Moritat’s new self-released album, Vermilion, settles in like the night. The Chicago art-rock band’s subtle, magnetic polyrhythms simmer with the allure of a backyard bonfire or an open-air midnight dance party, and their cool, melodious synths feel like a predawn drive on an empty road lit only by stars. Moritat’s core members—Venus Laurel, Corey McCafferty, […]
Tag: Vol. 51 No. 14
Issue of April 14, 2022
J Wade and Cloud Boy build a Creative Mansion
The hip-hop duo’s long-gestating new album, The One Who Knocks, has become the gravitational center of a sprawling artistic collective.
By Leor Galil
On the cover: Photo by Matthew Gilson. For more of Gilson’s work, go to matthewgilson.com.
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In this issue …
Cannabis Conversations insert: Download it as a PDF. (The insert is also included in this week’s full Reader issue PDF.)
Posted inMusic
Helado Negro’s down-home pop is as invigorating as it is intimate
For more than a decade, Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange has crafted down-home pop music as Helado Negro. Each of his seven albums has shown a graceful evolution of his sonic palette, introducing scrappy psych-folk excursions, midtempo synth-pop odysseys, and other elements, but they’re all connected by an overarching gentleness at their core. Lange’s music […]
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Chicago rapper Supa Bwe demonstrates the unity of the personal and political on No Thanks
Supa Bwe’s ear for melody and taste for sweet hooks make him one of the city’s best rappers. Since breaking out in 2014, he’s amassed a cult audience with performances that blend screamo intensity and R&B sensuality, and he was doing it years before Soundcloud rap introduced a cohort of shouty rappers who sounded like […]
Posted inMusic
Vijay Iyer builds a superpowered septet in tribute to Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard
The creative and intellectual spheres of Eve Ewing and Vijay Iyer are so expansive they’re pretty much impossible to abbreviate. So the news that Iyer is in town for the pandemic-deferred premiere of his musical suite inspired by Ewing’s writing, Ghosts Everywhere I Go, should inspire eager anticipation and knowing nods. Ewing and Iyer are […]
Posted inMusic
The sum of Patti Smith’s work has more weight and depth than ever
Patti Smith hasn’t released a new album since 2012’s Banga, but the Chicago-born punk singer and poet has stayed extremely active as a photographer, activist, and author. She’s published six books in the past decade, and her latest, 2019’s Year of the Monkey, is a riveting memoir. Set in 2016, it’s a picaresque ramble through […]
Posted inMusic
Underground rapper Defcee connects with Closed Sessions producer BoatHouse on For All Debts Public and Private
If you need an introduction to Defcee, you haven’t been paying attention to underground hip-hop in Chicago. The rapper had a banner year in 2021, thanks to three collaborative releases that nudged him further into the national spotlight: June’s We Dressed the City With Our Names, a collaboration with beat maker August Fanon; September’s Sunday […]
Posted inMusic
Congotronics International is a supergroup as big as the world
Congotronics International is rooted in Konono No. 1 and the Kasai Allstars, two bands from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that released music through legendary Belgian label Crammed Discs in the mid-2000s. Those groups’ hyperamplified, percussion-heavy sounds, which Crammed released in a series dubbed Congotronics (also the title of Konono No. 1’s 2004 album […]
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Cellist and former Chicagoan Fred Lonberg-Holm revives some local projects
Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm lived in Chicago for 22 years. During that time, he was ubiquitous on the city’s improvisational music scene, playing in bands and ad hoc groupings with so many essential players that any list that could fit in this preview would be ridiculously incomplete. He was also a tireless touring musician who represented […]
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Juana Molina’s folktronica is perfect for tumbling down a rabbit hole to wonderland
To experience a Juana Molina concert is to be swept away in a most particular sort of rapture. In the late 80s and early 90s, the Argentine singer-songwriter had a successful career in television and comedy before changing gears to pursue music. An early proponent of combining South American folk music and electronica, Molina introduced […]
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Experimental musician Claire Rousay makes you listen to everything
Prolific experimental percussionist and electronic musician Claire Rousay has created a sprawling body of work that clunks and patters somewhere between noise and silence, music and abstraction. Her new release, Everything Perfect Is Already Here (out April 22 on Shelter Press), consists of two 15-minute ambient explorations that rustle and dissolve in gentle lyrical spasms. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The body in focus
While living alone in the woods of northern California at the start of 2020, Lilli Carré started learning chess. Like many folks deep into the pandemic, she took up a new hobby. While trying to draw inspiration for her work, she incorporated her new vehicle for communication when all touch and connection were lost. Carré’s […]
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Swedish doom-metal pioneers Candlemass celebrate their epic sounds in Chicago
If you love modern doom, you owe a debt of gratitude to Candlemass. Formed in Stockholm in 1984, the group were among a handful of early purveyors of the slow, down-tuned, and monumentally forlorn heavy form of metal inspired by Black Sabbath. In fact, their 1986 debut album, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, helped establish the genre’s […]
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Waldos Forever Fest blazes back for first time since 2019
It’s mind-boggling to think that recreational weed wasn’t yet legal the last time Dispensary33 hosted an in-person Waldos Forever Fest—so named for the group of 1970s Bay Area high schoolers who dubbed themselves “the Waldos,” whose inside slang for their afternoon meeting time canonized “4:20” as shorthand for everything cannabis. So it’s safe to say […]
Posted inMusic Review
Chicago experimental dance trio Purelink draw ecstasy from echoes on Puredub
As the trio Purelink, Chicago producers Millia Rage, Kindtree, and Concave Reflection explore the seams joining ambient music and dance. The tracks on Purelink’s 2021 Bliss/Swivel EP float like their rhythms are on the edge of dissolving (“Maintain the Bliss”) or transform the hyperactive sounds of drum ‘n’ bass into ghostly apparitions (“Head on a […]