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In their nearly 30 years as a band, Boris have developed the rare ability to alchemize practically any sound in the vast realm of heavy, atmospheric, and psychedelic rock into their distorted, amplified vision. The Tokyo trio’s release and tour schedules have been equally ambitious (they’ve played Chicago so often over the past decade they almost seem like locals), and as the live-music industry ground to a halt along with the rest of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they turned to the studio for respite....

A few years ago, Chloe Wang was just another young actor in Los Angeles struggling to land substantial roles. “It wasn’t what I signed up for, but I’m so stoked it’s happening,” Bennet says. “I’m half Chinese, and we’ve got an ethnically diverse cast. To act alongside a melting pot of actors with a showrunner [Maurissa Tancharoen] who is Thai—it’s really cool to be on right side of history when it comes to diversity....

In January 2000, as the likes of Sunny Day Real Estate and the Get Up Kids led emo’s second wave, a group of five young adults from Lawrence, Kansas, calling themselves the Anniversary released a striking debut. Built around the dueling guitars and vocals of Josh Berwanger and Justin Roelofs and backed by the infectious Moog lines and high vocal harmonies of Adrianne Verhoeven, Designing a Nervous Breakdown (Vagrant) earned the quintet a cult following....

Music journalist Banning Eyre first heard about blind kamalé ngoni player Vieux Kanté on a visit to the Malian capital of Bamako in February 2005. After picking up on the buzz that surrounded the 31-year-old musician in town, he decided to meet him for an interview. Eyre spent an hour speaking with Kanté and listening to him give spontaneous performances. His instrument, the kamalé ngoni, was designed in the 1960s as a sort of secular version of the traditional donso ngoni, which is typically played only at ceremonial functions; it uses a harplike arrangement of strings similar to that of a kora, and Kanté had a customized 12-string version....

The cinematic world of video makers Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby is defined by live-action footage interspersed with rudimentary animations, simple musical compositions juxtaposed with pop hits, and narrated passages laced with existential wonder. The pair, who’ve been creating singularly playful yet somberly reflective experimental videos over the past 25 years, present “Amazements: Videos by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby,” a program of their latest and past works, at the Block Museum of Art on Thursday, November 21....

Erika Sheffer’s The Fundamentals opens with a crafty one-two punch. As the house lights dim, stock images of happy, indulgent people splash across a sweeping off-white wall adorned with nondescript high-end sconces. “Happiness is a place,” a soothing disembodied voice intones. “Comfort is a destination.” It soon becomes clear this audiovisual presentation, heavy on marketing hyperbole and inspirational vagaries, is a pitch for the high-end Wellington Hotel Properties. But it isn’t designed to lure customers, but rather to convince hotel employees that fealty to corporate “fundamentals”—resourcefulness, professionalism, courtesy, etc, will imbue their work hours with fulfillment bordering on religious ecstasy....

Since 1997, Evanston indie rocker Justin Roberts has built a deep discography of children’s music that treats listeners of all ages with respect. He first got an inkling that he wanted to make originals for kids while teaching at Step by Step Montessori in Minneapolis in the early 90s, and he’s since become an unusual type of star in children’s music: though he didn’t have kids himself, his ability to speak to them through music has earned him three Grammys for his independently released albums....

Red Tape Theatre presents Suzan-Lori Parks’s 1999 Pulitzer-nominated riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In Parks’s version, Hester (Jyreika Guest) lives in a lean-to under a graffitied highway overpass with her five fatherless children, scrounging for scraps to survive while appealing to anyone who will listen to help her find a way out of her situation. Every authority figure in Hester’s life—the doctor, the welfare worker, the preacher, and the father of her firstborn—abuses her in some way....

I biked my way through Lima, Peru, earlier this month, and while the streets are crazy congested, one of the features I enjoyed the most was the capital city’s extensive system of boulevard bike paths—an idea I’d love to see copied in Chicago. Reed said he could imagine Chicago taking a similar approach in the medians of Stony Island Avenue, which would make it easier to pedal to the upcoming Obama Presidential Center from the far south side....

Absolutely Not cannot be stopped. The local trio are becoming one of Chicago’s most prolific acts, releasing great records, touring nonstop, and apparently making anyone who hears or sees them instantly fall in love with their high-strung, synthy punk rock, which sounds like everything is turned up to 11. Today Absolutely Not release a new single and music video, “Programmed,” which the Reader is pleased to exclusively premiere. The video is an eerie Stepford Wives-inspired drama, directed by Dave Rentauskas, that perfectly mirrors the track’s paranoia-inducing, dystopian sketchiness....

On January 12 I headed over to City Hall to see firsthand if the spirit of reform that’s supposedly transformed the Emanuel administration since the release of the Laquan McDonald video had reached the Community Development Commission. Not that there’s anything wrong with developers making a fortune. I’m hoping to make a fortune one of these days myself. It’s just that we have other things we could do with the money, what with the schools being broke and everything....

The Indian American’s role on Connecting . . . was a breakthrough moment that is still few and far between: a South Asian American leading a major primetime TV show. Currently on hiatus, the show takes viewers to a world we have known all too well in the last year, where a group of friends connect via video calls and share the challenges of the pandemic together. One of Cheena’s closest friends, Chicago native Danny Pudi, is well known for playing Abed Nadir on NBC’s Community....

Solange and Claire are sisters and servants, attending to the needs of the young woman known to them as “Madame.” They’re also nuts. What’s made them that way is an interesting question, the answer to which may or may not be embedded in the gambits they act out during The Maids, Jean Genet’s 1947 succes de scandale, getting a less than successful revival now at the Artistic Home. Sartre goes on to suggest that Genet wanted to make a whirligig of gender, too, citing a remark from his Our Lady of the Flowers: “If I were to have a play put on in which women had roles, I would demand that these roles be played by adolescent boys, and I would bring this to the attention of the spectators by means of a placard which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets during the entire performance....

Update: The Nate Wooley/Ken Vandermark/Paul Lytton trio have canceled their tour. This show will proceed with Kuzu and a duo of Vandermark and Lytton. Local clarinet and saxophone player Ken Vandermark, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley, and English percussionist Paul Lytton played their only handful of gigs as a trio in 2011, but their collective history stretches back more than 20 years. In 1999 Vandermark and Lytton initiated a partnership through which they’ve explored musical extremes—density and silence, propulsion and stasis—in intimate, totally improvised duos as well as in the larger, more mapped-out environment of Vandermark’s nine-piece Territory Band....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Elon Musk and his Boring Company will compete with three other firms to build O’Hare Express train The competition to build an express train from downtown to O’Hare International Airport is on. Two firms, Elon Musk’s the Boring Company and Oaktree Capital Management, and two joint ventures, O’Hare Express Train Partners (OHL Infrastructure, Kiewit, Amtrak) and O’Hare Xpress LLC (Meridiam, Antarctica Capital, JLC Infrastructure, Mott MacDonald and First Transit), will compete for the chance to design, construct and operate the train, according to Curbed Chicago....

Q: I’m a 31-year-old straight woman. I have a good job, great friends, and average attractiveness. I’ve dated close to 30 men at this point, and I can’t wrap my head around this: I’ve never had a boyfriend or dated anyone for more than a couple months. It’s really starting to wear on my self-esteem. I don’t believe anything is wrong with me, but the more time goes on, the more I think I have to be doing something wrong....

Billy Boy Arnold‘s career spans no fewer than three historical blues epochs. Mentored as a teenager in 1948 by harmonica master John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, who’d helped define the mid-20th-century Chicago style, Arnold began playing professionally just as Muddy Waters and his contemporaries kicked off the postwar blues insurgency. Then, in 1955, he participated in what was, for all intents and purposes, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll—in fact, he’s often credited with coining one of rock’s most iconic stage names....

Q: I married my high-school sweetheart at 17, had a baby, together a few years, mental illness and subsequent infidelity led to things ending. My ex-husband remarried, divorced again, and is now in another LTR. I’m in a LTR for a decade with my current partner (CP), we have a few kids, and I’m so in love with him it terrifies me. My ex frequently makes sexual remarks to me, low-key flirts and I feel an animal attraction in the moment....

All year the Jazz Institute of Chicago has been celebrating the legacy of singular tenor saxophonist and crucial mentor Von Freeman, who would’ve turned 95 in October (he died in 2012). Friday night’s concert is built around the music of pianist, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra, but it’s part of the Freeman series too—Freeman played in the Arkestra off and on in 1959 and ’60, shortly before Ra and his group left Chicago in ’61....

Next time you think you’re busy, look at Tomeka Reid’s schedule. Even though the cellist was already committed to touring Europe with Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, she just assumed the position of Darius Milhaud Distinguished Visiting Professor at Mills College in Oakland, California (even though she’s based in Queens, New York). And when she’s not racking up the miles to meet playing and teaching engagements, she’s squeezing in a tour to support the release of Old New (Cuneiform), the recent second album by the Tomeka Reid Quartet....