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A couple years ago I immersed myself in the music of Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin, who’s basically a jazz improviser and has created a unique sound on the Fender Rhodes. On his 2014 solo album, A Fender Rhodes Solo (Bee Jazz), he used an elaborate rack of filters and effects (reverb, chorus, distortion, looping, octave splitter, bit crusher) to render the instrument’s sound otherworldly, only occasionally evoking the warm, enveloping glow of the unprocessed keyboard....

London’s Conflict are one of the original anarchist punk bands, and though it’s been nearly four decades since they formed, their Thatcher-honed rage feels as relevant in today’s world as ever. Driven by original vocalist Colin Jerwood, the group hew to politics that are far more from the punch-a-Nazi school of activism than the let’s-sit-around-and-discourse model—and they don’t shy away from taking the left to task nearly as much as the right....

Q: I’m a 41-year-old male who looks like the tall, strong, professional, alpha-male type on the outside. On the inside, though, I would like to find a strong, confident woman who wants a cuckolding relationship—she sleeps with other men, while I am faithful and submissive to her. There must be women out there who would love to have a loving, doting boyfriend or husband waiting at home while they go out with other men, but I tend to attract women who want the alpha-male type....

Long before drummer Warren G. “Trae” Crudup III and bassist Luke Stewart launched noisy free-jazz duo Blacks’ Myths in 2018, they backed celebrated saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as the rhythm section in his trio. They’ve also enmeshed themselves in D.C.’s jazz scene individually: Crudup performs with a slew of scene fixtures, including saxophonist Brian Settles and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, while Stewart plays in Afrofuturist crossover group Irreversible Entanglements and works for jazz nonprofit and editorial site CapitalBop as “director of presenting and avant music editor....

Michael Gebert Scott Manley sniffs a black truffle I was at Rare Tea Cellar, gourmet tea and food importer Roderick Markus’s warehouse, a Batcave of wonders along the Ravenswood line, in mid-January. Phillip Foss (El Ideas) and a couple of his cooks were there, tasting different things—scattered across Markus’s desk were upscale foodstuffs including an entire leg of jamon iberico-style ham made in Appalachia, a tray containing a few thousand dollars’ worth of both white and black truffles, assorted teas and tinctures, vinegars and liqueurs from all over the world....

Katatonia were fresh off a hiatus when they dropped their 11th studio album, City Burials, in April, but the pandemic meant they couldn’t stage the triumphant return tour it merited. In May, the nearly 30-year-old Swedish metal outfit appeased their fans and assuaged their own frustration with a livestreamed concert. More than six months later—with the live-music circuit in Europe and the Americas still on hold—they’ve released Dead Air, a beautiful, melancholy, tight, and almost seamless document of that online performance....

Monique Golding, 40, moved to Chicago in 2017 and quickly became enmeshed in the city’s music communities. She’s a member of vocal group Mosaic Soul, which recently self-released the live album Blessed. She also sings as part of the Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble, whose second-full length, Now, is due via International Anthem on April 9. I sang for the first time onstage in my high school for a Christmas performance—this was back in my senior year of high school....

In late September, two days before the first inspection for Mousetrap, the new taproom from Off Color Brewing, water is leaking from one of the five enormous casks that occupy nearly an entire room at the front of the building. The 15-year-old former Barolo wine barrels, known as foeders, recently made the long journey here from an Italian wine cellar and need to be hydrated and checked for leaks. The one that’s dribbling water onto the ground has an improperly seated gasket that will need to be fixed; another, currently sitting empty, has cracks between the wooden staves big enough that you can see light through them if you stick your head inside the barrel....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Within a few years the band was frequently playing at the Lewis Institute, where Tough was taking language and literature classes, and he would often join in on drums. (The Lewis Institute no longer exists, having merged in 1940 with the Armour Institute of Technology to form IIT....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. 104.3 Jams Imagine my surprise when I went shuffling through the radio dial and arrived at what I thought was soft-rock station K-Hits, only to hear Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” About a month ago, K-Hits turned into 104.3 Jams, a station completely devoted to all the 90s hip-hop and R&B that soundtracked my middle-school dances—songs from a simpler time, when for some baffling reason Ja Rule’s out-of-key yelling seemed like a necessary addition to nearly every song on the radio....

As one great Tribune journalist after another took the hedge fund’s buyout and walked out the door, I found myself facing a great decision . . . My love for the Sun-Times goes back to the 1960s when I was a kid growing up in Evanston. I read its sports pages before I went to school. Just how wrong was not apparent to me until much later—in the early 1980s—when I started covering politics in Chicago....

The 2016 presidential election might be remembered as the one about beliefs—about the things that people either believe or refuse to believe. Neil Steinberg wrote in his Wednesday Sun-Times column that he could sum up the race for president in one sentence: “Donald Trump is a man who will say anything, supported by people who will believe anything.” People who choose to believe make-believe aren’t particular to Trump. Many are among the finest people on earth....

I’m privileged to have a built-in “stay-at-home bubble” because I rent an apartment from my friends, who live on the first floor of the building with their son (see “Interview with a gamer” for his take on video games). We all have a fondness for the design and aesthetics of board games from the 70s and 80s, and quarantine time has given us a bit of an excuse to do a deep dive into the household collection....

UPDATE Tuesday March 17: this event is on hiatus. Refunds available at point of purchase. Teatro ZinZanni’s Chicago premiere of Love, Chaos & Dinner is a delightfully schizophrenic extravaganza. Occupying an entire floor of the Cambria Hotel with a giant big-top tent that glitters with mirrors and chandeliers, this show is three hours of madcap high jinks and stunning feats of awe. Guests are guided through the pandemonium by two cohosts....

Todd Rosenberg The giddy beginning: Laura Osnes and Steven Pasquale as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow The other night, I decided to take advantage of the Lyric’s rush ticket program and go see Carousel. This would be my first Carousel, but I’d heard a lot recently about its greatness and that it was darker and more complex than the other Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which I sometimes find a little hard to take....

This operetta by composer Paul Abrahám and librettists Alfred Grünwald, Fritz Löhner-Beda, and Emmerich Földes (translated here by Gerald Frantzen) was a big hit in 1931 Berlin. The far-fetched story, set in Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, concerns a romantic triangle tinged with political tension. A plan to restore Hawaiian sovereignty revolves around the imminent arrival of Princess Laya, heir to the Hawaiian throne, who has been living in exile in Paris....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. No, but really, perhaps we’re witnessing what will be a new era of how we can relate to both performance and essentially each other. I’m watching a televised morning program as I write this that is running a segment where the reporter is interviewing her husband, who is just showing us records from his record collection....

Last fall Victoria Pope landed her latest dream job. This is good news. Who knew dream jobs in print journalism still existed? As an aside, let me comment here that there’s little room for false dignity in print journalism. (The TV anchor desk is different.) The job is undignified: it means asking questions that can sound very stupid, snooping around and getting dirt under your fingernails, sticking it to people who probably deserve it but were nice to you....

I n the category of do as I say not as I do, President Trump recently proposed cuts in the federal food stamp program right around the same time his family and business partners maneuvered to win a healthy handout from taxpayers in Mississippi to build a hotel. Which is much the same argument Mayor Rahm made when he closed six mental health clinics in high-crime areas on the grounds that somehow fewer mental health services would be a benefit to those who desperately need it....

Science plays like this one by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood often hinge on the idea that the most staggeringly powerful technology in the history of the world—life-giving, life-cheapening, life-threatening—maybe shouldn’t be overseen by people incapable of understanding morality or human emotions. The action of the play is essentially these three individuals contending with their mutual inability to understand one another’s pain. Alice’s son Luke (Alexander Stuart) comes out as collateral damage....