Russian techno producer and DJ Nina Kraviz abandoned a future in dentistry as her international music career started to take shape. Bouncing from one gig locale to the next, she lived out of suitcases while the years melted by. One night some years ago, in an undisclosed hotel room in an unmentioned locale (unmentioned, perhaps, since forgotten—Kraviz travels so frequently who could blame her for maybe not remembering details such as when and where?...

Near the end of Wormrot’s “Hollow Roots,” front man Mohammad Arif bin Suhaimi shrieks “No point of venting for this fucking long.” He finishes that thought about 43 seconds into a 56-second track, an eternity depending on how extreme—and expedient—you prefer your grindcore. Wormrot, a three-piece that hails from Singapore, is as reputable as a modern grindcore band comes; young metal fans around the world love them as much as the crusty folks who participated in grindcore’s big bang back in the mid-80s....

Leor Galil Evidence that the maze is in a garage Just right of the staircase that leads up to Thalia Hall‘s concert space is an intimate garage space, and for the next three weeks it’ll be home to You Are Here Festival, a visual art-cum-music festival that takes place in a maze. The folks behind You Are Here started building the maze last Friday, and when I went to Thalia Hall yesterday they were finishing up putting everything in place for its debut tonight....

The Chicago Jazz Festival provides a rich cross section of the genre, and this year it’s partnered with a diverse group of local presenters for a series of neighborhood concerts that begins on Friday, August 23. But local jazz clubs and presenters offer a diverse bounty of music all year round—and they step up their efforts for the fest. The Dog/Days concerts at Constellation and the Hungry Brain, most of which are free, begin the weekend before the festival and are worth a plane ticket all by themselves....

You can’t go a day in Chicago without hearing mention of seminal architects Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, or Frank Lloyd Wright. Or encountering some reference to Daniel Burnham’s famous dictum “Make no little plans.” (Not even lunch plans?) Or stumbling into an impassioned debate about whether to call it the Sears Tower or Willis Tower. (Let’s call the whole thing off.) Our grand architectural past is captured in postcards, etched in stone, seared in memory....

SHOW: Lucrecia Dalt, Bitchin Bajas, and M. Sage at the Hideout as part of its Resonance Series on Fri 2/8 ARTIST: Trek Matthews MORE INFO: trekmatthews.com

“My new brush is the Caterpillar,” says artist Walter De Maria early on in Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, James Crump‘s beautiful new documentary on the birth of land art that screens Wednesday at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Known variously as “earthworks,” “land art,” or “dirt art,” depending on whom you ask, this artistic movement began during the early 1960s as a reaction against the gallery-show format. The idea was to create something that couldn’t be sold, or even moved....

In his liner note essay for Convulsive Threshold (Editions Mego), Yasunao Tone’s 2013 collaborative album with Russell Haswell, Tony Myatt explains that the veteran Japanese sound artist rejects the notion of abusing or inducing errors into his work with digital sound technology. He prefers the term deviation: creating situations where the technology can take a work someplace new and unintended. That distinction might seem silly, especially if one understands that Tone—a key member of the Japanese wing of the international interdisciplinary creative group Fluxus in the 60s and early 70s—was one of the first sound artists to manipulate compact discs and build works from the digital errors (or glitches) of his interventions in the early 90s....

Big Red slumbers in a nest of wood chips, leaves, and straw. If he weren’t pushing 550 pounds, he’d look like a fuzzy dirigible moored to the floor of his pen. Across the barn are the three Blonde sows that over the last four years helped him produce more than 60 pure-blooded Mangalitsa pigs, a friendly, wooly-haired, slow-growing Austro-Hungarian breed that had almost gone extinct in the early 90s. Earlier this month, Lee walked me out on one of his pastures where his third-generation Mangalitsa and Red Wattles roamed, digging deep holes in the earth and scratching their itchy flanks on tree trunks....

This rugged improvising trio is composed of musicians with extraordinarily disparate personalities who seek common ground while expressing their individual voices. Guitarist Nels Cline and saxophonist Larry Ochs both established themselves in California, the former in LA, where he added a punk ethos to his mixture of free jazz and fusion, and the latter in the Bay Area as a founding member of influential saxophone quartet Rova. These days, however, Cline lives in New York, where he’s spent most of his time shaping solos of textural richness and architectural concision as a member of Wilco along with exploring a late-blossoming interest in balladry, as heard on his gorgeous solo album Lovers (Blue Note)....

Over the years, music scholar Christopher C. King has displayed his erudition, curiosity, and passion on countless projects that uncover fascinating and forgotten corners of history—not just in the U.S. but increasingly also in Eastern Europe, usually digging back between 50 and 100 years. He’s produced crucial multidisc sets focusing on bedrock American sounds, including the entire surviving output of blues legend Charley Patton and the recordings of the so-called Bristol sessions, which created a new paradigm for country music....

By all appearances, Sol Café is a product of gentrification, a prime example of the businesses that arrive in neighborhoods to accommodate newer, wealthier residents. It definitely stands out from its neighbors on Howard Street, which include long-standing family-owned restaurants, payday lending services, a minimart, and a pair of shoe stores. Inside the sunlit storefront, baristas sling specialty lattes amidst dried flowers, plants for sale, and a golden disco ball, which floats just above the register....

Earlier this week, extraordinary Chicago soul singer Jamila Woods released her debut solo full-length, Heavn, through local hip-hop label Closed Sessions. On the sedate “Lonely Lonely,” the 26-year-old (who’s also a poet, teacher, and artist) takes pride in fighting through darkness and despair: “I put a sun in my lamp / I put a Post-it Note on my mirror / So I might love myself / So I might be enough today....

Michael Gebert Crayfish boil I arrived late at Dolo Restaurant and Bar, located a little southwest of the primary Chinese restaurant area that spans Archer and Cermak in Chinatown, and my friends had already been through the menu and decided on some things to order. One of those things was a big platter of crayfish and crab; we were interested to see what the Chinese interpretation would be. It arrived a few minutes later, and to our surprise it proved to be nothing more nor less than a seafood boil like you might find in some place in Maine called Ye Old Fish Shanty or in Shreveport or anywhere else they catch up stuff like this: red crawfish mixed with crab legs, half ears of corn, boiled potatoes ....

Red Theater has achieved its admirable goal to “ask dangerous questions theatrically” in the past. But this time playwright Walt McGough’s schematic 2018 Gamergate-inspired drama provides only answers—and likely ones the young storefront audience this company courts already know. Ambitious Katja, a 22-year-old coder, is passionate about designing a noncompetitive online game that involves creating trees, attaching stories to them, and watching multiple players’ stories interconnect. Trent, a hard-core gamer and Katja’s bosom college friend, now at a dead end and living with his parents, can’t understand a game where no one wins....

With nearly 40 actors, eight directors, and an overall roster of artists spanning five countries, Trap Door Theatre‘s sprawling, eight-episode streaming production of playwright Matei Vişniec’s Decomposed Theatre offers a deep dive into the drama, absurdity, tragedy, and undeniably relevant work of the contemporary Romanian-French dramatist. Weirdness and wonder abound, starting with the first episode, The Runner & Illusionist, which takes viewers on a virtual run while we also see—via split screen—a cruise ship magician who sometimes levitates between water and sky....

Lifetime Will Ferrell is (mostly) dead serious in A Deadly Adoption. A week before the Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig-helmed Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption aired, the network premiered another original movie called I Killed My BFF. (Not to be confused with the Lifetime series I Killed My BFF. So many BFFs are being killed always.) Two women, a young single mom named Heather and a slightly older married one named Shane, meet in a maternity ward after their respective labors and forge a strong and immediate bond....

Categorizing art is a significant part of aesthetic experience. To be a fan of science fiction, for example, is to declare a passion not for one work of art, or even for art in general, but for a somewhat nebulous set of tropes and canons. Aesthetics is as much about context as it is about text. Genres and styles help explain what art matters, and what art means. Max Sansing’s work doesn’t obliterate or struggle against the wood background—rather, it uses the grain as an ironic wink....

More than six months after the Northalsted Business Alliance said it would abandon the name Boystown for the city’s principal queer enclave, business leaders in the community have made few changes and continue using the moniker that many have called misogynistic and transphobic. But banners bearing the Boystown name were removed from light poles throughout the neighborhood only days ago. Businesses still use the name in marketing materials, even those seemingly disseminated by the chamber....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. If reading Maya Dukmasova’s feature on defense attorney Stuart V. Goldberg put you in the mood to learn more about local lawyers, Marianna Beck’s 1988 story on Michael H. Minton should do just the trick. In 1979, the divorce attorney won a landmark case that established a precedent for equitable treatment of housewives in a system that historically did not serve those without the financial wherewithal....