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Our long national nightmare isn’t over. It’s barely begun. That’s the dystopic message of Dan Giles’s play, now in a world premiere at First Floor Theater. As reflected in the mirrored walls of William Boles’s set, with Claire Chrzan’s lighting and Eric Backus’s sound creating a disco hellscape environment, we’re through the looking glass of Trumpian times. Do we throw down for resistance, or do we game the system for our own benefit?...

In a time when the question of whether to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border dominates the national discourse and the question of who belongs on each side is omnipresent, two Chicago exhibits wrestle with what citizenship means today, especially for those who are deliberately and structurally denied these rights. Educator and visual artist Fidencio Fifield- Perez, who was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, learned to hoard mail at a young age....

Andrew Tham, 31, is a composer and performer who grew up in Edgewater. He’s a founder of art-music cassette label Parlour Tapes, a member of performance collective Mocrep, and an occasional sound designer for the Neo-Futurists. I was a music director at our college radio station and I booked this band called Volcano! from Chicago, and Sam Scranton—he’s a good friend of mine now and a composer—he was the drummer in the band....

Minneapolis native Bryan Black was fronting an industrial band called Haloblack when Prince invited him to work as an engineer at Paisley Park, a position he held for only six months. Later, he told the bloggers at his label, Electric Deluxe, that the work was “tedious and painful,” but he gained knowledge he wound up applying to his own music, first as part of a “techno punk” duo called Motor, and currently as a solo techno artist under the name Black Asteroid....

Chef Jassy Lee is a living embodiment of an international fried chicken triangulation, a case study in the global affinity for spicy, battered, and crispy poultry. Born in Taishan, Guangdong, she emigrated to the U.S. in 1991 with her parents, but also visited relatives in Belize, members of that country’s Chinese immigrant community, which is largely responsible for another beloved expression of deep-fried poultry. Lee’s Belizean family owned restaurants and served fried chicken—uhhh, BFC?...

For more than a decade, Chicago singer-songwriter Lee Ketch has used his band Mooner to perfect an earthy indie-rock sound that draws equally from Americana and power pop. On the group’s new third album, The Alternative Universe of Love (Aerial Ballet), he reflects on his past with an irresistible combination of nostalgia, regret, and forgiveness. Longtime listeners will pick up on this backward-looking theme from the album’s title—it’s named after a song from Mooner’s self-released 2009 EP, Nudè Barmados, which came out before Ketch moved here from Portland, Oregon....

Theater Oobleck presents the world premiere of Mickle Maher’s latest hilarious tragedy. In the basement of a community theater (very much like the Chopin, where this production is being staged), two middle-aged sisters who have given 20 years of their lives to the company flail while holding auditions for an adult-oriented version of The Three Little Pigs. Meanwhile, upstairs on the main stage, the pompous artistic director is mounting his take on Macbeth....

courtesy of the artist Jonah Parzen-Johnson Saxophonist and Chicago native Jonah Parzen-Johnson calls his work “lo-fi experimental folk music for solo baritone saxophone and analog synthesizer,” a classification that has met my resistance since I first encountered it. Isn’t it enough to say he makes music for saxophone and synthesizer? As heard on his album Remember When Things Were Better Tomorrow (Primary), he writes engrossing, accessible melodies that do indeed convey a folky simplicity and directness, but using a variety of extended techniques and interactive synthesizer programs of his own design, those melodic phrases fan out and mutate in countless ways—sometimes decidedly abstract, sometimes florid and tuneful—as he improvises on each composition....

The cover art for Cosmovore, the latest album from Oakland metal trio Ulthar, is immediately arresting: it’s an illustration of a group of plantlike monstrosities that each appear to be vomiting nervous systems made of fibrous bundles and gaping maws. It’s from a work called The Mountains of Madness 3 by fantasy artist Ian Miller, who got his start illustrating the covers of paperbacks by horror author and noted racist H....

This week’s poster is for Eating Rainbows, an outdoor celebration of the rainbow and the LGBTQ+ community. This annual event is organized by Jenna Liberman and Paul Octavious of the Eye Eaters project, which brings artisans from the culinary world together with visual artists to create gatherings that combine food, music, and interactive art installations. Octavious is also a photographer and graphic designer, and he created this poster using art provided by Aaron Lowell Denton of Bloomington, Indiana, whose poster work has been highlighted in the Reader before....

Feeling cooped up? There’s a few pop-up experiences opening this weekend that can get you out of the house while being mindful of recommended safety guidelines. First, the north-side bar and music venue Cobra Lounge opened Chicago Craft: a Collective Grip, a pop-up shop within the venue to support local artists, bands, and breweries that have been hurting financially during the pandemic by giving them another platform in which to sell their wares....

Formed in England in 1967, Procol Harum are probably best known for their massive debut single, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a chilling, Bach-inspired, organ-led beauty of a tune deemed by some the first progressive-rock song ever. But prog or not, it introduced the world to the baroque-rock grandeur Procol Harum came to specialize in, with its sweeping arrangements and epi, story-driven lyrics, double-keyboard interplay between singer and pianist Gary Brooker and organist Matthew Fisher, and complex, bluesy shredding by guitarist Robin Trower....

Few Chicago jazz musicians operate with the erudition and rigor of saxophonist Geof Bradfield, a scholar of the music’s history, a thoughtful composer, and an artist who never reverts to autopilot. When he was approached about making a live release by British Columbia-based jazz label Cellar Live, he didn’t merely trot out an assortment of past accomplishments but crafted new pieces with the attention to detail and holistic construction one might expect on a meticulously assembled studio effort....

Pitchfork Music Festival unveiled a number of the performers for its annual three-day bonanza this morning; the 13th iteration runs July 20-22, once again at Union Park. Raphael Saadiq it’s either @BIGBABYDRAM or Draco Malfoy #P4Kfest pic.twitter.com/wQqUIDY88V — Rachel Yang (@_rachelyang) February 27, 2018 saad that i spelled Saadiq wrong! buuut he’s confirmed and we’re on to the next one. 3 out of 12 have been done #P4Kfest https://t.co/vvQ1T5FIGx oooh she’s mixing up the order to keep us on our toes but dude next to me is guessing this is not this heat #P4Kfest https://t....

SpongeBob Squarepants braces for an epic food fight in Sponge Out of Water This past weekend Fifty Shades of Grey opened to whopping commercial success, enjoying the most profitable opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie. It came not long after American Sniper—another R-rated movie that audiences seem to enjoy debating more than actually watching—sat atop America’s box office chart for about a month. Clint Eastwood’s latest had been dethroned one weekend earlier, however, by another, more genial cultural phenomenon: SpongeBob SquarePants, whose second theatrical feature, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, drew in audiences to the tune of $50 million....

Courtesy of Noisy Ghost PR Via Tania Tania Bowers, the voice behind the long-running Via Tania, moved back to her native Australia four years ago after an 11-year run in Chicago. Before she split town she told Gossip Wolf that her project would continue “in some form,” but she hasn’t released anything since 2009, when she dropped Moon Sweet Moon. That silence ends tomorrow when Via Tania and the Tomorrow Music Orchestra (Narooma) finally sees release....

This Steppenwolf for Young Adults (SYA) production’s full title is worth sharing: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. The act of shortening the title reinforces the idea of erasure that’s present throughout this play within a play, penned by Jackie Sibblies Drury and codirected by SYA artistic director Hallie Gordon and Gabrielle Randle....

I attended a Chicago Teachers Union rally and the local Trump and Bernie Sanders political rallies earlier this year, so I thought I knew what to expect when I stumbled upon a labor protest in Paris on Tuesday afternoon. I was wrong. I wondered how ugly this battle might get—or at least I did until a few minutes before 6 PM, when an officer aimed his cannon and fired a shot my direction....

Since this spring Chicago singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Xoe Wise has been parking her scooter at intersections around town for small, outdoor pop-up performances—a series she calls “Curbside Live,” where she collects tips via Venmo to donate to local venues and businesses. Wise plays magisterial indie folk that retains its grandeur even when she pares her instrumentation down to just acoustic guitar, so the al fresco format of Curbside Live doesn’t handicap her at all....

“Never told this to anyone,” says Chance the Rapper, recounting in a revealing GQ profile how a scary period during his girlfriend’s pregnancy last year helped strengthen their relationship and restore his faith in God. He says touring and merch sales are solid and that he’ll never participate in the “dick-swinging contest” of signing to a label. He appreciated the benediction. But also: “I’m thinking, like, damn, I don’t even know if God likes rap!...