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For her livestreamed concert in the Jefferson Park EXP series last December, Chicago experimental musician Kimberly Sutton trained her camera on a pair of lit candles and several speaker cones of various sizes, resting on their backs like bowls and filled with water or sand. As the vibrations from the speakers increased, liquid and sand and flame started to tremble and flicker, forming restless and intricate interference patterns. Eventually the hums and throbs grew intense enough that the water began to bubble and spatter; you could see the sound leaping free of its cages and making a bid for freedom....

Anastasia Chatzka, one of the city’s most prolific fashion designers, will close her self-named Ukrainian Village boutique this weekend after four years. Chatzka, a Reader Best of Chicago pick in 2015 and 2016, will be selling her designs and the fixtures in her meticulously decorated storefront at 60 to 70 percent off throughout the weekend, from noon to 7 Saturday, then at a closing party from 11 AM to 4 PM Sunday, March 12, at 1001 N....

The new EP by Defcee and producer August Fanon, We Dressed the City With Our Names, ties Defcee’s history in Chicago’s rap and poetry scenes to the primordial hip-hop culture of New York graffiti artists depicted in the 1983 documentary Style Wars. The first track opens with a sample of a young graffiti writer explaining that his work is for him and other writers to see—forget the outsiders—and then Defcee raps about being animated by that same desire to leave a mark on hip-hop subculture....

Mary Stamm-Clarke Lone In a “Guest List” feature he did for Pitchfork last year, British electronic producer Lone, aka Matt Cutler, described the lo-fi artist Nite Jewel’s work as, “perfect music for that weird time between awake and being in a dream.” That’s also a pretty good description of Lone’s music. Though his music is more propulsive and energetic than Nite Jewel’s it’s nevertheless the kind of material you’d bust out at dawn, when dancers and rave kids are at the peak of blissful exhaustion....

Chicago theater has been forced to improvise. When COVID-19 caused Congo Square’s production of Douglas Turner Ward’s classic satire Day of Absence to close early, Charlique Rolle, the new managing director, led the company in exploring how they could adapt to the virtual realm. The result is a new online sketch comedy series, featuring a quartet of actors creating work in ensemble. For Congo Square ensemble member and HOTB cast member Kelvin Roston Jr....

Imperfections is an independent film that boasts a number of admirable qualities: an original heist story shot on a small budget, an authentic Chicago setting (viewers may recognize local haunts Lost Lake, the Hideout, and the Jewelers Row stretch of Wabash), and a 31-year-old female protagonist. The mother’s boyfriend (Ed Begley Jr.), a diamond importer on Jewelers Row, offers the daughter a job as a runner—a position typically given to pretty, inconspicuously dressed women whom no one would suspect of carrying precious stones in their pockets....

Greek myths are essentially ancient soap operas, and such is the case with Medusa Undone, which reexamines the origin of the well-known monster but told through a modern feminist lens. Here the gods Athena and Poseidon are cast as monsters and Medusa is a timid sea nymph who just wants to serve Athena and is afraid of incurring the wrath of the gods. As Medusa leaves her terrible family life (her sisters are Gorgons, after all) and follows her spiritual passion to become a priestess, she finds herself caught betwixt Athena and Poseidon in a classic love triangle, which ends quite badly for her (not to mention leaving her with one terrible hairdo)....

For a comedy show, the Second City E.T.C.’s latest sketch revue, directed by Anthony LeBlanc, seems unusually poignant. The venerable theater’s offerings—particularly on the main stage—have long saved room for little bursts of sentimentality, but I don’t remember ever seeing a revue that felt quite as touchingly suffused with longing as this one does. We meet, among others, lonely online daters, roommates singing about the sorrow of parting when one gets a fiancee, and a fatherless tyke aching for a stepdad who’ll play Dance Dance Revolution with him....

Every year brother-sister duo White Mystery celebrate tokers’ holiday 4/20 with a sweet spring surprise—and 2015 is no different. This time Gossip Wolf’s favorite Chicago garage rockers have switched up the format, releasing not a new album but instead a feature film about their “breakneck nomadic lifestyle” called That Was Awesome. This wolf has seen only the trailer so far, but it features cartoons, basketball, poetry about the band written by drummer Francis White and read by their dad, and cameos from underground rock luminaries (among them Cody Blanchard from Shannon & the Clams and Timmy Vulgar from Human Eye)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Brockhampton What’s not to love about a boy band whose 15 members include their webmaster? What’s not to love about group leader Kevin Abstract rapping about being gay, when so many other MCs can’t even handle other people being gay? What’s not to love about their immersive Saturation trilogy? I say all this because I’m still adding to a lengthy Twitter thread in which I make my case to join Brockhampton—come on, guys, put me in!...

Just a year ago the future of Chicago’s two black-owned banks—Illinois Service Federal and Seaway Bank and Trust—looked grim. Both banks were under consent orders from federal regulators to raise capital after years of shrinking income brought them to the brink of failure. They badly needed an influx of new deposits to continue making loans, and millions of dollars in investment to keep shareholders from bailing. The influx of new deposits means Seaway will be able to make more loans to individuals and businesses, which will generate the interest that becomes income for the bank....

In 2013, self-described “doom funk” septet Gramps the Vamp won the Reader‘s Best of Chicago audience poll for Best New Band, and it looks like y’all were on the right track. Gossip Wolf has somehow missed them completely—until now! Their self-­titled 2014 debut album is full of spooky, sample-­laden, Afrobeat-­inflected grooves with a dark, cinematic vibe—they’d make a fine soundtrack for a scary sci-fi film full of nattily dressed actors fleeing for their lives....

How would Apple ensure it was helping underserved communities and schools in Chicago and not just the best and brightest? On Wednesday, the tech giant’s top executive returned for an hour-long MSNBC interview special with anchor Chris Hayes and Recode tech reporter Kara Swisher—a show that had been branded “Revolution: Apple Changing the World.” Cook sat comfortably in the center of a gymnasium turned television studio on the second floor of the selective enrollment high school as several hundred students, faculty, press, and ticketed members of the public showered him with applause every few minutes....

The Gold Web @TheGoldWeb Plenty of local bands can work up a groove, but few give you as much to look at as the Gold Web. The glam-rock quartet put out their self-titled debut album at the end of 2014, though the studio takes of their songs seem to be largely a formality—the Gold Web are meant to be seen onstage. All four members dress like it’s Halloween every time they show their painted faces in one of Chicago’s rock clubs, and like a troupe of Jim Henson creations, these guys don’t make it entirely clear what they’re supposed to be....

Dances are made in time and space, a minute or an hour in a dancer’s life never to be seen again. Dances do not last—they have to be made new each time and evaporate as they are appearing. Today, small freedoms—moving, gathering, and connecting—have been restricted to limit the movement of a virus that, whether we want to admit it or not, is showing us just how connected we are. Katherine Disenhof...

On October 10, the day local hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive turned ten, it launched Fake Shore Dive (that’s right, “dive”), a pop-up bar in the same Wicker Park storefront previously home to Riot Fest’s temporary restaurant—and before that the Saved by the Bell diner, Saved by the Max. Fake Shore Dive stayed open for three nights, and in that time many big-name Chicago hip-hop players stopped in to thank the site for championing the local scene when few others paid it much attention—among them Chance the Rapper, Twista, and Bump J....

A global pandemic isn’t the best time to be hooking up with random strangers, so if you’re looking for some vicarious erotic thrills, Pride Films And Plays’s Five Encounters on a Site Called Craigslist will satisfy your desire. It will also make you consider how casual hookups impact your emotional well-being as playwright Sam Ward recounts his personal experiences with the now-shuttered personals section of Craigslist. As a bisexual twentysomething coming to terms with his sexuality, Ward learns a lot about himself through this mixed bag of flings, and his script makes audience members a part of the action with a heavy amount of interaction....

Marc Acito’s jumpy, effortful play is, charitably, children’s theater for adults, which makes sense, since it’s tangentially based on Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s picture book And Tango Makes Three. Its main characters are two anthropomorphized animal couples—Silo and Roy, the famous male penguins in Central Park Zoo that pair-bonded and parented, and Pale Male and Lola, the equally famous red-tailed hawks that nested atop Paula Zahn’s Manhattan co-op—but their problems (jealousy, infidelity, anticapitalist angst, internalized homophobia) are decidedly grown-up....

Gossip Wolf has never bought into the theory that punk gets better when it has a bigoted, incompetent Republican administration to rail against. (And Americans certainly didn’t consider that when they flushed the current one!) But in case you feel like cherry-picking supporting evidence, Chicago hardcore band Wrong War provided some on Election Day in the form of their anvil-heavy debut LP, Fixed Against Forever. The veteran crew—former Ottawa and Current singer Matt Weeks, guitarist Patrick Keenan, bassist Dave Pawlowski, and drummer Dan Smith—retch up a projectile of feral, rumbling riffs that delivers a hearty “fuck you” to the Trump era....

Q: My only child is 16 years old. He was curious about sex from a very young age and very open with me, so his interest in sexual matters gave me ample opportunity to talk with him about safety and consent. He went through a cross-dressing phase when he was small—mostly wanting to wear nail polish and try on mascara. I felt like I navigated those waters pretty well, but his father made attempts to squelch those impulses....