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Gossip Wolf has been following local label and multimedia collective FeelTrip for ages, and the crew keeps growing. Cofounder David Beltran (aka producer Starfoxxx) says that FeelTrip recently launched the imprint Reptilian Traxx, which he’ll run with Matt Engers (aka producer Sophagus) and FeelTrip’s in-house video director, Joshua Patterson (aka new-age act the Druid Beat). Beltran says Reptilian Traxx will release obscure electronic music, classic-­sounding club tracks, and “anything not jangle pop....

UPDATE Monday, September 23, 12:55 PM: The Cerrone concert has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Disco and pop music would be diminished had French drummer, producer, composer, and bandleader Marc Cerrone never taken an interest in dance music. In the early 70s, he got his first taste of fame as a founding member of Kongas, which melded Afropop rhythms, South American percussion, limber funk, and early disco in dance-driven rock singles....

A meditation on endings and new beginnings, Lottery Day is a fitting capstone for Ike Holter’s seven-play Chicago Cycle. Each play cast a spotlight on overwhelmingly unsolvable issues like gentrification, violence, politics, and community identity in the fictional 51st ward of Rightlynd, and Lottery Day attempts to reckon with the sum of these parts. Through pointed references to Chicago politics, Holter takes aim at entities such as Rahm Emanuel, Lori Lightfoot, the reviled police academy, and the thinly veiled “Applewood Foundation,” all of which strive to change disinvested neighborhoods by making choices that they will never have to feel the impact of....

Like many avant-garde-leaning guitarists, Bill MacKay exudes the spirit of a wandering player walking the earth, at peace with pulling up a rickety stool and shuffling through a dusty acoustic jam with whomever he happens to encounter along the way. A frequent collaborator with local savant Ryley Walker (the pair have made a small selection of records together), MacKay has more recently been releasing his own solo guitar explorations, which prove he has the chops to command a quiet and respectful room of listeners....

Philadelphia indie-rock alchemist Alexander Giannascoli understands better than most musicians who’ve emerged in the past decade how to convey the slipperiness and complexity of emotion in song. The 27-year-old kicked off his career in the early 2010s with a streak of albums he self-released or put out through small cassette labels, and they all wound up on the Bandcamp page he ran as Alex G. By the time he added “(Sandy)” to his stage name in 2017, his blossoming cult status had gotten a major boost from his contributions to Frank Ocean’s two 2016 albums, Endless and Blonde....

Q: I’m an 18-year-old female. I’m cisgender and bisexual. I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with my cisgender bisexual boyfriend for about a year. I’m currently struggling with a lot of internalized biphobia and other hang-ups about my boyfriend’s sexuality. I don’t know if I’m projecting my own issues onto him or if I’m just being bigoted towards bi men, but either way, I feel truly awful about it. But when I think about the fact that he’s bi and is attracted to men, I become jealous and fearful that he will leave me for a man or that he would rather be with a man....

With closed theaters, movies played on my small TV, and the lukewarm reaction of the summer’s releases, I was itching to watch something with others. And lucky for me, the drive-in was back. I hope it’s here to stay. By September, I’d seen friends post about their “new” drive-in experiences of watching family-friendly favorites with kids way too young to have ever remembered when pulling up to a lot with a huge screen and cars packed full of folks was a thing....

French director Mia Hansen-Løve is one of the most ambitious filmmakers working today, trading in themes that are nearly universal yet difficult to articulate. Goodbye First Love (2011) isn’t about the loss of innocence so much as how one feels losing his innocence. Employing a rich, subtle cinematic language, one rooted in jump cuts and confident, sweeping camera movements, Hansen-Løve renders almost palpable the sensation of time slipping away. Her fourth feature, Eden, does this in the service of yet another complicated emotion—the longing for transcendence....

You don’t have to read much into what I’ve written for the Listener since December to conclude that my condition during the past three months of the pandemic has been . . . let’s say “suboptimal.” I’ve reviewed a cosmic metal epic that predicts the fall of the human species, set up an ostensible music poll that was actually about the choice between default hopelessness and forced optimism, and speculated about a 1970s recording of a carousel band organ so spectacularly decrepit that I couldn’t help comparing it to my brain....

Summer is gone, but it hasn’t quite taken music festivals with it. This weekend, hip-hop and EDM stars descend on Toyota Park for the three-day Freaky Deaky—a production of React Presents, who’ve also booked the two-day Reaction New Year’s Eve at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. And early next year, the folks at Lincoln Hall and Schubas bring back Tomorrow Never Knows for its 13th iteration. The festival kicks off Wednesday, January 11, and takes over Schubas, Lincoln Hall, Metro, and the Hideout for five days....

Donald Trump may be the best thing that ever happened to Rahm Emanuel. This year Emanuel has been able to style himself as a champion of immigrants and a tough-talking defender of liberal values and his city’s pride thanks to Trump and his petty obsession with Chicago. Meanwhile Chicago’s stature continues to grow as a glistening global city. The Obama Presidential Center will be constructed in Jackson Park, and a kickoff summit of global activists and leaders was held this fall....

Anon(ymous) When Naomi Iizuka wrote Anon(ymous) in 2006, there were 8.4 million refugees registered with the UN. By the end of 2015, there were 21.3 million. Those numbers seem enormous, but of course they all represent someone: a mother, a son, a daughter, you or me, yearning for a home that no longer exists. Politicians love to paint immigrants as terrorists or a problem that must be dealt with, but conveyed through the lens of Homer’s Odyssey, this production helps us see the people behind both the photographs and the propaganda....

Ayn Rand in Love It appears “Communism has come to Hollywood,” laments a button-downed Ayn Rand in this delightful new musical by Gregory Dodds. Loosely based on the real-life Rand’s chance encounter with director Cecil B. DeMille before the height of her fame, this imagined scenario isn’t concerned so much with Rand’s politics as it is with her calculated love affair with actor Frank O’Connor (they subsequently maintained an open marriage for decades)....

My year, live from this pandemic, in words, would have to be these lyrics from Shabazz Palace’s 2011 song (which sounds more timely and pertinent than ever) “Are You…Can You…Were You? (Felt)” from their futuristic and speculative but deeply introspective album Black Up. It’s the “relax inside my blueness” for me. It’s also the “I can’t explain it with verbs, I have to do it” for me, too. I’ve been looking towards surrealism, speculative ways of thinking, and jazz to feel less anxious, to feel more human....

Even considering how much interesting material the Chicago hip-hop scene has produced already this year, the past few weeks have felt like an early Christmas. On September 7, for example, rapper and producer DGainz (probably best known as the videographer who lent drill its caustic visuals in the early 2010s) dropped the pop-heavy Oddball. The following day, Lil Chris (a member of west-side group M.I.C who’s made videos with DGainz) released a mixtape called Conscious Trap, whose title defies the convention of separating rappers into “street” and “backpack” categories....

This week’s gig poster advertises a party—a real-live party with music and people all in a room together!—organized at Elastic Arts in Logan Square by a collective of artists, musicians, and dancers called the Stylin’ Out Network. Throughout lockdown, the collective hosted DJ sets on their Twitch channel, and this event celebrates the return of their quarterly ST(ART) UP series, which pairs DJs from the collective with live performers and visual artists....

Further Out At the end of last year, when I first saw Cloakroom live, I commented that when they were on stage their crushing wall of heavy and spacey guitars reminded me of Illinois alt-rock legends Hum—as opposed to the softer side they display on their debut full-length, Infinity. So it only makes sense that when the northwest-Indiana trio holed up to work on that record’s follow-up, their new Run for Cover Records double LP, Further Out—which gets its official release party this Sat 2/7 at Beat Kitchen—they brought Hum front man Matt Talbott on board for production and engineering duties....

Local sludge-metal/noise-rock freaks Cacaw called it a day in 2011. Upon their collapse, half the band—Zack Weil and Kyle Reynolds—started Oozing Wound with Unmanned Ship bassist Kevin Cribbin. The other two members, guitarist-vocalist Anya Davidson and bassist-vocalist Carrie Vinarsky, backed away from music to focus on their visual art. Davidson is a comics artist—in the past few years she’s written and drawn a book’s worth of the strip Band for Life as well as the graphic novels School Spirits and Lovers in the Garden—and Vinarsky is on the grind as a tattoo artist....

You’ll sink about six inches into the leather banquettes at Formento’s, the 859th new Italian restaurant to open in Chicago during the last 18 months or so. It’s a nice detail that might persuade you that you’ve arrived at your grandfather’s Italian restaurant, which of course you haven’t. Formento’s comes from what is now known as B. Hospitality, the folks behind the Bristol and Balena, who have striven to distinguish themselves from the horde by opening a proudly Italian-American red-sauce joint....

Local garage rockers CoCoComa went on hiatus four years ago, but on Sunday their most recent lineup—guitarist-­organist Anthony Cozzi, bassist Tyler J. Brock, guitarist Lisa Roe, and drummer Bill Roe—regrouped to play the wedding of their friend J.J. Wright. “He was one of our earliest and most enthusiastic fans, so we couldn’t say no,” says Bill. Rehearsals have gone well, and CoCoComa have extended the reunion—as Bill says, “We thought it’d be cool to play something else nonformal....