Bridging the ultrasynthetic and hyperorganic, Mort Garson’s album Mother Earth’s Plantasia is a Moog-powered salve “for plants . . . and the people who love them,” as the cover art notes. Since its 1976 release, Plantasia has become cultural canon, attracting reissues of varying legitimacy and providing grist for several exhaustive cultural critiques. After New […]
Tag: Angel Bat Dawid
Posted inMusic
Jonn Wallen of Oui Ennui made a torrent of genre-hopping albums while battling long COVID
In the past year or so, whenever a friend has asked me to recommend music, I’ve pointed them at Chicago multi-instrumentalist Jonn Wallen, who creates omnidirectional experimental electronic albums under the name Oui Ennui. A self-described hermit, he’d already spent decades making music largely in private and for his own satisfaction when COVID-19 hit. After […]
Posted inMusic
Sons of Kemet go Black to the Future at Lincoln Hall
Barbadian-British reedist Shabaka Hutchings can’t contain his creativity within a single group—right now he has three. His most expansive is Shabaka & the Ancestors, a sextext featuring several South African musicians rooted in Johannesburg’s freewheeling jazz scene. His tightest, the three-man the Comet Is Coming, brings the same spiritual profundity within a harder-rocking, more synth-saturated […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best use of cicadas on a jazz album
The dense, iridescent drone of an untold number of singing cicadas seeps into Now, the 2021 sophomore full-length by Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble. In August and September 2020, 11 of the collective’s members gathered to record at Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio, both inside and out back in the garden behind the building—and the environmental […]
Posted inArts & Culture
‘We need to be imagining other possibilities for ourselves’
The United States incarcerates more people and incarcerates them at a higher rate than any other country in the world, with 2.3 million people presently in custody—over half a million more than the country with the next highest population of imprisoned people. A report released in 2021 by the Sentencing Project found that Black people […]
Posted inMusic
Elastic Arts hosts the fourth annual Afrofuturist Weekend
The fourth annual Afrofuturist Weekend comes to Elastic Arts from Friday, October 22, through Sunday, October 24, with evening programs on Friday and Saturday and daytime programs on Saturday and Sunday. The festival’s organizers describe it as a “celebration of Black artists making forward-looking work that envisions radically positive futures for Black people,” and in […]
Posted inMusic
Half Gringa drops a new single and plays a pandemic-delayed album-release show
Gossip Wolf has been following the work of local singer-songwriter Isabel “Izzy” Olive, aka Half Gringa, since she was still calling her project Tin Silos in the mid-2010s. Since adopting the Half Gringa name, Olive has been on an incredible hot streak: her 2017 debut, Gruñona, earned a spot in the Reader’s sprawling list of […]
Posted inMusic
Bandcamp Fridays are back, at least for the rest of 2021
Though live shows are returning, there’s no safer way to support artists and labels than buying music online.
Posted inMusic
Rock critic Jessica Hopper publishes an expanded edition of her first book
Rock critic Jessica Hopper publishes a hugely expanded edition of her first book, Bryan Away (aka Elliot Korte) drops an album of lush folk-pop, and more.
Posted inMusic
Angel Bat Dawid finds creative kinship in Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty
Brotherhood, meet sisterhood. Those who know clarinetist, composer, and self-described “sonic archaeologist” Angel Bat Dawid from the incisive October release LIVE likely associate her with her stalwart seven-piece band, Tha Brotherhood, which backs her on that album. It was recorded during a fraught, frustrating 2019 European tour, but when the pandemic shuttered venues and stilled […]
Posted inCity Life
Celebrate independence your way
Upcoming events and recommendations for the next seven days
Posted inCity Life
Juneteenth celebrations and more
Upcoming events and recommendations for the next seven days
Posted inMusic
Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble’s Now is an essential album of the moment
Flipping through television channels. Flicking through radio stations. They’re quotidian actions—until they’re not. When you’ve lived through a year like 2020, every frequency delivers the same nightmare from a different angle. On Now (International Anthem), Chicago sound collagist Damon Locks and his Black Monument Ensemble confidently grasp the tuning dial of history. Like 2019’s Where […]
Posted inMusic
Celebrating women’s solidarity through culture on the gig poster of the week
This week’s featured gig poster was created by Chicago-via-Indiana photographer and designer Adeleine Prairie Sinsabaugh.
Posted inMusic
Alejandro Ayala, aka King Hippo, DJ and producer
“You bring people together and something will always happen. . . . The how is pretty easy, but the why is more important to me.”