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If there’s a more efficient and affordable way to build a high-quality experimental music collection than subscribing to Kevin Drumm’s Bandcamp page, I don’t know about it. Over the last couple of years he’s produced new work at a prodigious clip, releasing multiple titles each month that alternate between restrained, deeply resonant drones, furious noise excursions, and deliciously tactile experiments in dynamics. His rapidly expanding body of work has shown that he’s a restless creator who’s seriously invested in trying new things within his abstract milieu....

During the past year, comedians were forced, like so many others, to get creative. Dave Helem, producer and host of the Dope Comedy Summer Series, had a wrench thrown into a major career milestone and had to quickly adjust—instead of filming a traditional stand-up special as planned, his first hour-long special, DJ The Chicago Kid, was filmed at a drive-in outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. A Dope Comedy Summer Series...

It was a gloriously sunny afternoon as the Hideout’s annual block party kicked off late last month. Beer was flowing, hot dogs were being grilled, and bands played into the night. But there was a touch of melancholy in the air. Some attendees were quietly murmuring that such celebrations may be coming to an end. At least at this location. I call this phenomenon Disposable Chicago. Sometimes it seems as though the Emanuel administration can’t dispose of people, places, and things fast enough....

In the Before Times—before the Moth, before the Stoop, before the phrase “live lit” was even coined, much less a thing—Sharon Evans’s Live Bait Theater was HQ for Chicago storytellers. At least it was for a frenetic month every year, as legions of narrative spinners arrived to the tiny space for the Fillet of Solo Festival. The diminishment is, obviously, that the real-time live communal thrill is gone. The nightly community Fillet cultivated in previous fests isn’t possible if we’re not all packed into a 40-seat house or the back of some bar, where the collective energy can’t help but ricochet off the walls....

Poor iPod Classic On Sunday more than a dozen local record labels will join together at the Empty Bottle for the Chicago Independent Labels Pop-Up Shop. The list of imprints slinging new records and cassettes includes classical-focused Parlour Tapes; the in-house label belonging to Permanent Records; and the eclectic FPE Records, which was founded in 2012 by Matt Pakulski (he also came up with the idea for the pop-up event)....

L M Feldman’s Grace, or the Art of Climbing is a character-driven exploration of the world of competitive rock climbing that seeks to apply a vital rule of the sport to life: there is no shame in falling so long as you never let go. Alex Molnar stars in the show’s midwest premiere, presented by Brown Paper Box Co., as Emm, a young woman who decides to train as a rock climber in the face of her struggle with depression and the deterioration of important relationships in her life....

In a time characterized by waiting—waiting to leave the confines of our homes, waiting to see our loved ones closer than six feet away, waiting to truly exhale—those of us who have found ourselves estranged from our usual gigs in Chicago’s illustrious independent music scene knew that waiting was simply not an option. In a matter of days following March 12, 2020, COVID-19 splayed across the country, tours were scrapped, venues were shuttered, and income for a majority of music industry workers slipped away like sand through a sieve....

Quin Kirchner blew into Chicago in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated his old hometown of New Orleans. He wasted no time making himself essential as a drummer, and since then he’s played with a wide variety of acts: Afrobeat combo Nomo, tropical pop band Wild Belle, singer-guitarist Ryley Walker, and countless jazz ensembles. In all these settings, he’s supplied crisp grooves and percussive coloration that keep the music flowing. Kirchner didn’t release his first album as a bandleader, The Other Side of Time (Astral Spirits/Spacetone), till 2018, and it was worth the wait....

As a member of Chicago production collective OnGaud rapper and beat maker SolarFive contributed to one of the best local hip-hop releases of 2014: Mick Jenkins’s The Water[s]. The same sumptuous, soul-influenced mystique OnGaud lent The Water[s] snakes its way through SolarFive’s brand-new debut mixtape, 88 Soul. That magic is present in the occasional weeping synths on “Amethyst”; the lazy, stumbling beat on “Float Away”; and the instrumental sections that sound like they’ve been submerged in water on “Eviction Notice....

To gain some perspective on the teachers’ strike that just ended, I thought I’d fire up the old time machine and go back to 1980—January to be exact—when Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” topped the charts. And still the Tribune‘s editorial writers opposed the strike and blamed it on the union. Apparently, the Tribsters wanted teachers to work for nothing. Neither! Some unnamed Tribune editorialist wrote that beaut in 1967, when “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees topped the charts....

There are no major protests or demonstrations in Chicago today on International Women’s Day—but that doesn’t mean women are ignoring the push for pay equity, reproductive justice, and gender parity. Instead, more women are getting politically active: they’re planning to vote, become activists, or run for office themselves. On the eve of International Women’s Day, Taylor took the stage during Russian feminist punk band/protest group Pussy Riot’s show at the Subterranean to talk to an overwhelmingly female audience about the importance of engagement in politics....

It’s Pride month, sinners, and with that comes a melange of rainbow-slathered everything. Yay, love! Yay, parades! As queerness becomes more marketable, however, it risks becoming more whitewashed. So! To keep the “homo” out of homogenization, we spoke with the city’s queer and creative about the media that influenced them most as they were coming out—a reminder that there’s no one right way to forge an identity. Devlyn Camp, creator of the Mattachine podcast...

Blue Buddha Boutique bluebuddhaboutique.com Anybody who’s in the business of brainwashing women into buying more clothing and accessories will tell you the best way to brighten up a blah outfit is to add some statement jewelry. There are plenty of stores in Chicago selling jewelry that will help you state that you are a fun, fearless, sexy female. But sometimes you do not want to look fun and fearless and sexy....

The Rubicon A few months ago, a group of friends whispered something about heading to an underground party called the Rubicon. I couldn’t go that night, but thinking that I might experience an affair equivalent to a mid-70s Tangerine Dream album, I made it my business to get to a Rubicon rave a few months later. In a subterranean space in Pilsen, club kids and art-school graduates danced to local DJs in a giant smoke-machine cloud....

Barrel-Aged Ceres Vodka from Chicago Distilling Company chicagodistilling.com Bartenders and distillers are barrel aging everything these days, from gin to cocktails—but barrel-aged vodka is still fairly rare. And that alone was enough reason for Two mixologist Graham Crowe and Chicago Distilling Company owner Jay DiPrizio to want to make one. They collaborated in late January to fill a used whiskey barrel—from the distillery’s in-the-works malt whiskey program—with their Ceres vodka. About six weeks of barrel aging smoothed and mellowed the vodka, giving it a pale gold color and faint notes of chocolate, caramel, and oak, with a sweet spiciness....

Monica Schipper/Getty Images for New York Comedy Festival The danger Brian Williams was most in was the danger of letting his little story run away from him. A story in Monday’s New York Times hails the photography of Spider Martin, who in 1965 was assigned by the Birmingham News to shoot pictures of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Art historian Martin Berger is quoted by the Times observing that several scenes from the new movie Selma seem to be based on Martin’s pictures....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Die Enttäuschung, Lavaman On their first new album in five years, Berlin’s Die Enttäuschung not only withstand the loss of founding drummer Uli Jennesen (seamlessly replaced by Michael Griener) but grow into a quintet with the addition of trombonist Christof Thewes. They remain one of the most agile, imaginative, and satisfying improvising bands on the planet, especially with Thewes joining the highly interactive front line of bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and trumpeter Axel Dörner....

But when it comes to forking over $2.3 billion—at least—to the world’s richest man who runs the world’s biggest corporation, money’s no problem. Party like a rock star! Here’s a sample from a 2018 Tribune editorial, which in retrospect reads like a scene from the lusty romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey . . . I mention this just in case any of my brothers and sisters at my beloved Chicago Teachers Union actually believed Toni was the true-blue progressive they made her out to be in this year’s mayoral election....

Five years can be a lifetime in the career of a postpunk band, but that’s how long it’s been since the LA duo No Age dropped a new record. Singer and guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt have finally broken their silence with the exuberant Snares Like a Haircut (Drag City), a maelstrom of fury and melody that sounds like it must be the product of more than two people....

It was only fitting that 2019, the year leading up to the new Roaring Twenties, should be a time of transitions, milestones, and new beginnings in the Chicago transportation scene. Bike fatalities are down, with only four cases to date, compared with the recent average of six, but the last two cases sparked outrage. On November 6, a turning truck driver failed to yield to school counselor Carla Aiello, 37, who was on her bike, crushing her under the wheels....