B is also for bountiful, and there’s no shortage of intriguing events to check out this week, whether you’re looking for serious onstage drama, a musical meditation on Chicago’s lakeshore environment, or a celebration of Black women, queer, trans, femme, and/or gender nonconforming people. Fri 10/22 Shattered Globe Theatre, in association with Interrobang Theatre Project, […]
Tag: Spektral Quartet
Posted inMusic
Chicago math-pop masters Paper Mice return with 1-800-MONDAYS
It’s been almost eight years since we’ve heard new music from local weirdos Paper Mice, but their brand-new 1-800-MONDAYS (Three One G) was worth the wait—it’s easily their best record yet. This time around, the trio blur the line between pop and herky-jerky math rock more thoroughly than ever before, stepping up the polyrhythms and […]
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A new record store somehow opens in Evanston
A new record store somehow opens in Evanston, Spektral Quartet host an online Q&A with composer Du Yun, and more.
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Andrew Tham, composer, performer, and cofounder of Parlour Tapes
“I was just livestreaming myself from my room for eight hours a day, just to see what it felt like. It was weird.”
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Time to jump on the Bandcamp stuff you’ve been waiting to buy
Once again, it’s “Bandcamp day”—when almost all your money goes to the artists and labels you want to support.
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Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living upends the timeline to stake out a fresh vantage point
The through line of Spektral Quartet’s first studio release in four years, Experiments in Living, is that there is no through line—at least on the surface. The double album covers 150 years of history, from Brahms to living lions such as George Lewis, but rather than foist a chronological or thematic flow onto the recording, […]
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Spektral Quartet bring a mind-expanding program (and Julia Holter) to the Music Box
Spektral Quartet bring a mind-expanding program (and Julia Holter) to the Music Box, the Synthesizer-Chili Cookoff signs off with its tenth installment, and more.
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The best Chicago albums of the 2010s: the critics’ ballots
Here’s where to see who voted for what and how the points got divvied up.
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The best Chicago albums of the 2010s
The Reader polled dozens of critics to arrive at an absolutely indisputable ranked list of several hundred records that will definitely not start any arguments.
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Spektral Quartet’s new season takes deep dives in diverse directions
Spektral Quartet’s new season takes deep dives in diverse directions, “posi-djent” act Harm Less celebrates a new album, and more.
Posted inBlogs
Spektral Quartet hustles to close its Chicago season on the gig poster of the week
This week’s featured gig poster was designed by local silkscreen artist Ryan Duggan.
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Spektral Quartet and Third Coast Percussion celebrate the work of Augusta Read Thomas
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s prestigious Mead Composer-in-Residence for the longest term so far (from 1997 to 2006, under both Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez), Augusta Read Thomas has been an indefatigable force in new music in Chicago as a composer, educator, and curator. Since 2010 she’s been a professor of music composition at the University […]
Posted inBlogs
Stringing along on the gig poster of the week
This week’s featured gig poster was designed by Justin Santora.
Posted inMusic
Spektral Quartet give the local premiere of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet no. 2, all six hours of it
Last year I produced a concert in which fantastic Denver pianist R. Andrew Lee performed November, a masterpiece of minimalist solo piano composed by Dennis Johnson. What made it such an event was exactly what made attending it so daunting: duration. Never mind the effort required to make structural sense of a piece of music […]
Posted inBlogs
This week’s Frequency Festival finds points of contact between classical, jazz, and the avant-garde
The concert series booked by the Reader‘s Peter Margasak throws its second annual six-day festival of boundary-erasing music.