South-side native and Chicago soul artist Manasseh has all the skills to become a superstar. His sumptuous voice and incisive lyrics, as well as his stellar craftsmanship as a vocal and instrumental arranger, have made all his recordings knockouts. His most recent release is the March 2022 full-length Monochromatic Dream, whose delicious earworms of psychedelic […]
Tag: Friko
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Horsegirl and the dream of a teen rock scene
In July 2019, Chicago indie-rock trio Horsegirl played the eighth annual Square Roots Festival. At the time, live shows were the only way to hear the group’s taut but disarming dream pop, with its windswept-lakefront sound—and they’d only performed a few of them. They hadn’t released any music, not even to stream, and unsurprisingly they’d […]
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Eli Schmitt, jack-of-all-trades in Chicago’s young DIY arts and music scene
Eli Schmitt, 20, moved to Chicago a couple years ago to attend DePaul, where he studies journalism and art history. In that time he’s become a crucial connector in an emerging youth arts movement best known for its bands, which include Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Friko, Dwaal Troupe, and Horsegirl. Schmitt wears a lot of […]
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Bandcamp Fridays enter their third year
I still can’t do anything but guess about the long-term significance of last month’s news that Bandcamp has been acquired by Epic Games. Or maybe I should say “worry,” not “guess.” I cherish Bandcamp because it caters to artists who have little to no interest in the mainstream music business, and I don’t want that […]
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Young indie rockers Friko celebrate a sophisticated new EP with a springtime show
Friko front man Niko Kapetan is a key player in Chicago’s young indie-rock underground. His band belongs to a tight-knit community that also includes like-minded acts Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Dwaal Troupe, and Horsegirl—the connections among them are too numerous to list here, but to pick one example, Kapetan helped engineer and produce Horsegirl’s 2020 […]