Once again, Chicago has lost a legendary musician, and in this author’s opinion there haven’t been nearly enough public tributes. Jim Post was a crucial part of the Old Town […] The po…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:51PMFormed by drummer Christian Vander in Paris in 1969, Magma have made a career of defying convention, and the fact that they’re still actively recording and playing live today is […] The …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMThe term “world music” has never been adequate to the task we’ve set it—even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of […] The post The…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:15PMWe won’t know the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for many years, not least because they haven’t stopped piling up. Bodily sickness, mental illness, financial loss—everyone seems to h…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:50PMIt’s sad when a talented band’s closest brush with fame is almost finishing a soundtrack for a movie that never existed, ending up with nothing but demos where one of […] The post Soul…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:56PMI can’t rattle off a list of my most beloved guitarists, despite being a so-so guitar player myself, but I can quickly tell you my top ten bassists. One of […] The post Genius bassist Ri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:20PMBrooklyn is so closely associated with the American cultural zeitgeist of the early 2000s that it’s easy to forget how newly “cool” the borough was at the time. During Oneida’s […]…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:00PMLast fall Chicago drone explorers Bitchin Bajas released a cassette of synthesizer-only Sun Ra covers called Switched on Ra (Drag City). The trio of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:15PMMost musicians use their first professional endeavors to find a voice and develop their chops. So I love it when artists “spin off” into new sounds, even if they break up beloved bands t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:20AMAs the world literally burns, it’s a comfort to see performers we hold dear come back through town to offer musical relief. Singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler debuted in 2004 with the album …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:00PMI’m a lifetime fan of vinyl records, but “record collecting” continues to befuddle and annoy me. I know I might sound like a pretentious gatekeeper pontificating about a trivial proble…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:31PMPaul Cotton, best known as a crucial member of country rockers Poco, died a year ago this month, and it was easy to miss the news amid all the chaos in the world—to say nothing of all the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:03AMLately it seems like every “lost” recording, no matter how inconsequential, is getting pushed on limited colored vinyl for a crass Record Store Day cash grab. Beneath the hype, “archiv…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:18PMIf I were forced to subscribe to any wild theory circulating on the Internet right now (we won’t say the c-word), it wouldn’t be about lizard people, a flat Earth, anything “secretly s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMGiven the myriad horrors American society faces, desensitization can be a survival mechanism as well as part of the problem. Numbness can easily turn to apathy when we’re bombarded unrelen…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMI love a good mystery. Sometimes even my most exhaustive research turns up nothing more than a few details about a great musician, not enough to tell the full tale. As much as I might want t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:32PMSecret History readers often assume I know every Chicago musician who ever lived, but luckily I’m still capable of experiencing the joy of discovery. One of my bigger thrills in life is bu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:10PMWhen I finished college downstate and moved to the Windy City in 1995, the Chicago no-wave scene was breaking apart. While still in school, I’d often driven three hours to catch gigs here,…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:54PMEarlier this year, Japanese psych band Kikagaku Moyo announced that they would go on indefinite hiatus following their 2022 tour. It’s always surprising when a successful, globe-trotting b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 07:00AM