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Bassist and vocalist Margaret McCarthy began releasing music as Moontype while enrolled in Oberlin’s music conservatory. She began with a 2017 self-released EP called Fan Music, in which drifty singing, plucking, and strumming are barely audible through what sounds like the hum of a box fan. McCarthy shifted to more traditional songwriting with 2018’s Bass Tunes, Year 5, which she released upon graduating from school in June of that year; it’s a bare indie-rock album built from her steady, gentle bass and overdubbed layers of yearning vocals....

Update: The D-Composed concert with Mosaic Vocal Ensemble on April 5 at Saint Benedict the African Catholic Church has been canceled. To foreground Black composers, Coleman initially wanted to organize a series of concerts. D-Composed arose out of that effort. The quartet plays a wide range of material, including classical and trap music, and it prefers small rooms—cafes, galleries, private ballrooms, Chicago Park District facilities—rather than conventional concert halls. Its programming includes Family Edition shows (so far they’ve all been at the Stony Island Arts Bank) and D-Compressed yoga shows (at the Museum of Contemporary Art, though the group hopes to branch out to various yoga studios)....

Deeply Rooted Dance Theater (DRDT), founded in 1995, has been transitioning for over a year. In September 2019, founding artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff passed the baton to longtime DRDT educational director Nicole Clarke-Springer, and a new artistic team, all with long ties to the company, stepped into formation. In his new role as creative director, Jeff absorbed himself with the task of finding and founding a new institutional home for the company on the south side of Chicago and developing an initiative for interdisciplinary works....

The Enemy Kitchen food truck has an erratic and unpredictable schedule. Most of the time it sits on the plaza outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is currently showing “Backstroke of the West,” a midcareer survey of the work of the food truck’s proprietor, the artist Michael Rakowitz. (Do not call it a retrospective. “A retrospective,” says Rakowitz, “is a living funeral.”) Inside the gallery, a plaque briefly tells the story of Enemy Kitchen‘s history and mission, and describes the truck itself as an “installation....

Brooklyn duo Xeno & Oaklander (aka Sean McBride and Liz Wendelbo) have been blending electronic experimentation with pop music for five full-length albums and more than a decade, layering strange synths with hushed, hook-driven vocals. McBride and Wendelbo have pushed their sonic minimalism in many directions, including stark cinematic soundscapes and heady drones, but on the brand-new Hypno (their first album for Dais), they try shaking off their fascination with challenging sounds to take a stab at straightforward dance pop....

In pre-COVID-19 Chicago, Grant Park, for many, served as a vibrant platform for cultural and political expression. Perhaps less known is the park’s history in America’s effort to promote national participation in World War I. The image here is of Grant Park transformed to host the traveling Great War Exposition from September 2-15, 1918. Created by the federal government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), and overseen by the State Council of Defense of Illinois, the exposition was part of a larger effort to sell the war to the American public....

Mick Jenkins has become one of the best rappers in the city (if not the country) by making music that comes across as if he’s inviting you into a deep conversation. Because his songs that take on race, consent, systemic injustice, and black history, among other subjects, you can’t passively listen to them—they require the type of attentiveness that makes your listening experience an interaction. His best tunes arrive gilded and shine to a degree that it can take at least a couple dozen listens to begin to approach his headier points....

It’s been nearly five years since Sharon Van Etten released Are We There―which means it’s also been nearly five years without that voice. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter has long possessed the secret power to sound woefully resigned to the poetic drudgery of life while simultaneously prophetic in her realization of that. Though Van Etten is a raw and affecting lyricist, her smoky, folklike singing sometimes does the job all by itself—she threads each line with emotion using her delivery and melodic timbre....

Heather Trost has made herself heard both inside and outside the music scene in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she lives—in recent years her violin has appeared on recordings by Beirut, Josephine Foster, Claire Cronin, and Thor Harris, among others. She remains best known as half of the wonderful A Hawk and a Hacksaw, a Roma-inspired duo with her husband, Jeremy Barnes, but her first solo album, Agistri (LM Duplication), which dropped earlier this year, couldn’t sound much more different than those raucous Eastern European sounds....

Prometheus, impaled forever on a rock for tipping humanity off about fire and freedom, has stood since antiquity for the unstoppable triumph of reason over religious or cultural orthodoxy and raw power. In more recent, radical circles, he has stood for the spirit of iconoclasm itself, as noble as he is fierce. However, in this pious new adaptation from the Greek language by renowned classicist Nicholas Rudall, directed by Terry McCabe, Prometheus is seen not so much as standing for anything as he is standing, basta....

Last week Riot Fest Presents, Rock Sin Anestesia, Metronome, and Star Events announced the debut of Ruido Fest, which they claim is the first three-day, multistage outdoor festival in the U.S. devoted to Spanish-language rock and Latin alternative music—and it’s happening in Pilsen this summer! Top-tier acts booked for the fest, which takes over Addams Park from Fri 7/10 till Sun 7/12, include Mexico City alt-rock kings Cafe Tacvba, LA fusion group Ozo­matli, and Monterrey electronic-­rock outfit Kinky (who also play Double Door on Wed 5/20)....

The creators of Khecari’s weeklong dance event, The Retreat , encourage audience members to fall asleep. Or rather Khecari’s artistic directors, Jonathan Meyer and Julia Rae Antonick, who have been developing the project since 2014, fuse improvisation and highly structured choreography into an amorphous performance designed to put viewers in a meditative headspace. Meyer and Antonick want to evoke the feeling of being in the wilderness, using fabric and light to transform Pilsen’s Glass Factory into a living environment....

If Illinois legalizes recreational cannabis, David Tello plans to come home. Until he decides whether to return to his wife and two children in Peoria, Illinois, in May, he’s staying in California, where he’s helping his brother relaunch their cannabis company in that state’s new recreational market. If recreational cannabis becomes legal here, Tello will launch MelloVibes, a cannabis dispensary, in Peoria. But for now, he’s legally blocked from the industry he knows best because of a previous conviction that he later got sealed....

Andrea Bauer A hand-bottled sample of Pareidolia, wrested from its natural habitat and delivered to the Reader offices. Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s Parachute didn’t win the James Beard Foundation Award for best new restaurant last night, but it was one of Chicago’s five national nominees on that portion of the slate, alongside Topolobampo, the Violet Hour, Donnie Madia, and Tanya Baker of Boarding House. (Madia and the Violet Hour both won....

If you want to understand race in Chicago in the months after the end of the First World War, the letters written by two soldiers from the south side are illuminative. Throughout the war, Lieutenant Charles L. Samson wrote his wife, Loula, at 6730 S. Perry multiple times a week. A mechanical engineer, he’d had a close scrape with death after a German submarine sunk his troop ship off the Scottish coast....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Alderman Emma Mitts (37th Ward): not a fan of the Chicago Teachers Union On election night Alderman Emma Mitts let her 37th Ward constituents know that she was ready for war. Just a few months after that school opened, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a new $20 million charter in Mitts’s ward, this one part of the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Mitts—and Mayor Rahm Emanuel—received pushback on that school because it’s across the street from a regular public high school, Prosser Career Academy....

American Honey, now playing a six-day encore engagement at Facets Cinematheque, is a hypnotic road picture about a crew of wayward young people selling magazine subscriptions across crumbling middle America. After winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in May, this fourth feature and first U.S. production from British writer- director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) met a slightly weaker reception stateside, where some critics dismissed it as overlong and self-indulgent....

Choreographer Ayako Kato makes discoveries in stillness. For her latest work, Stück 1998/Anchor 2018, she was inspired by the moments of silence in contemporary classical composer Manfred Werder’s 4,000-page score Stück 1998, a piece containing 160,000 12-second units of time with six seconds of music and six seconds of silence in each. “For a mover, silence is equivalent with stillness,” says Kato. “When I experience that stillness I realize there is no such thing as stillness....

Most of my favorite films to have premiered in Chicago in 2019 played here before September, which is when I began my career as a special education teacher. Since then I’ve slowed down on my intake of new movies, but what I saw in the first eight months of the year provided me with much to admire. I’m especially grateful for the brief run, in May, of László Nemes’s Sunset at the Landmark Century and AMC River East....

When David Weathersby’s Thee Debauchery Ball premiered at the Black Harvest Film Festival last year, it was followed by a party—a house music party, one that was a fitting reception for the documentary about Black music, community, art, and sexuality. “I always say that I don’t feel like I’m a filmmaker without Black Harvest,” he says. “They were the first festival I ever submitted anything to and got a response ....