who cofounded Slo ‘Mo and collaborates with the Reader) have put together an intersectional, intergenerational lineup that centers Black LGBTQ+ artists and their communities. OTV hosts the free event Friday through Sunday, June 26 through 28, with performances from many great Chicago acts, including Drea the Vibe Dealer, Lucy Stoole, Avery R. Young, Mother Nature, DJ Duane Powell, and Thair. Tune in to OTV to see who’s on each night!
TV Pow cofounder Brent Gutzeit moved from Chicago to Milwaukee four years ago, but he hung onto the Rolodex of talented friends he built here. In less than a week he assembled the 106-track, 11-hour compilation Building a Better Reality, released on Juneteenth to benefit Black Lives Matter, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Greater Chicago Food Depository. “This is just something that I could do,” Gutzeit says. “We all can help out in different ways—figure it out and do it.” Artists donated live tracks, unissued material, and new recordings. Among the contributors are Ken Vandermark, I Kong Kult, Al Margolis, Azita Youssefi, Fire-Toolz, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Gel Set, and Nick Mazzarella & Tomeka Reid, and standout cuts include a breathtaking 30-minute piece by Joshua Abrams and a live Michael Zerang track that conjures a cloud of unsettling sounds.
In February, Chicago rapper Roy Kinsey dropped one of the year’s best albums, Kinsey: A Memoir. Last weekend he teased a new song, a remix of the 2019 single “She/Her” with an all-star cast of Chicago women: Mother Nature, Cali Hendrix, and Tweak G. v
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