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Like many recent gig posters of the week, today’s selection isn’t something you’ll see stapled to telephone poles, but we’re happy to highlight it on account of the festive ridiculousness of its photo. The Empty Bottle is copresenting a livestream reunion concert by the Snow Angels, which Reader contributor Monica Kendrick described in 2010 as a “seasonal supergroup.” Not everybody can make a gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems....

Russian techno producer and DJ Nina Kraviz abandoned a future in dentistry as her international music career started to take shape. Bouncing from one gig locale to the next, she lived out of suitcases while the years melted by. One night some years ago, in an undisclosed hotel room in an unmentioned locale (unmentioned, perhaps, since forgotten—Kraviz travels so frequently who could blame her for maybe not remembering details such as when and where?...

Near the end of Wormrot’s “Hollow Roots,” front man Mohammad Arif bin Suhaimi shrieks “No point of venting for this fucking long.” He finishes that thought about 43 seconds into a 56-second track, an eternity depending on how extreme—and expedient—you prefer your grindcore. Wormrot, a three-piece that hails from Singapore, is as reputable as a modern grindcore band comes; young metal fans around the world love them as much as the crusty folks who participated in grindcore’s big bang back in the mid-80s....

Leor Galil Evidence that the maze is in a garage Just right of the staircase that leads up to Thalia Hall‘s concert space is an intimate garage space, and for the next three weeks it’ll be home to You Are Here Festival, a visual art-cum-music festival that takes place in a maze. The folks behind You Are Here started building the maze last Friday, and when I went to Thalia Hall yesterday they were finishing up putting everything in place for its debut tonight....

The Chicago Jazz Festival provides a rich cross section of the genre, and this year it’s partnered with a diverse group of local presenters for a series of neighborhood concerts that begins on Friday, August 23. But local jazz clubs and presenters offer a diverse bounty of music all year round—and they step up their efforts for the fest. The Dog/Days concerts at Constellation and the Hungry Brain, most of which are free, begin the weekend before the festival and are worth a plane ticket all by themselves....

You can’t go a day in Chicago without hearing mention of seminal architects Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, or Frank Lloyd Wright. Or encountering some reference to Daniel Burnham’s famous dictum “Make no little plans.” (Not even lunch plans?) Or stumbling into an impassioned debate about whether to call it the Sears Tower or Willis Tower. (Let’s call the whole thing off.) Our grand architectural past is captured in postcards, etched in stone, seared in memory....

“My new brush is the Caterpillar,” says artist Walter De Maria early on in Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, James Crump‘s beautiful new documentary on the birth of land art that screens Wednesday at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Known variously as “earthworks,” “land art,” or “dirt art,” depending on whom you ask, this artistic movement began during the early 1960s as a reaction against the gallery-show format. The idea was to create something that couldn’t be sold, or even moved....

In his liner note essay for Convulsive Threshold (Editions Mego), Yasunao Tone’s 2013 collaborative album with Russell Haswell, Tony Myatt explains that the veteran Japanese sound artist rejects the notion of abusing or inducing errors into his work with digital sound technology. He prefers the term deviation: creating situations where the technology can take a work someplace new and unintended. That distinction might seem silly, especially if one understands that Tone—a key member of the Japanese wing of the international interdisciplinary creative group Fluxus in the 60s and early 70s—was one of the first sound artists to manipulate compact discs and build works from the digital errors (or glitches) of his interventions in the early 90s....

Big Red slumbers in a nest of wood chips, leaves, and straw. If he weren’t pushing 550 pounds, he’d look like a fuzzy dirigible moored to the floor of his pen. Across the barn are the three Blonde sows that over the last four years helped him produce more than 60 pure-blooded Mangalitsa pigs, a friendly, wooly-haired, slow-growing Austro-Hungarian breed that had almost gone extinct in the early 90s. Earlier this month, Lee walked me out on one of his pastures where his third-generation Mangalitsa and Red Wattles roamed, digging deep holes in the earth and scratching their itchy flanks on tree trunks....

This rugged improvising trio is composed of musicians with extraordinarily disparate personalities who seek common ground while expressing their individual voices. Guitarist Nels Cline and saxophonist Larry Ochs both established themselves in California, the former in LA, where he added a punk ethos to his mixture of free jazz and fusion, and the latter in the Bay Area as a founding member of influential saxophone quartet Rova. These days, however, Cline lives in New York, where he’s spent most of his time shaping solos of textural richness and architectural concision as a member of Wilco along with exploring a late-blossoming interest in balladry, as heard on his gorgeous solo album Lovers (Blue Note)....

When I boarded a plane bound for Chicago in Rome earlier this week, I didn’t expect to make it back to the United States. My passport had stamps from travel through Germany, France, Ireland, England, and Italy over the last few weeks, countries from which travel is now banned to the United States. On the departures board, over half of the flights out of the country were flashing “canceled” notices, including flights to India, England, Japan, Russia, and New York among others....

The other night I was talking to a friend about the way a properly deployed hand-clap pattern can make a good pop or rock song great. There are countless gems out there with well-placed claps—”Hey Ya!” by Outkast, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel—but the tune I always turn to first to make this point is the 1966 stomper “Shot Down” by Seattle protopunks the Sonics....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Alderman Danny Solis still can’t explain where $140,000 for arts and culture projects disappeared to. If you find the $140,000 missing from the 25th Ward, please let Alderman Solis’s office know. In 2013, the ward contracted the artist collective Pawn Works to recruit muralists for the ward’s Art in Public Places initiative. By the end of that year, the group was still owed $16,000 of the $30,000 it was promised....

Do you know your mother? I don’t mean her identity but who she is as a person. Does she know you? Truly know you. Mother-daughter relationships are fraught even under ideal conditions. What if your mother has dark secrets she’s unwilling to divulge? What if she might be mentally ill? How about if she develops degenerative dementia causing her to fade away before your very eyes? Toronto-based poet Damian Rogers grapples with these issues and much else in her graceful, melancholy memoir An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (Knopf Canada)....

We Were Feminists Once (PublicAffairs), the new book from Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch Media, takes aim at “marketplace feminism,” a specific kind of politicking that embraces a Midas-like sensibility: if a woman touches it, it must be feminist. In anticipation of her appearance at the Printers Row Lit Fest on Saturday, I spoke with Zeisler about the changes in media that created this phenomenon. That’s a good question. I don’t think marketplace feminism replaced activist feminism....

Suburban rock three-piece Liqs have made a home for themselves in Chicago’s young garage scene, a big community with porous borders that’s constantly breeding new bands. As front man Nick Van Horn told Houseshow Magazine, a Medium-based site that focuses on local DIY rock, Liqs started as his solo outlet—the group originally performed under Van Horn’s name. In mid-2o14 they dropped their Eye to Eye EP, and last year they contributed to the first Monster Compilation from tastemaking label Dumpster Tapes, which included tracks by a great mix of older veterans (Mac Blackout) and impressive upstarts (Son of a Gun)....

On Cloud Rat’s October compilation Silk Panic, vocalist Madison Marshall howls, “Sister wolf eats the throat of the jester / Here to fucking perform.” That line might make a fitting mission statement for the Michigan grindcore band, who have been crafting surrealistic political punk-grind for almost a decade—taking the nightmarish lyricism of Pig Destroyer and melding it with the fury born of living in a state that’s full of injustice. The band is not just ferociously articulate; they’re also inventive and unafraid to explore a vast number of styles....

Richard Park’s budtenders go through a one-year training program before they’re allowed to talk, unmonitored, to customers at Andersonville’s Dispensary 33, where he’s a founding partner and director of operations. That’s why pastry chef Mindy Segal suggested he would be a good person to explain the do’s and don’ts of dabbing, or vaporizing cannabis concentrates. The varieties of amorphous blobs that result are sold in appetizing shades of honey, amber, cream, and gold, with names such as shatter, sugar, sauce, budder, batter, crumble, rosin, kief, and good old hash....

Comedian, writer, and actor Dwayne Kennedy is truly a comedian’s comedian. He has appeared on screens and stages since the 80s, getting his start in Chicago at the open mike at Zanies on Wells Street. He’s had guest spots on sitcoms like Seinfeld and Martin, and his TV debut itself wasn’t too shabby: in 1989 he guest starred on the show 227 playing opposite fellow visiting actor Halle Berry. Kennedy grew up both on the south side and in the south suburbs, and frequently works into his comedy the kind of analysis about the city-state and community development that longtime Chicagoans can relate to....

Gossip Wolf has been tearing it up at Chicago clubs to the mixes of legendary DJ Teri Bristol since the mid-90s. Fellow enthusiasts of late-night booty shaking no doubt remember her epic sets at Medusa’s, at Smart Bar, and alongside Psycho-Bitch at Crobar’s Sunday-night G.L.E.E. Club (aka Gay, Lesbian, Everyone’s Equal). In January, Bristol was hospitalized in Tennessee for kidney failure; she’s had surgery and gone on dialysis, and her bills are piling up....