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In a 2015 Reader oral history of the long-running winter solstice concerts led by drum masters Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang, critic Bill Meyer calls the annual event “an anchor, a beacon, and a seasonal tradition in its own right.” But like so many other traditions, this year’s concerts—the 30th anniversary installment—have been disrupted by COVID-19. Zerang says the duo has “pared down the proceedings” and will host only one dawn show instead of the usual three....

courtesy the artist “Mutual Regard,” a new exhibit of work by French photographer Jean-Luc Mylayne that opens Friday at the Art Institute and the Arts Club of Chicago, is the result of a series of collaborations: between Mylayne and his life and work partner, Mylène Mylayne; between the Art Institute and the Arts Club, which are cosponsoring the exhibit; and between Mylayne and the birds that have been his primary subjects for the past 40 years....

On Monday at 9:30 PM, Doc Films will present a 35-millimeter print of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). One of the greatest-looking movies ever made, it’s easily the most important revival screening in town this week. It remains a career best for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who also shot Apocalypse Now and Warren Beatty’s Reds. The Conformist features rich, deep colors and lots of gorgeous and precise camera movement; you could watch it with the sound off and it would be no less impressive....

Scarecrow Video is one of the largest video stores in the world, with more than 132,000 titles. It began in the confines of a small Seattle storefront back in December 1988 and only survived to see its pearl anniversary because the community around it understood the cultural value of its collection. In 2014, Scarecrow’s second-generation owners considered selling off the store’s videos following years of financial struggles—simply put, fewer people were renting from them year after year....

“Most people in the midwest don’t know this, but aronia berries grow in the midwest.” That was the word from chef C.J. Jacobson one evening at Intro, a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant that will rotate in a new notable chef and new menu every three months or so, even if the space itself—formerly home to L2O—doesn’t change much. That’s why he could get away with bits of creamy avocado and radish among bites of glistening fresh fluke, all bathing in an intensely green liquid infused with Douglas fir needles and dotted with droplets of Korean chile paste that somehow tasted as if they weren’t there at all....

You’ve heard of going through the looking glass? The Chicago Magic Lounge takes you through the laundromat. That’s where you’re headed if you seek the wonders of prestidigitation in store behind the bank of washer-dryers stacked floor to ceiling in the Uptown venue. As cover-ups go, it’s not quite as convincing as the industrial dry-cleaning machinery fronting the meth lab in Breaking Bad. But it’s a good introduction to the surprises in store....

For decades the greatest film by French writer-director Philippe Garrel has been one of the hardest to see. Garrel completed L’Enfant Secret in 1979 but didn’t exhibit it until 1982, because, according to legend, he couldn’t afford to pay the lab that had processed the film. Despite winning France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo (an annual award for movies exhibiting an original vision), the film has seldom been screened and was released on DVD only in Japan (even there it’s been out of print for a while)....

Toronzo Cannon’s 2016 breakout debut album for Alligator is titled The Chicago Way, but it doesn’t include a song of the same name. Since that release, the homegrown bluesman has become so enamored with the phrase that he wrote a song around it in time for his next album, The Preacher, the Politician or the Pimp (2019). “The Chicago Way” is a fast-paced boogie in the John Lee Hooker tradition, but it only hints at the depths of Cannon’s vast repertoire....

Animals Out of Paper This 2008 play by Indian-American writer Rajiv Joseph concerns three emotionally fragile people: Ilana, a reclusive origami artist, holed up in her studio and blocked by depression following the collapse of her marriage; Andy, a determinedly optimistic high school teacher and origami fan with a crush on Ilana; and Andy’s student Suresh, a smart but troubled teenager with uncanny and untrained skill at turning blank paper into animal figures....

Formed in La Quinta, California (“the Gem of the Desert”), in 1986, Yawning Man are largely considered the fathers of the desert-rock movement. The band’s now legendary “generator parties”—all-night drug-fueled jams held in the middle of nowhere and named for the equipment they’d use to power the shows—are still spoken about as life-changing moments by members of groups that emerged out of the same scene, including Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age....

This coming week the Gene Siskel Film Center will screen the new restoration of Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus (1976), the first film written and directed by controversial French musician Serge Gainsbourg. I can’t recommend the film wholeheartedly, in spite of some memorably stark mise-en-scene and committed performances from Joe Dallesandro and Gainsbourg’s then-partner Jane Birkin, though I’m sure Gainsbourg fans will appreciate it. The movie represents a cinematic analogue to the sort of sexual provocations Gainsbourg recorded throughout his musical career—it’s designed to make viewers uncomfortable, even when (maybe especially when) it’s operating in a comic register....

German one-man primal black-metal outfit Old Growth has dropped a remarkable debut. The project of a musician who goes by Shaman Animist, Mossweaver is dedicated to the theme of reverence for wilderness, and contains more than an hour of evocative hymns to the unknowable forest that was here before us and will be here long after we go extinct—unless we destroy it first. His tools are high-tech, but at peak fury his sound is primitive and feral....

In COVID times, gestures that would have been banal and forgettable a year ago now arrive embedded with loaded backstories—even those (especially those?) that play out on stage. Eventually, the group stepped off Zoom and met for tech week in TATL’s Rogers Park space. It was the first time the maximum-45-seat Jarvis Square Theater had been used for live theater in almost a year. With Taylor taking on chauffeur duties so the actors could avoid public transit, the group did two days of masked rehearsals....

January is a time of celebration and mourning for David Bowie fans. Today would’ve been the Starman’s 71st birthday, and Wednesday is the second anniversary of his death. Since debuting five years ago, Chicago-based Bowie tribute band Sons of the Silent Age have been throwing occasional fund-raisers for cancer patients and cancer research, and their efforts feel even more pointed since their inspiration’s death from the disease. Front man Chris Connelly and drummer Matt Walker brought their nine-person group to Metro on Saturday, focusing this time on the Berlin trilogy—that is, the three albums Bowie created after he moved to West Berlin in 1976....

After years as one of the most prolific and unrelenting noise artists in the U.S., veteran LA experimentalist John Wiese seems to have deliberately altered his modus operandi. His discography lists more than 400 items under his own name as well as projects like Sissy Spacek, Leather Bath, and others, but over the last half decade his output has screeched to a near halt. That said, if he only intermittently drops a title like the recent one-sided record Escaped Language (Gilgongo), I’m OK with it....

Given the diverse CVs of Bloodmist’s members, the trio’s music could be many things. Clarinetist and synthesizer player Jeremiah Cymerman has made solo recordings that bridge free improvisation and electronic sound design; synth alchemist and drum programmer Mario Diaz de Leon composes unabashedly dramatic acoustic chamber pieces and electronic metal; and bass guitarist Toby Driver leads ever-evolving goth-prog combo Kayo Dot. But if you had to put your money on just one descriptor, you’d win big if you picked the word “dark....

Five years ago, Canadian brother-sister duo Tennyson were often seen as a prodigy act. Keyboardist and producer Luke Pretty was 17 when the group began to tour and record; drummer Tess Pretty was only 15. Now that they’re 22 and 20, respectively, their performance is less of a novelty, but they retain the same charm. The Prettys started playing acoustic jazz gigs when they were barely in their teens, and these days they make polished electronica fusion with a smoothness you’d expect from people who’ve been working together for most of their lives....

“I could walk out on the sidewalk outside the bar and do a maceration of the weeds in the cracks and call it a fernet,” Billy Sunday partner Alex Bachman is quoted as saying in the new book Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs (Ten Speed Press). Author Brad Thomas Parsons, who also wrote Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, aims to demystify amaro—a difficult task since there’s no legal definition of amaro and, while it’s most often associated with Italy, it can be made anywhere....

Categorizing the doomsday sonic bludgeon wielded by Providence duo the Body over their two-decade reign of terror isn’t an easy task. Guitarist and screamer Chip King and drummer Lee Buford slice and dice doom, sludge, noise, and avant-metal into a monolithic, nails-on-chalkboard wall of sound. Buford’s hip-hop-mangled thumping and pounding and King’s six-feet-under caterwaul could carve out a niche for the duo all on their own, but they only occasionally create their bleak and heavy hellscapes alone....

Just southeast of Oak Street Beach, there’s a bend in the Lakefront Trail where it turns south, hugging Lake Shore Drive. As you head downtown, there’s a wall on your right, and the path’s concrete surface slopes down toward the water’s edge, where there’s a sheer drop of several feet into Lake Michigan. Convinced by what he saw farther north that the curve would be ice free, he confidently rounded the bend at a high speed....