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Last month London DJ and producer Ryan Lee West (aka Rival Consoles) told PopMatters that his latest LP, April’s Persona (Erased Tapes), has “lots of subtlety across the record that excites me more than something that is loud or more intense.” Indeed, Persona has enough sonic complexity to whet the appetite of a filmmaker searching for ambitious, fluid, and immersive electronic instrumental music for her soundtrack without the 80s-nostalgia trappings of Stranger Things or the overdramatic blasts that fester in Inception that are both so common in film and music these days....

Though it seems like Australians toss around the term “country music” without much precision, there’s definitely something happening down there—a small emerging crop of dreamy, retro-leaning pop acts are flirting with elements of twang. Tomorrow night a promising young singer from the Sydney suburb of Glebe makes her local debut at Martyrs’ opening for Marlon Williams, another impressive Aussie whose music has superficial elements of country. Julia Jacklin’s debut album, Don’t Let the Kids Win (Polyvinyl), drops October 7, and though her swoony, liquid vocal style has little do with Nashville country of any era, it’s definitely put its hooks in me....

President Obama finally got around to criticizing Donald Trump for his incompetence and idiocy in the face of the pandemic. It’s got me thinking: What if the leader of the Democratic Party—the man most beloved by Democrats—were less like Obama and more like Mike? As in, Michael Jordan. When it comes to competition, Jordan never lets a grudge—any grudge—go to waste. He views every slight, no matter how trivial or unintended, as a monumental insult that demands revenge....

Since 2010 this invaluable Chicago ensemble directed by composer Nomi Epstein has been the city’s most stalwart advocate for post-John Cage experimental music, working at various times with text scores, indeterminacy, and other open-ended modes of composition. For this unusual concert Aperiodic joins new-music scholar Jennie Gottschalk to illustrate some of the threads from her book Experimental Music Since 1970 (Bloomsbury), an accessible survey of some of the most interesting if misunderstood through lines in new music over the last five decades....

At the beginning of this discursive one-man show, a Silk Road Rising/Stage Left coproduction, Egyptian-American musician and storyteller Karim Nagi announces he’s taking his audience on a fanciful junket through the Arab world in order to counter the pervasive Western misrepresentations that reduce some 423 million people across 22 countries to mystical genies, exotic seductresses, or extremist terrorists—or, in Nagi’s characteristically glib yet piquant phraseology, to Aladdin, Jasmine, or Jafar. It’s an admirable goal, given the global carnage that results from the relentless othering of Arabs, but like the unwieldy tuk-tuk that’s supposed to carry us “tourists” along yet never gets put to much meaningful use, it’s difficult to know where this tour is headed....

Contemporary stories are having a welcome moment at Lyric Opera. While Dead Man Walking continues its powerful run at the Civic Opera House, a new Lyric kids’ opera, Earth to Kenzie, takes on the subject of homelessness. The 45-minute work, with music by Frances Pollock and libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo, was commissioned by Lyric for a series of local school performances (some of which were canceled during the CTU strike)....

Barbara Stanwyck and David Manners star in Capra’s The Miracle Woman, which screens at the Music Box this weekend. In the emblematic, all-American town of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it takes an act of divine intervention to stop a pure-hearted altruist from committing suicide. George Bailey’s struggle to remain a moral paragon in a climate of corruption and failure is presented as a Herculean effort—the film shows that without Bailey’s superhuman power the town would devolve into a modern-day Gomorrah....

Umlaut Records is one of Europe’s most interesting improvised-music labels, run by a collective with members in Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. It’s released a ton of great music, including aggressive free bop, austere free improvisation, and contemporary classical music (such as a recent a recording of the brilliant and challenging vocal work 14 Recitations by composer Georges Aperghis). The generally forward-looking slant of Umlaut’s catalog makes the music of the Umlaut Big Band, based in Paris, even more fascinating in contrast....

During a recent orientation on the Ship of Tolerance at MacArthur Middle School in Prospect Heights, Russian artist Emilia Kabakov posed two questions to the students: What problems did they expect to see in the future, and what could they do to solve them? Taiga, a Chicago transplant who hails from Russia, says she thinks Chicago is an ideal location for the ship because it’s a “community-oriented” city. “You can make things happen here,” Taiga says....

Like the late Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, James Gray makes movies that suggest the work of a late 19th- or early 20th-century artist transported to the present. This may be somewhat intentional on Gray’s part, as the New York-based writer-director has frequently cited artists from these periods as influences. He based the look of The Yards (2000) on the work of French realist painters, drew on the narrative structure of Dostoevsky’s White Nights for Two Lovers (2009), and took inspiration from Puccini’s operas for The Immigrant (2013)....

The fetish for upscale tiny houses has been around long enough for some of the novelty to wear off. In the wake of the mortgage meltdown, the micro dwellings flourished as McMansion antidotes. They made a statement about carbon footprints and financial restraint, even if equipped with hot tubs and high-end sound systems. And they tickled our fancy, their peaked roofs and window boxes evoking the whimsical playhouses of childhood. They inspired their own reality television shows, lifestyle websites, and magazines, as well as numerous listings on Airbnb ($138 a night on a lake near downstate Carbondale, for example; $195 in Schaumburg, up a tree)....

Let’s face it, only a few of us have relationships that call for a complete stranger installing a plaque at the site where we had our first kiss a la Barack and Michelle’s monument at 53rd and Dorchester, the former site of a Baskin-Robbins that they reportedly visited on their first date. But plenty of us can point directly to venues, restaurants, and perhaps even neighborhoods that are forever tainted in our minds by memories of love gone very wrong....

Chicago postpunk four-piece the Knees dropped their first single, “Round and Round,” three years ago; on the A side the band balance a terse, tightly wound melody with a smidgen of garage feedback, while the entropic B side, “Distribution,” displays their fondness for noise. Since then, the Knees have released new music at a trickle. Their debut EP, August’s Posture (Born Yesterday), is their first new material since the June 2018 single “Stammer,” which Brooklyn-based label Two Syllable also included on May’s Chicago Cassette Compilation: Volume 3....

Richard A. Chapman Firefighter alderman Nick Sposato supported the union’s donation to Mayor Emanuel. For the record, let me say this—the firefighters of Chicago have no bigger fan than yours truly. But it just gave him $25,000. Like this dude—who’s raised more than $30 million in the last four years—needs more money! But it’s almost as much money as Alderman Robert Fioretti has been able to raise in the last month....

Lucas Hnath‘s intriguing 2014 drama The Christians, now receiving its Chicago premiere in a finely acted production at Steppenwolf Theatre, is unlike any play I’ve ever seen about religion. There’s no nun boldly overstepping her authority to expose a suspected pedophile priest; no charismatic hypocritical preacher bilking the gullible faithful; no philandering phonies or self-hating homos, preaching traditional family values while pursuing their own illicit lusts. Instead, The Christians concerns a basic question that might seem better suited to a scholarly lecture: Is God’s love for humanity so great that it encompasses everyone, not just Christians?...

One hundred years after the 1917 Soviet revolution in Russia, two baffling museum exhibitions attempt to recast one of the bloodiest regimes in human history in a positive light. “Revolution Every Day” at the Smart Museum and “Revolutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test” at the Art Institute take different approaches to their subject, but neither pays much more than lip service to the millions of victims of the historical period these shows celebrate....

Abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett spent more than half of her life in Chicago. But though she was one of the most prominent black leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries, there’s no monument to her anywhere in the city. Wells’s great-granddaughter and a dedicated group of community members have been trying to change that since 2011, and a new fund-raising push launched on Twitter this week has infused their quest with new urgency....

On Ex Hex’s 2014 debut, Rips, guitarist-vocalist Mary Timony of D.C. postpunk royalty Helium and Autoclave went pop in a new trio. On the brand-new It’s Real (Merge), Timony and company rein it in and slow it down. The first album’s power pop was rooted in a frantic, nervous vibe and proved the band geniuses at cramming earworm vocal melodies and white-hot guitar licks into brief explosions of energy. But the greatness of It’s Real comes from a nearly opposite angle; its songs smolder and steam, its hooks ooze, and its guitars yearn....

As temperatures dipped to 20 below zero on the night of January 29, Martha Hardy and Nakia Young were horrified that the radiators in their South Shore apartments stood cold. The neighbors live in a 21-unit brick building on the southwest corner of 70th Street and Oglesby Avenue. To their surprise, when they contacted other residents, some said they had heat. It didn’t make sense. The whole building only had one source for heat, an enormous Kewanee boiler in the basement....

Exal Iraheta grew up listening to tales from Central American mythology. “The stories, kind of like Grimms’ fairy tales did in Europe, didn’t shy away from real danger,” the playwright, screenwriter, and School of the Art Institute alum recalled. “For me, I’ve always thought of horror and scary stories as a way of releasing something, or experiencing life from a different perspective.” “My (lead) character gets the chance to do a video date—which turns out not to be the best idea,” Iraheta said....