Extreme heavy music can seem like loud, scary noise for the sake of loud, scary noise. But if you’re drawn to intense, cavernously dark sounds, they can also be a portal through which to process emotions and find catharsis. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that doom and drone metal have become more popular as […]
Tag: Vol. 52 no. 14
Issue of April 20, 2023
On the cover: “Why you talking to a bum?”: When the very presence of unhoused people on the CTA is considered a public safety concern, who is the public, and what are we keeping them safe from?
Photograph by Kirk Williamson.
Find a print copy of the Reader.
←Previous issue | Next issue→
Posted inMusic
Electro-industrial artist Debby Friday explores a world of emotion
Debby Friday kicks off the title track that opens her debut album, Good Luck (Sub Pop), with a fiery declaration: “Get it while it’s hot!” The Nigerian-born, Toronto-based artist sounds commanding atop the song’s lurching electro-industrial beats, but even as she confidently seizes our attention, there’s a sense that she’s tormented too. When she exclaims […]
Posted inMusic
Seth Parker Woods’s Difficult Grace is a portrait of the artist as he is now
Cellist Seth Parker Woods didn’t compose the music on Difficult Grace, but you’d be forgiven for second-guessing that. By his admission, this expansive multimedia project, recently adapted into an album for Chicago’s Cedille Records, is semi-autobiographical; its repertoire list nods to Woods’s spiritual forebears (Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and Alvin Singleton contribute the closest things to “canonical” […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
Art-school punks Poison Squirrel released their lone single in 1980
The early history of Chicago punk is a tough nut to crack. Because the scene here isn’t seen as groundbreaking or cohesive, it hasn’t been nearly as thoroughly researched or documented as the scene in New York City. The 2007 documentary You Weren’t There, directed by Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman, tried to pick up […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Unraveling X
What if you fall in love with a monster who engulfs your entire world then dies? You’re bound to have questions, and, if you’re a writer, or just a certain type of obsessive, you’ll turn over every rock and upset every applecart looking for answers. In Catherine Lacey’s immersive new novel, Biography of X, a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Temporary in nature
Is the temporary worthwhile? Gardeners come face to face with this dilemma every day, caring for their plants with exceptional diligence. But the seasons change, and they must confront an inevitable winter. Despite this grief, they return to their plots, routinely tending to the temporary. This is the dilemma that Chicago artist Leslie Baum contemplates […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Double negative
Unlike a regular scar, a keloid grows far beyond the original wound. Through the buildup of collagen, the body slips under its own cover and piles up, over, and around a loss—a powerful metaphor for Katherine Simóne Reynolds, whose solo exhibition at the Graham Foundation, “A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing,” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hands-on reading
The act of reading is rarely just a simple matter of decoding text, but as this diverting exhibition demonstrates, book designers have been augmenting blocks of words with fold-out extensions, rotating dials, opening doorways, and 3D elements for almost as long as there’s been a printing press. Composed of objects from the Newberry Library’s own […]