Nnamdï’s sixth and latest album, Please Have a Seat (Secretly Canadian/Sooper), begins and ends with versions of the same refrain: “Some days I wake up ready to run.” Sure enough, since moving to Chicago from the suburbs a decade ago, the inexhaustible artist has essentially operated at a dead sprint. He records prolifically. He co-owns […]
Tag: Sooper Records
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Monobody guitarist Conor Mackey gets even wilder with the IDM project Lynyn
Conor Mackey plays guitar in postrock group Monobody, which is how you know he has unpredictable energy—any musician tasked with creating rogue jazz flourishes and postmetal freakouts while Nnamdi Ogbonnaya plays his high-wire drums is definitely operating on another level. Mackey studied music theory and composition at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and since graduating […]
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Luke Titus and Cisco Swank graft jazz skills to beat-tape looseness on Some Things Take Time
Chicago drummer Luke Titus and New York rapper-singer Cisco Swank unite jazz, R&B, and hip-hop on their new album, Some Things Take Time (Sooper). Brief but stimulating, the record feels like a walk around the block as the neighborhood awakens. Swank and Titus are both young multi-instrumentalists and producers with prodigious backgrounds: Swank attended New […]
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Jill Hopkins, new media and civic events producer for the Metro venues
Jill Hopkins is a Chicago broadcaster, DJ, writer, musician, and storyteller. After an eight-year stint at Vocalo Radio, Hopkins kicked off 2022 by joining the Metro family of venues (which also includes Smart Bar and GMan) as their new media and civic events producer. As told to Jamie Ludwig I was always a big radio […]
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The Roadburners bid farewell to their charitable Bring It Up High Festival
Hi Fi & the Roadburners were among Chicago’s most ferocious live acts for more than 25 years, melding rockabilly, gutbucket R&B, and punk rock into blue–collar anthems that landed them on the Victory Records roster during the label’s 1990s heyday. Lead guitarist Jeff Schuch passed away in 2009, and singer Erik “Hi Fi” Kish died […]
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Bitchin Bajas travel the spaceways on their new album
Update on Thu 11/4: Due to a positive COVID-19 test among Fulton Street Collective’s event-planning staff, the Unity Night fundraising event on Sat 11/6 has been tentatively rescheduled for Sat 3/26/2022. Ticket holders for the November date can get refunds or retain their tickets to use in March. They haven’t released a full-length of new […]
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Former Oshwa bandleader Alicia Walter makes a grand entrance as a solo artist
In the 2010s, Alicia Walter led criminally underappreciated Chicago band Oshwa, who played dizzying, dramatic math-rock with the finesse of a tween Mensa member simultaneously solving three Rubik’s Cubes. Walter moved to New York in 2016, the same year Oshwa released their final album, I We You Me, but her Chicago connections remain strong: this […]
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Veteran Chicago rockers Great Deceivers bid adieu with a somber but vital self-titled album
It’s difficult to describe the vastness of Chicago indie rock and punk without mentioning Great Deceivers, partly because of the four-piece’s pedigree. Guitarist Russell Harrison and bassist-vocalist Ben Rudolph play in unforgivingly ferocious hardcore unit C.H.E.W., while drummer Seth Engel makes delightfully solemn indie rock as Options and has been part of far too many […]
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Born Yesterday Records had a better 2020 than you
Chicago underground rock stayed great through a terrible year, and Born Yesterday released some of the best.
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Chicago pop wiz Luke Titus steps out from behind his drum kit
Luke Sangerman, who performs and records as Luke Titus, is 24 years old but has the skill set and intuition of a seasoned veteran. He’s had a long music career for someone his age: He joined the Blue Man Group as a stage-band drummer at age 15, becoming the youngest American ever hired by the […]
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Chicago art-pop wonder Sen Morimoto captures the magic of his community
Chicago art-pop wizard Sen Morimoto made national news in July, when the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events removed him from its Millennium Park at Home virtual summertime music series. Morimoto had prerecorded a series of mystical, gentle musical movements, but he began his set by delivering a brief statement lightly criticizing Mayor Lori […]
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Lightfoot hijacks Lollapalooza
Did Chicago musicians booked for Lollapalooza know their sets might look like an endorsement of Mayor Lightfoot?
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Chicago music mastermind Nnamdï reflects our absurd world with the gorgeously strange Krazy Karl
Our country has always privileged the powerful—a group that, historically and presently, has consisted almost exclusively of straight white men. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve only intensified their avaricious push to feed the rest of us into the grinder in order to prop up a broken, inhumane economic system. It can feel […]
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Why do indie musicians put up with penny payouts?
Streaming your favorite artists’ music is the least helpful way to support them. But they can’t abandon those platforms, because we won’t.
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Nnamdï grows up on Brat
Prolific musical polymath Nnamdï uses his new solo album to teach himself something about work-life balance.