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This Thursday marks the first night of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, the largest annual showcase of experimental moving-image work in Chicago. Running through Sunday, the festival contains work by a number of notable artists (among them local filmmakers Melika Bass and Deborah Stratman, who are represented in Thursday’s program) as well as up-and-coming figures from the experimental community. Onion City is a welcome reminder of what a great city Chicago is to see avant-garde films and videos....

“I woke up—I took my costume, I took a bath. That day we were ready. That day we were having a performance,” recalls dancer and choreographer Rigoberto Saura. It was Friday the 13th of March 2020, and Hedwig Dances was preparing to take the stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts for their program Lightplay, consisting of Raum, a premiere by artistic director Jan Bartoszek inspired by the work of László Moholy-Nagy, as well as a restaging of Saura’s 2019 The Flowering Mechanisms....

Northern California punk outfit Ceremony have been a vital part of the modern-day hardcore scene since their 2005 inception, but they’ve spent much of their career pushing as hard as possible to sound like anything but a hardcore band. Their earliest stuff was super aggressive, powerviolence-inspired hardcore, but by the early 2010s they’d begun making detours, diving into grimy, Stooges-style garage rock on 2012’s Zoo and making Joy Division-flavored postpunk a focal point on 2015’s The L-Shaped Man....

Ramon Gardenhire remembers being in law school at Wayne State University in Detroit and trying to give blood for the first time. He went with a group of friends and sat down with the screener. “I was floored,” says 38-year-old Gardenhire, who finished law school in 2003 and is now vice president of policy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. “It was the most surreal thing, going to law school and trying to do my civic duty and then hearing that....

Hip-hop was built on four basic elements: MCing, DJing, graffitiing, and breaking. Then came the fifth element, knowledge. Influential rapper KRS-One introduced four more in 2003’s “9 Elements,” but knowledge holds a place of supremacy among the elements, at least to me: it’s the circumference within which the other elements are able to coexist, the lens hip-hop devotees use to see the world. Hip-hop is a lifestyle, and those who adhere to it don’t stop living once the DJ packs up for the night or their spray-paint cans run dry....

Che “Ryhmefest” Smith has put out seven albums and three mixtapes, once beat Eminem in a freestyle battle, and is one of only three rappers in the world to have both a Grammy and an Oscar to his name—and he still lives in Woodlawn, the neighborhood he grew up in. It’s part of him living out a message of community he’s always believed in. A recent tweet from the rapper reads: “Stop teaching people 2 Leave ‘the hood’ make it, 2 escape it!...

It feels like just yesterday that Steve Mizek, founder of defunct electronic-music site Little White Earbuds, launched his Argot label. In fact it’s been more than five years—Argot grew out of Mizek’s small-run imprint, Stolen Kisses, in spring 2012. On Friday, October 27, Smart Bar hosts Argot’s belated fifth birthday party, with sets from Mizek and three producers who’ve released new material through the label this year: experimental Champaign producer Hippie Priest (who dropped the full-length cassette See It Through in July), Detroit drum ‘n’ bass fanatic Todd Osborn (who dropped the Elastic 68 12-inch in May), and underground Brooklyn house artist Octo Octa (who dropped the New Paths 12-inch in April)....

Jim Prisching/AP Photo Ernie Banks had a brief brush with Chicago politics. To read the outpouring of heart-felt grief over the passing of the great Ernie Banks, you might be surprised to learn that, when given a chance, voters in the Eighth Ward wouldn’t elect him alderman. The Eighth Ward was centered in and around the Chatham neighborhood—Banks lived at 8159 S. Rhodes—which was then starting to change from white to black....

To me, Chicago congressional hopeful Benjamin Thomas Wolf—aka the “cannabis candidate”—seemed like someone I could get behind when he burst into the spotlight before last month’s primaries. More disturbingly, I also learned he was accused of abusing women. I care about people and families, NOT politics, corporations or the chicago establishment. The people need healthcare, they want cannabis, they hope for free education. I’m fighting for them. Rahm and the establishment are afraid we might win....

“Leading requires telling people the truth,” Rahm Emanuel declared at one point during the final mayoral debate, held last week. Even if you think Emanuel is our best bet—and maybe he is—he’ll be a better mayor, and Chicago will be a healthier city, if he’s forced to consider following his own advice. Emanuel was among those who lined up firmly behind Daley. Now he says he’s bringing Chicago back from those dark days....

Ambient music is often unfairly regarded as “background noise,” but in the hands of its most passionate practitioners, it can be as striking as the loudest and most confrontational music ever produced. Minimalist composer William Basinski has been mastering this realm of sound for four decades, and he’s bringing his expertise to Chicago for two performances at Pitchfork’s Midwinter fest. On Friday night, he’ll perform his seminal work The Disintegration Loops with the Chicago Philharmonic....

Ana Gabriel, nicknamed “La Diva de América,” has influenced generations of music fans since she launched her career in the 1970s. With her no-holds-barred approach to every tune and her signature vocal quality—a husky rasp that evokes long nights of crying and drinking—the Mexican singer-songwriter has mastered torch songs in a wide range of genres. Over the decades, Gabriel has had massive hits in Latin pop, rock, and most notably mariachi music....

Whether you’re feeling patriotic (or just relieved compared to recent years), or just looking for a break over the holiday weekend and beyond, here are some events to help you ease into July. Fri 7/2 and Sat 7/3, 9 PM: Composer, clarinetist, improviser, and Participatory Music Coalition cofounder Angel Bat Dawid settles in for an inspiring weekend residency, “Tha Playground,” at the Empty Bottle with collaborators. On Friday, she’s joined in a “swing set” by gospel and jazz singer Phillip Armstrong....

Chicago hip-hop producer and visual artist Robert Krums has been making music for nearly two decades, and for most of that time he went by the name Earmint. About five years ago, he reinvented himself as Spectacular Diagnostics. Fortunately, the reputation in the national underground he’d earned as Earmint helped him assemble a hit squad of guest MCs—Vic Spencer, Quelle Chris, Jeremiah Jae, Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine—for his first Spectacular Diagnostics album, 2015’s Raw Game....

My favorite question as an arts journalist is “Why now?” When Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina first hit New York stages in 2014, the answer seemed clear. Across the country, states had started to legalize queer marriage left and right; it wasn’t a matter of if it would become the law of the land, but when. With the white weddings and registries, however, continued the question of assimilation: What do we lose when we insist we’re just like everyone else?...

DIY spaces come and go, but people such as Charles Joseph Smith give the city’s nebulous underground scene a sense of cohesion. Smith, who performs under both his own name and that of his performance-art alter ego, Mr. Forefinger, is a champion of the outre, odd, and endearing. A familiar face around independent shows, Smith is likely to be found in the thick of the crowd, busting out dance moves that blur together breakin’ and ballet, which he showed off on local cable-access dance program Chic-a-Go-Go (a fine feather in any underground Chicago musician’s cap)....

With every passing year percussionist John Hollenbeck has upped his game as a composer and arranger, writing increasingly ambitious material for his two primary groups: the chamber-music-like Claudia Quintet and the richly orchestrated Large Ensemble. He’s a devoted student of jazz’s big-band tradition, cleaving unapologetically to ambitious composers and arrangers such as his longtime mentor Bob Brookmeyer. Earlier this year his Large Ensemble dropped its strongest album yet, All Can Work (New Amsterdam), which resonates more for me with every listen—it rarely connects directly with conventional big-band jazz, focusing instead of vibrant harmony, intricate moving parts, and bursts of sonic color....

The first Helltrap Nightmare I attended was in 2016, in the bar half of Cafe Mustache. Sarah Sherman took the stage wearing a metallic jumpsuit hand-painted with veiny boobs, holding up a Ziploc bag full of her own pubic hair—an intro that, though jarring, was completely on-brand. In the years following Helltrap’s inception, the format has expanded to include the entire spectrum of performance-based comedy and DIY music, serving as a multigenre open mike for any and every one....

This could be the story of two wrongful convictions. This could be the story of how James Allen was railroaded by a Chicago police detective and Cook County prosecutors who didn’t think he deserved to be free. But before he has the chance to prove that he’s innocent of two murders, Allen needs one thing: for Dorothy Brown, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, to do her job....

Q: Sex-positive bi woman here. I have recommended your column to many people over the years to help them feel normal and human in their kinks, fantasies, sexuality, etc. But I’m having a more difficult time extending similar acceptance to myself. I was in a three-year relationship with a cis straight man. I recently moved across the country for graduate school and this was the catalyst for me to put my foot down about opening the relationship in order to get my sexual needs met....