Sacred Bones Archives - Chicago Reader

The Soft Moon continues to hammer out industrial darkwave misery

by Noah Berlatsky November 30, 2022November 23, 2022

“I’m starting to turn into someone else . . . again,” moans Luis Vasquez on “Monster,” from his latest album as the Soft Moon, Exister (Sacred Bones). It’s true that Vasquez, who’d been holed up in Berlin during the pandemic, moved to Joshua Tree to record this effort. But whatever else might’ve changed about him, […]

Music

Plantasia puts down roots at the Garfield Park Conservatory for its third installment

by Shannon Nico Shreibak September 13, 2022September 12, 2022

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 […]

Music

Marissa Nadler adds a welcome darkness to the scary darkness of the end of days

by Steve Krakow August 1, 2022August 1, 2022

As the world literally burns, it’s a comfort to see performers we hold dear come back through town to offer musical relief. Singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler debuted in 2004 with the album Ballads of Living and Dying, establishing the template for her delicately ominous, reverb-shrouded fables of loss and mortality. She’s since come out of the […]

Black and white image of one of the members of Boris in a dramatically large woven black hat and flourishing black dress

Music

On the new W, Boris find serene sounds amid their continuous sonic explorations

by Dave Cantor January 12, 2022January 5, 2022

As Boris continue to steer in and out of avant-rock territory, the 30-year-old Japanese band increasingly splinter genre ideas and expectations fans might foist upon them. The trio have been prolific during the pandemic, releasing nearly a dozen albums whose variety almost necessitates a disregard for boundaries: they include studio full-lengths, EPs, and live and […]

Music

On Bigger Than Life, darkwave project Black Marble leans into its pop tendencies

by Luca Cimarusti January 10, 2020August 18, 2021

With this summer’s Bigger Than Life (Sacred Bones), Black Marble has finally given in and made a pop record. Born in Brooklyn and now based in Los Angeles, this darkwave act began in 2012 as the bleak, gothy duo of Chris Stewart and Ty Kube, but by 2016, when Stewart moved west and released Black […]

Music

Pharmakon makes noise that vomits and bleeds

by Noah Berlatsky October 3, 2019August 18, 2021

For New York noise artist Margaret Chardiet, aka Pharmakon, the body is a wet, alien thing that hangs on the self like meat on a butcher’s hook. Her defining album, 2014’s Bestial Burden (Sacred Bones), chronicles a serious illness and hospitalization. It opens with the multitracked sound of her desperate breathing, in a claustrophobic symphony […]