On its fantastic fourth album, Mother (Bella Union), stirring Cretan-Australian duo Xylouris White masterfully expands its reach without surrendering the essential intimacy and bruising power that’s made it more than the sum of its parts. Cretan singer and lyre player George Xylouris and drummer Jim White are expansive players who together produce a bigger sound than one might expect from such a stark lineup. This time out they introduce additional instrumentation in the form of rustic viola and violin bowing from guest Anna Roberts-Gevalt of the superb Kentucky folk duo Anna & Elizabeth....

When Boleo bartender Mony Bunni competed in Speed Rack Midwest in 2015, she failed miserably. She was in the process of opening the bar Queen Mary at the time, and the annual all-female speed-bartending competition took place the day before the bar officially opened. “My head was all over the place, and I ended up forgetting citrus in two of my cocktails onstage, failing in front of everyone,” she says. “It just broke my soul a little....

Marco Ugarte/AP Photos Mexican federal authorities arrested drug lord El Chapo Guzman in February 2014. Starting Friday the Patio Theater will present a weeklong run of Es el Chapo?, a documentary feature about Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzman and, more generally, the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs. The movie centers around widespread rumors that it wasn’t Guzman who was arrested last year by Mexican authorities and members of the DEA, but rather a double....

Greg Puciato is a busy man. Even before his main gig as front man of long-running technical metalcore outfit the Dillinger Escape Plan ended in 2017, he was already in two other bands: metal supergroup Killer Be Killed (with Soulfly’s Max Cavalera and Mastodon’s Troy Sanders) and the Black Queen, a dark electronic act he founded in 2015 with Telefon Tel Aviv’s Joshua Eustis and guitar tech Steven Alexander. He’s also an author who recently self-published his debut book of poetry and photography, Separate the Dawn....

For the past year and a half, I’ve been enrolled in a graduate program in special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The classes have been challenging and eye-opening, in part because my professors routinely ask me to reflect on my prejudices as a person without disabilities. In the first class I took for the program, an overview of the history of special education in the U.S., I learned about person-first language, and this shaped how I’ve approached the course material ever since....

For the past year, I’ve been making the same (extremely bad) joke, paraphrasing the hard-boiled koan delivered by Matthew McConaughey‘s Rust Cohle from the first season of True Detective. “Time is a flat tire.” Constellations is definitely the more downbeat of the two, but seeing them within a couple nights of each other, as I did, reinforced that even if the existence of multiverses can never be proven (we’ll file that under “Things That Are WAY Above My Paygrade”), they’re undeniably fun to ponder....

Though reckless garage-rock foursome Heavy Times weathered several mutations, one consistent component of the band was the subtle, yet heady hooks in underrated frontman Bo Hansen’s songwriting. A second was his charming, cynical onstage banter. Luckily, with his newest venture, Ethers, both of these qualities remain firmly intact. More solemn and dare I say reflective than Hansen’s previous projects, Ethers is filled out by organ and backing vocals from Mary McKane (Outer Minds, Runnies) and steady bass courtesy of Russ Calderwood (Heavy Times, Runnies, and also McKane’s husband)....

Q: I’ve been with my boyfriend for two and a half years and we have a great relationship—or so I thought. Last week, I snooped on my boyfriend’s browser history and I don’t know what to do with what I found. I’m a longtime reader and Savage Lovecast listener SO I KNOW WHAT I DID WAS WRONG. I believe my actions were driven by 1. lingering trust issues (a while ago, I found out my boyfriend had been looking at Tinder since we’d been together, though I don’t believe he ever messaged or intended to meet anyone) and 2....

This morning I woke to the news that pianist Cecil Taylor had died on Thursday in his Brooklyn home at age 89. Sometimes artists of Taylor’s stature are so ingrained in your consciousness that they become part of you, whether they’re alive or dead. He came out of jazz and belonged to it, but beginning the late 50s he bucked the tradition in every way, blazing a trail all his own....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, September 27, 2016. CPD: Fatal shooting near Millennium Park started with argument about religion Berwyn resident Peter Fabbri, 54, was shot Saturday night near Millennium Park after an argument about religion, according to the Chicago Police Department. Fabbri, who was a Christian, felt that a group preaching and handing out pamphlets on the street was being hateful and an argument ensued, authorities said....

Want proof that context is everything? Consider the Hypocrites‘ Dracula. Onstage at a cabaret-style comedy venue like, say, the Annoyance, where party-primed customers sit around bistro tables and drink alcoholic beverages, Timothy F. Griffin’s new version of the classic horror story by Bram Stoker would be a gory, funny—if overlong—Halloween goof with a fist-pumping feminist gloss. Yes, it’d be a goof with a gloss: righteously yet uncomplicatedly entertaining. We wouldn’t even worry about the cartoon mugging of the actors under Sean Graney‘s direction, needing no better justification than that the funny faces make us laugh....

For nearly 200 years the Dutch East India Company monopolized the trade routes between Europe and Asia. That many years later, we can thank its exploitative reign for de Quay, a new Lincoln Park restaurant that embellishes the fortifying food of the Low Countries with the tropical heat and sunshine of Indonesia. That’s been going on more or less since the 17th century, when Europeans began to learn what to do with the boatloads of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves that sailed the trade winds to their shores....

Five years ago when I wrote about the supposed embiggening powers of sannakji (aka “Korean Viagra,” aka recently dispatched and dismembered octopus still wriggling and suckering with residual nerve activity), I was mildly disappointed that the pair I purchased at HMart didn’t have the same vitality as the ones I’d been served in South Korea. Nothing’s ever as good as it is at its source, right? “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn....

Small-town girl finds adventure, fame, and love in the big city: the evergreen plot gained new color in 1937, when Jackie Ormes made history as the first Black female cartoonist with a syndicated comic strip with Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, in which teenage Torchy Brown leaves rural Mississippi to sing and dance at the Cotton Club in New York City. Trading in a cow for train fare north and sitting in the “whites only” car to get there (18 years before Rosa Parks), Torchy was an independent, outspoken heroine who served up style with social commentary—and posed weekly as a paper doll with pinup proportions and a killer wardrobe....

Saul Levine in A Few Tunes Going Out: Groove to Groove Tomorrow night at 8 PM venerated artist Saul Levine, who’s been making experimental films since the mid-1960s, will be at the Nightingale Cinema to present a career-spanning program of his work. Many of the pieces will screen from Super-8 film, a format that Levine considered his preferred medium for many years. “When Kodak stopped making Super 8-millimeter sound film, it was like having my tongue ripped out,” he wrote a few years ago, emphasizing the intensely personal nature of his imagery....

In my idiosyncratic personal dictionary, the current definition of the word “omnimusician” is a little different from the one you might’ve found there ten years ago. At that point, it would’ve meant someone who plays all kinds of creative music—free, composed, conducted, acoustic, electronic. Now the term applies to a different kind of figure, one who not only pursues an interest in many different approaches to playing music but also takes a multifarious role behind the scenes....

The Blues Festival hasn’t spawned as many satellite events around town this year as it has in years past, but for the most part that will just mean you won’t have to skip five for every one you attend—there should still be lots of memorable moments. On Wednesday, June 8, Firecat Projects hosts a Blues Fest kickoff reception for the photo exhibit “Women of the Blues: Coast to Coast Collection,” which opened May 27 and runs till June 18....

On a Thursday night in late September, men clad in bow ties and black vests work the floor of Uptown’s Chicago Magic Lounge like street hustlers, snaking through a grid of tables to swoop in on audiences of two or three at a time. At one table, a magician turns two coins into three within a woman’s clenched fist. Ten paces away a man’s chosen card transports from the deck into a smirking magician’s pocket....