Gossip Wolf first heard the immaculate vocals of Sacha Mullin in avant-weird band Lovely Little Girls (where the Reader‘s Philip Montoro noted his “exalted and almost alien” sound) and in long-running prog-pop outfit Cheer-Accident (where he still sings). On Saturday, July 15, Mullin self-releases his second solo album, Duplex, whose oddly tuneful songs sound a bit like George Michael fronting far-out jam band Gong in a Broadway-style revue. That’s not a surprise, considering that the session musicians on Duplex include current and former members of Cheer-Accident and the similarly uncategorizable American Draft and Guzzlemug. Also on Saturday, Mullin celebrates the album with a Cafe Mustache show featuring Dougie Poole, Ted Tyro, and Double Morris.
In 2008, Robert Cole Manis worked with Drag City imprint Galactic Zoo Disk to release the compilation LP Cosmic Lightning by forgotten outsider punk J.T. IV (aka John Henry Timmis IV), who’d died in 2002. This week, in conjunction with Featherproof Books, Manis’s Moniker Records label publishes Timmis’s From the Inside, a short autobiographical work that focuses on his adolescent experiences at a Kansas mental health facility.
Gossip Wolf loves Assembly, the 2015 album by Arvo Zylo’s colossal experimental group Blood Rhythms—”colossal” describes both its ominous sound and its shifting lineup, which has included up to 15 people (including five drummers). The group has been pretty quiet since Assembly, though the Bandcamp page for Zylo’s label, No Part of It, lists two Blood Rhythms releases uploaded last year—a reissue of the 2009 live cassette Cutting Teeth and a compilation called Heuristics. On Thursday, July 13, Blood Rhythms return to the stage at Logan Square dive the Mutiny, joined by Gas Mask Horse, Spare Change, and Silver Abuse. Zylo says this may be Blood Rhythms’ final Chicago show—he’s moving away! The noise starts at 9 PM. v
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