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William Basinski has thrown himself headlong into the kind of “productive quarantine” that seems like a myth to most of us, and the spoils are abundant. Since March, when states across the U.S. began issuing stay-at-home orders, he has unveiled a collaboration with sound artist Richard Chartier and a new project called Sparkle Division. The New York-based composer and musician is best known for the four-volume audio experiment The Disintegration Loops, which he created in summer 2001 by recording the deterioration of tape loops he’d made in the early 80s....

Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. Damo Suzuki has always had a case of wanderlust. Born in 1950 in Kobe, Japan, he began traveling while still in his teens and spent time living in Gräsmark, Sweden, before eventually landing in Cologne, Germany, where he landed a gig as the lead singer of Krautrock progenitors Can in the early 70s....

Toward the end of Amour Fou, Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner (Lourdes) imagines the final meeting between Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel)—the gifted but tormented Prussian writer who achieved lasting literary fame only after committing suicide in 1811, at age 34—and his cousin Marie (Sandra Hüller), whom he’d asked on several occasions to join him in death. Marie is clearly fond of her cousin, even enamored with his genius, but she’s unwilling to take his death wish seriously....

Like most of us, Emily Witt grew up with a set of expectations about how her life would proceed. It was pretty much the same sort of life her parents, most of her friends, and most of the characters on TV and in the movies had: after a period of experimentation, she envisioned, as she puts it, “my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center....

The opening credits sequence of Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad (which begins a weeklong run at Facets tonight) is meant to resemble something out of a 1970s exploitation movie, with split-screen effects, colored filters, and a Dusty Springfield ballad on the soundtrack. This homage is appropriate, as the film feels like an update of a couple superior exploitation movies of that decade, George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973) and Russ Meyer’s Supervixens (1975)....

Las Vegas rapper-producer Hykeem Carter, aka Baby Keem, got his foot in the music industry’s door thanks to hip-hop powerhouse Top Dawg Entertainment, where he’s pitched in on writing and producing three of the label’s big recent releases: Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, Jay Rock’s Redemption, and Schoolboy Q’s Crash Talk. Now living in Los Angeles, the 18-year-old is still malleable as a musician, and it shows on his latest self-released full-length, the stylistically scatterbrained Die for My Bitch....

The glass on the doors leading to Second City’s Mainstage theater lists the names of cast members from its past revues. The company employees who gathered today outside the Old Town comedy mecca won’t see their names displayed prominently anywhere. They’re ticket takers, servers, bartenders, and they stood in the cold, on the afternoon of the first snowy day of the season, explaining why the union they’ve organized deserves a seat at the bargaining table with the management....

Last week, supreme Chicago boogie label Star Creature Universal Vibrations dropped its first three records of 2020. They bring some serious heat: there’s a seven-inch by NYC talk-box maestro Temu (the tenth release by the label’s Tugboat Editions imprint); the disco-inflected debut album by Munir (of Indonesian boogie collective Midnight Runners), titled Eastern Sun; and the Paradise’s Love Remix 12-inch EP by American disco combo Bordeaux, a collaboration with London soul-reissue label Fantasy Love that packages a remastered version of the funky, fiery 1982 original with two slick remixes....

I know there are concerns in the community that it could be a bad summer, but I’m optimistic,” Perry Gunn says. Englewood will rely mainly on more traditional methods for interrupting violence—youth programs and summer jobs. “If we keep kids engaged, we can have a positive summer,” Gunn says. The success of the Jackie Robinson West Little League team in 2014 raised interest in baseball in Englewood, Gunn says. (Jackie Robinson West won the Little League World Series that year, but its title was stripped because the team violated residency rules....

For Mujeres Latinas en Accón (Latina Women in Action), empowering women isn’t just about offering counseling, survivor support, and other services out of their three offices—it’s about being an active and visible presence in the community. Whether it’s the Women’s March downtown, meetings with legislators in Springfield, or family festivals in Pilsen, the regal purple T-shirts make Mujeres an instantly recognizable force to be reckoned with. “Mujeres has always been very rooted in advocacy,” says Fanny Cano, development and communications manager....

It took eight years after she first began having hallucinations for Esmé Weijun Wang to receive her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. Her diagnosis, while laden with its own orbit of stigma and baggage, is a source of comfort. “I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable condition,” she writes in the first essay of her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias. I think of TCS as having an audience among whoever is interested in reading it, really—people with mental health diagnoses, people who love people with such diagnoses, clinicians, researchers—anyone who’s curious about the topic....

No one in Baskets gets to have what he wants. Take Chip Baskets (Zach Galifianakis), who just wants to be a clown. Back home in Bakersfield, California, after flunking out of clown school in France, Chip gets a gig with a rodeo, but it does little to fulfill his artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, he prepares to be knocked around by the bulls as if he’s about to take the stage at Carnegie Hall....

One cannot truly write an obituary for Chicago improv, because improv, like a zombie, is inherently undead. And like most horror flicks, improv is filled with the exciting thrill of watching actors delight without the safety net of the script, combined with legitimately disturbing scares. But in improv, some scares aren’t fiction—they are the very real horrors of harassment and racism. The Black Lives Matter movement served as a catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning for major institutions, exposing inexplicable negligence under the harsh interrogation lights of social media and outlets like the New York Times....

Four-piece Massachusetts postmetal band Astronoid took three years to follow up their 2016 debut, Air, with a new full-length, a self-titled album that dropped in February on Blood Music. That’s because the type of music they play doesn’t just fall together; it takes a lot of work. Astronoid’s sound is a dreamy fusion of metal, prog, and shoegaze, and because they have roots in black metal, they use its dark satanic rhythms as a foundation atop which to build risers in the sky for a celestial choir....

A couple months before he dropped June’s Beautiful Thugger Girls (300/Atlantic), Young Thug tweeted it would be his “singing album.” But to expect Thug would follow any traditional concept of singing would be to ignore his track record of eschewing what had been generally accepted as rap’s norms. As he rose to fame he didn’t just blur rapping and singing, he rearranged words at their molecular level to render even the most rote turns of phrase alive, for example, slowly wringing the words “play with my money” on “Wyclef Jean” off last year’s Jeffery....

Bil Vermette has been making ambient and electronic soundscapes for more than 40 years, and his new album, Hunting for Planet 9, won’t disappoint fans looking for another collection of instrumental, synthesizer-heavy space waves to add to their playlist. The Berwyn musician became known for his hypnotic compositions as a member of late-70s synth collective VCSR, and after the band split in the early 80s, Vermette began self-releasing solo work on his own Rainforest Productions label, starting with 1984’s Katha Visions (reissued in 2013 by the Galactic Archive label run by Reader contributor Steve Krakow, in conjunction with Permanent Records)....

Scroll through the first 20 of Soundcloud’s 50 most popular tracks right now, and you’ll find songs from three Chicagoland MCs: Juice Wrld, Polo G, and Calboy. The song in the top 20 with the most total plays is Calboy’s “Envy Me,” with more than 66 million since December. And those numbers are just for the version Calboy released after signing to RCA and Polo Grounds in fall 2018—the “Envy Me” video had been on YouTube since August, and now has more than 113 million plays there....

(Tall Pat) Bleach Party‘s Endless Bender EP doesn’t come out till Friday, but you may already have heard the serrated surf-rock guitars of the tightly wound, garage-inflected “Single Summer”—this bonus track from the EP’s digital version appeared in a national radio spot for the McDonald’s value menu that aired for a few weeks over the summer. The ad put “a little extra dough” in the band’s pockets, says bassist Richard Giraldi, but he’s much more excited about Endless Bender....

New Jersey singer-songwriter Donna Missal has a smoky, powerhouse voice, and a flair for making retro soul sound up-to-the-minute that recalls Amy Winehouse. She began releasing songs in 2015, and on her 2018 debut album, This Time (Harvest), she shows she has potential to become a household name. Opening track “Girl” starts with her vocals framed by a few muted chords and a stripped-down beat; it sounds so good you’re almost sorry when the rest of the band comes in....

Of all the albums I’ve covered since the Reader adapted to the pandemic by trading concert previews for record reviews, the new release from Finnish metal explorers Dark Buddha Rising is probably the best one I could’ve picked to help me stay grounded and focused during our agonizing election week. Psych, drone, and doom are among the most immersive forms of music on earth, and on Mathreyata, Dark Buddha Rising alchemize them into something that feels big enough to encompass the cosmos—an especially inviting place when things get this heavy on the home planet....