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As far back as Ecclesiastes 3:20—”All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return”—dust has been acknowledged as an elemental constant in the natural world. However, certain types of the powdery substance aren’t so beneficial to Mother Nature. Take petcoke, or petroleum coke, the dustlike carbon material derived as a by-product of the oil-refining process. Around four years ago, Chicago’s southeast-side residents began to notice that the mountains of black dust along the banks of the Calumet River were having a negative impact on air quality and public health....

Japanese metal trio Boris have been at it for nearly 30 years, and over the course of nearly 40 full-length releases and collaborative albums they’ve covered nearly the entire spectrum of loud, harsh, and heavy music. On the band’s latest single, “Love” (the first taste of the upcoming album LφVE & EVφL), they blur the lines separating all the genres they’ve mastered in the past: massive waves of doomy sludge give way to smeared, hazy, psychedelic shoegaze vocals, which makes the track sound crushingly miserable, pensive, and uplifting all at once....

Chicago R&B artist Hxry got his start as a producer—at least as far back as 2016, he was releasing stylistically scattershot instrumental tracks on Soundcloud—but he got his first real taste of success as a vocalist, with his 2018 song “Reasons.” Atop a fluttering synth melody and a suave, minimal rhythm section, Hxry gently sings sweet nothings in a watery, processed voice, occasionally blurring his words even as he crystallizes his romantic intentions....

For a lot of performing arts organizations, the holiday season is when the cash cow gets milked for all it’s worth. Obviously this year it’s different. (If you’ve been in some sort of Rip Van Winkle scenario for the past nine months, congratulations. You might want to see if you can go back there for another six or so.) The narrator-star of this show is Aunt Trudy (N. LaQuis Harkins), a recently widowed woman with no children of her own....

If Chicago theater has a high priest, a white-ponytailed president of the underground, that person is Beau O’Reilly, cofounder and artistic director of Curious Theatre Branch. His latest show, A Packet of Holiness and Joy Will Come to You? (A Fable), is a ragtag six-hander about making do and being weird in dark times. Gentrification, marginalized artists, youth protest brigades with enthusiasm and no vision: the landscape is familiar. Only instead of a diatribe, we are treated here to reality as warped in the elongated mirrors of Beau’s fun house....

Q: I’m 28 years old and live in the Midwest. I’m intersex, but I identify as female. I’m not out about being born intersex. Due to surgeries and hormones, I look like a fairly attractive female. I’ve been hanging out with a chill hetero guy, and things are getting very flirty. Is it unethical of me to not disclose my intersex-ness to him? —In New Terrific Erotic Romance So that chill hetero boy you’re thinking about disclosing your intersex-ness to, INTER?...

Austin Psych Fest has changed the name of its annual blowout to Austin Psych Fest presents: Levitation, and the show is going on the road and coming to town. Levitation Chicago hits Thalia Hall next month, and Empty Bottle Presents announced the initial lineup for the two-day bash back in January—postpunk outfit the Pop Group and shoegaze band Swervedriver are the big, attention-grabbing groups and easily worth the price of admission....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, September 25, 2017. Alderman Lopez calls CPD gang database “deeply flawed,” calls for overhaul Alderman Ray Lopez is calling for an overhaul of the Chicago Police Department’s “deeply flawed” gang database, which includes more than 398,000 residents. Lopez has suggested that Chicagoans on the list should be allowed to challenge it. “The current system is overly cumbersome and does not help individuals who may have no idea they are on the list,” Lopez said....

When Russell Harrison, bassist of Chicago hardcore band C.H.E.W., first replies to my interview request, he signs the e-mail “c/o Courageous Horned-toads Escape Wasps.” Harrison and his bandmates have suggested several other possibilities for their acronym over the years: Cocaine Heroin Ecstasy Weed, Crying Heavily Every Week, Cold Hands Elicit Worry, Chill Hard Every Weekend. By the time you finish this story, they’ll probably have come up with a few more....

Make the ghost real. Make Hamlet a genius and a killer at the same time. Make Ophelia’s insanity inevitable. Make Polonius wise. Or is the ghost an illusion through and through? Is Hamlet a privileged monster, a whiny misogynistic fencing enthusiast and creep who commits foul murder with impunity, writes blatantly offensive letters, and enjoys a good four-hour pacing session by himself around the halls at Elsinore? Is it Ophelia’s play, really?...

When grieving, outraged crowds marched through downtown Chicago on Saturday, May 30, to protest the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Chicago rapper Femdot was among them. And when Chicago cops began assaulting those protesters, he was among the targets—one or more officers struck him in the head with a baton. Even after a hospital trip to have his injury closed with staples, Femdot—born Femi Adigun—didn’t shrink from the fight against systemic racism and police brutality....

Kanye West drops his seventh album Friday, and it’s currently titled with the acronym T.L.O.P. He’s revised the name a few times, though, and when he tweeted the latest change early Tuesday morning, Kanye offered a prize to the person who guesses what the acronym stands for: a pair of his newest Yeezy shoes plus tickets to Thursday’s rollout for his Season 3 fashion line. Kanye has booked Madison Square Garden for the event, which also serves as the premiere of his new album....

The Loop and lakefront show all the signs of a city that’s booming. Yet Chicago, and more broadly the midwest, is the epicenter of a little-understood reverse Great Migration. Economists and policy wonks also say Chicago’s economy isn’t as strong or dynamic as New York’s or those of the Bay Area or metropolitan D.C. They also cite Chicago’s high taxes as a factor in pushing some residents out. And they’d be partly right....

Gossip Wolf has always assumed that water and stringed instruments don’t mix, but Katinka Kleijn (who plays in the CSO and the International Contemporary Ensemble) and Lia Kohl (who’s in Mocrep and CabinFever) point out that their cellos are made of the same stuff as many canoes and sailboats! At 7 PM on Saturday, March 16, the duo performs “Water on the Bridge” at Eckhart Park’s natatorium. “We will improvise with cello and water sounds, field recordings, and live electronics by Daniel DeHaan,” says Kleijn, “as well as moving, floating, and swimming with 30 cellos in the pool....

Thinkstock Love, Rahm With a few weeks and counting to the epic mayoral showdown, Mick Dumke and I thought we’d apply a little truth serum to the campaign, as part of our February 3 talk show extravaganza at the Hideout. Lesson for mayoral challengers Fioretti, Garcia, Walls, and Wilson: if you want to raise more money, it helps to take about $17 million from our dead-broke public schools and give it to a bunch of wealthy bankers....

Some plays seem tailor-made for small spaces. Such is the case with Mark St. Germain’s powerful four-hander, adapted from Osha Gray Davidson’s 1996 book The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South (also the source for a 2019 film), about the real but unlikely friendship that developed between Ann Atwater, a fiery civil rights activist, and C.P. Ellis, an equally fiery “exalted cyclops” of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, in Durham, North Carolina, in the early 1970s....

On Monday, two days after Rhymefest was held up at gunpoint at 43rd and Cottage Grove, the rapper released “Cops N Robbers,” which details his experience—not just staring down the barrel of a gun, but also struggling to get Chicago police to hear his grievances. Rhymefest enlisted a team of collaborators for the track, including rapper John the Author and four producers—S1, Epikh Pro, Damon Ranger, and Xzibit—who are collectively responsible for its serrated synths, spindly percussion, and warm, slightly nervy piano melody....

On their current tour, Pennsylvania’s fast-rising technical death-metal stars Rivers of Nihil are trying their hand at the full-album- set format, focusing on last spring’s mesmerizing Where Owls Know My Name (Metal Blade). The traditional surprise-set-list show has its advantages for sure, but it’s good to see this format getting so much traction for new releases as well as old classics. Rivers of Nihil’s third full-length is a fantastic candidate for this treatment: it’s a loose concept album about the last human on earth, who’s made immortal to bear witness to the death of the planet itself....

Friday, June 7 Crossroads Stage South promenade 11 AM Joanna Connor 12:15 PM Benny Turner & Real Blues 1:30 PM Thornetta Davis 2:45 PM Guy King with special guest Chris Cain 4:15 PM Bombino Front Porch Stage Wrigley Square 11 AM Blues in the Schools with Katherine Davis, Tim Gant, Tino Cortes, Alan Burroughs, and Stone Academy students 12:30 PM Bob Stroger 2 PM Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith & the House Bumpers...

No one got much judicial love at the Valentine’s Day hearing on the lawsuit aimed at keeping the Obama Presidential Center out of Jackson Park. “Is there actually a membership?” the judge asked. “Real human beings? Taxpayers?” After the hearing, POP president Herbert Caplan restated the crux of the case against the city and the Park District: “We cite a specific statute which limits the right of the Park District to transfer public parkland to a private party for a private use....