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As a genre designation, “folk music” can mean a wide variety of things, including early rural Americana, politicized revival strumming, and weird psychedelia. Alexandra Drewchin, who makes music as Eartheater, doesn’t really fit in any of those categories. Instead she approaches folk as chthonic, atavistic druid witchery, making gentle music for sacrificing goats—complete with buzzing electronic flourishes that crawl across the steaming flesh. To those familiar with Eartheater’s rituals, the new album Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin (PAN) won’t appear to break new sonic ground, though Drewchin shifts her focus a bit from electronic to acoustic sounds—for instance, she commissioned Spain’s Ensemble de Cámara to provide chamber music backing....

Last year Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion won their first Grammy: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, for a 2016 album of music by minimalist icon Steve Reich. Reich’s distinctively pulsing music has been part of Third Coast’s repertoire since the ensemble’s founding in 2005, and recently they’ve been invited to perform his work by prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. For their next season, beginning this fall, TCP will take several programs on the road, including a selection of music by another minimalist icon, Philip Glass—he’s even writing a piece for the group, his first ever for a percussion ensemble....

Brendan doesn’t know about the swords yet. They’re still in his future, buried under mothballed Sansabelts, wigs, and a stack of vinyl thick with Motown 45s. But even so, a giddiness flares within him as he sweeps the kickstand of his bike and pedals into the heatless midday sun: today is overripe with possibilities, a pinata of a Saturday ready to break open and yield its treasures. The boys cut into an alley, one of many they’ve trawled scavenging for things to fix, bust, or play with....

I’m an unapologetic rail fanboy for the Metra Electric District line and the wonderfully diverse communities it serves throughout the south side and its outlying suburban communities. With the $10 weekend pass in hand, you can travel through the south side and suburbs and northwest Indiana: to a bird sanctuary, an early burger palace, a town that a railroad car manufacturer built, and a brewery that pays homage to the late Chicago artist Ed Paschke....

In December Gossip Wolf caught up with local guitarist and soul singer Isaiah Sharkey, who mentioned he was working on Love Is the Key (The Cancerian Theme), which “reflects funk, jazz, classic R&B, hip-hop, and other genres that’ve influenced me throughout my journey.” The album dropped Friday, June 21, and Sharkey wasn’t exaggerating about its kaleidoscopic sound! This wolf especially digs the string-laden “Love Is the Key,” which recalls early-70s Curtis Mayfield, and the wah-wah pyrotechnics of “Amen....

Life is spooky and scary enough these days, so even if traditional haunted houses were open in Chicago, most of us would skip the eerie sights and sounds in favor of a nice night alone with a bucket of candy. We may have the beginnings of a real-life I Am Legend (or for Vincent Price fans like me, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth) LARP out there these days, but maybe it’s best to keep on keepin’ on....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. An associate design manager at a financial technology firm, 27-year-old Katrina Wolf started developing her trademark mix of “a little weird, a little masculine, a little trendy, and a lot of streetwear” when Bria Salvador-French of Lincoln Park’s Smith & Davis Salon gave her a bowl haircut five years ago. “Since then I have been really engaged with fashion,” Wolf says....

Five months since CPS removed Dr. Michael Beyer, the principal of Ogden International School, from his position, he’s still getting paid but can’t return to work. CPS officials never explained why, having had the OIG’s report since June, they’d only moved to fire Beyer in November. But this wasn’t the first time he’d gotten in trouble with the district. In the information vacuum, speculation and conspiracy theories proliferated: maybe the mayor’s office wanted to tank the success of the Ogden/Jenner merger by pressuring CPS to remove Beyer, thereby making it less likely that a rich and poor school would merge in the future?...

Canadian-born pop artist Odie embraces his Nigerian heritage, and talks a lot about growing up with the sounds of African gospel and Fela Kuti. His family history pumps blood into the heart of his debut album, April’s Analogue (Unite Recordings/Empire), which transposes Afrobeat rhythms onto mopey pop instrumentals that feel ready made for Top 40 radio. The 21-year-old frequently cites Kid Cudi and Coldplay as his influences; he has a deep understanding of how their milquetoast material can harbor big emotions for large masses of listeners who at a person-to-person level may not share the same interests in emerging artists....

A little over a year ago, New York label Palto Flats collaborated with Swiss imprint WRWTFWW to reissue Midori Takada’s beautifully meditative 1983 solo album Through the Looking Glass, galvanizing an unlikely comeback, and—for many listeners—a discovery. Takada is an imaginative Japanese percussionist whose work in the 80s and 90s gracefully dissolved lines between free jazz, minimalism, and new age. The sound she developed still rings utterly contemporary, melding pulsing rhythms on tuned percussion and sharing Steve Reich’s adaptation of the circular rhythms of West Africa—but creating something more fragile and less mechanistic....

In the new American art film The Mountain, which I considered at length in the current issue of the Reader, director Rick Alverson looks back on the final days of the lobotomy as an accepted psychotherapeutic practice. The movie follows the exploits of a traveling therapist (Jeff Goldblum) who visits state hospitals and performs the procedure on mental patients with the goal of bringing them to an “innocuous state.” Though he trades in incapacitation and seems to enjoy his work, Goldblum’s character isn’t evil per se; Alverson seems to be saying that the therapist merely follows the order of the day and that this allows him to see himself as rational, even humane....

Karin Dreijer has made a career out of music that might not seem commercially appealing. In the Knife, the electronic-pop group she founded with her brother, Olof, and as a solo artist performing and recording under the name Fever Ray, Dreijer has made a mountain of music that pulses in unfamiliar ways, that disembowels and reconfigures pop music, that is, in a word, “weird.” But her songs always find a way of hitting their mark, and despite the unconventional paths she might take, she always seeks clarity in how she chooses to express herself....

Classic-movie fans will be pleased to learn that Dennis Wolkowicz—president of the Silent Film Society of Chicago and, under the pseudonym Jay Warren, its resident organ accompanist—is now general manager of the Patio Theater in Portage Park, where he has launched a Tuesday-night revival series in addition to an irregular schedule of indie screenings and free community shows. Built in 1927, the Patio has had a tortured history in the new century....

One of the most personally enjoyable things to come out of the pandemic for me so far is to see all the nimble, singularly creative, and sometimes desperate projects I wrote about blossom into something bigger as the city reopens. Alexis Thomas and Eve Studnicka formalized their meal delivery partnership into Funeral Potatoes, Tony Quartaro’s Beverly-born fresh pasta startup is settling into a brick-and-mortar pastaficio; Vargo Brother Ferments is just a GoFundMe fraction away from moving into a commercial kitchen; and after John Avila transitioned his Minahasa pop-up into a permanent space at Revival Food Hall, he and his partner began scheming to open the first and only Indonesian grocery store in the midwest (more about that later this week....

Chicago rapper and prison abolitionist Ric Wilson suffered a big loss this past Saturday when someone broke into his car in Lincoln Park and made off with his recording rig. Wilson had been traveling around town with a Mac Mini and an Avid Mbox 2 to put the finishing touches on his follow-­up to the November EP The Sun Was Out, which half the Gossip Wolf team called one of the best overlooked Chicago hip-hop releases of 2015....

This week’s gig poster was designed by Mobley, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Austin, Texas. It advertises his upcoming livestream tour, a series of nine virtual shows to benefit the Dawa Fund. Dawa provides direct financial assistance to people of color experiencing short-term crises—specifically musicians, artists, therapists, teachers, members of the service industry, and social workers. Each show on Mobley’s tour is copresented by a different American music venue; for the Chicago date it’s Subterranean, which will also receive a portion of the evening’s proceeds....

Chicago is kin to the south. No other U.S. city has more ties to the lower half of the country, specifically the Mississippi Delta, aka the Most Southern Place on Earth. All you have to do is spend ten minutes in the presence of Yoland Cannon to understand this. On the 900 block of North Laramie, Cannon is the Tamale Guy. No one talks about Claudio. Most afternoons, weather permitting, he sells Mississippi Delta-style tamales from a yellow cart parked on the sidewalk: ground-beef-stuffed cornmeal magic wrapped in husks and simmered in an oily, peppery brew that delivers the same immediate sensory impact as a shot of whiskey....

When Save Money rapper Towkio got invited to play his first Lollapalooza set this summer, he knew he wanted to make a statement—to show the fans who’d converge on the festival from all over the country what he loves about the city that shaped him. So he reached out to footwork dance crew the Era. Footwork music began evolving in Chicago in the early 90s, drawing on ghetto house and juke but adding complex layers of odd, almost compulsively frenetic rhythms; it grew hand in hand with the athletic, high-octane dance style that shares its name....

As a nonathlete and lifelong Chicago sports fan, I do more than my share of sitting in a chair and grumbling at televisions. Hey, we all have a role to play in the great game of life. There were certainly a lot of non-sport-related reasons to grumble in 2020 but then . . . the freaking Bears. The 2020 Monsters of the Midway came on strong and full of hope and then dissolved into a pile of tears and confusion, like a teenage boy desperate to lose his virginity....

This weekend the Goodman Theatre will present the I Am . . . Fest, three days of events and artistic educational programming, including workshops, film screenings, and play readings, to celebrate women of color. It concludes on Monday evening with the International 10-Minute Play Showcase featuring Chicago playwrights Nambi E. Kelley and Loy Webb and the U.S. premiere of The Interrogation of Sandra Bland by Mojisola Adebayo, in which 100 women of color perform the transcript of Sandra Bland’s arrest....