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Tag: pandemic
Posted inMusic
Bandcamp Fridays are back again—at least for the rest of 2022
It’s been four months since we’ve had a Bandcamp Friday. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, Bandcamp introduced them shortly after COVID-19 eliminated stateside touring in March 2020, and they’ve since become something of a tradition, helping countless musicians make ends meet without their usual road money. For the 24 hours of each Bandcamp Friday, the […]
Posted inFilm
Destroy Your Art returns
At Destroy Your Art, taking place this year at the Music Box Theatre on Thursday, August 25, at 7 PM, the four invited filmmakers will each screen a film they made specifically for the event; after that, they’ll burn the flash drive on which it’s contained in front of the audience using a blowtorch.
Posted inMusic
The ‘new normal’ hangs over another summer of live music
It’s music festival season again, and of course we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 222.3 million U.S. residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19—roughly 67 percent of the population. Vaccination is a great safeguard against serious illness or death, but it’s less effective against infection […]
Posted inMusic
The second-biggest news about Bandcamp this week
Friday, March 4, is the 20th installment of what’s become known as Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp passes along its usual share of revenue to the independent artists and labels selling music through the site. But that occasion was overshadowed somewhat this morning, when Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond announced that the company is “joining” Epic Games. […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best Chicago venues for the COVID averse
For a few relatively blissful weeks in July 2021, Chicago’s COVID-19 infection rates dropped far enough that it was possible to believe that the worst of the pandemic was over. Then the Delta variant hit. The city didn’t lock down again, but Delta posed a dire threat to public health as well as to the […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best impromptu spiritual-jazz show to celebrate what turned out not to be the end of the pandemic
When the pandemic shut down live music, Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey began presenting great online gigs via Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts series. I remember the excitement I felt when the gallery made a last-minute, low-key announcement, mostly to friends and supporters, that the sixth of its Sequesterfest livestreaming events would also be open […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best concert for a cause
On Wednesday, October 13, 2021, the Old Town School of Folk Music’s third annual Indigenous Peoples’ Day Concert shook the rafters of the auditorium with Opliam’s rock-tinged blues, Huguito Gutierrez’s Andean pan flute, and the NuFolk Rebel Alliance’s mishmash of folkloric music, acoustic Americana, and tropical punk. Artist and activist Opliam (aka Liam McDonald, who’s […]
Posted inMusic
Basque musician Elena Setién makes sense of a changed world on Unfamiliar Minds
Basque singer and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién began working on her latest English-language recording, Unfamiliar Minds, just as the first wave of COVID shut down Europe down. She uses both sound and language to get its pandemic-times message across: the echoing piano chords on the opening song, “2020,” evoke the numbness wrought by accumulating uncertainty, while […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Homeless in a pandemic-stricken Chicago
Thousands have survived one pandemic winter, only to now face another, still waiting for shelters to have spaces for them, to hear their names called for a public housing unit.
Posted inOn Politics
MAGA science
Having spent the better part of the last week closely following the showdown between CPS and its teachers, I’ve concluded there’s no way Mayor Lightfoot truly believes the positions she’s been taking. Not unless the mayor—who ran as a progressive—has suddenly transformed into a Chicago version of Ron DeSantis, ’cause the stuff she’s been spouting […]
Posted inMusic
COVID kept on complicating our relationship with music in 2021
In September, a local collective of house DJs threw a party at Podlasie Club, an Avondale Polish bar with a distinctive L-shaped neon sign out front. The members of the Humboldt Arboreal Society usually spin under a tent in Humboldt Park, but for that one-off with veteran local DJ Rahaan, they’d made an exception—in part […]
Posted inCity Life
Comfort in the face of the unknown
The numbers boggle the mind. More deaths than AIDS in 40 years, the most recent epidemic in recent memory. More deaths than the 1918 influenza pandemic, previously the deadliest disease event in American history. More deaths than the U.S. Civil War, the deadliest conflict in our nation’s history. More deaths. More. More. More. The COVID-19 […]
Posted inMusic
Spooky season begins with another Bandcamp Friday
Since the pandemic arrived in the U.S. in March 2020, Bandcamp has declared 15 Bandcamp Fridays, so forgive me if I truncate my usual spiel. If you’ve somehow found this post without being aware of Bandcamp Friday, I’ll just say this: for 24 hours, the digital retailer passes along its usual share of revenue to […]
