For more than four decades, Hiromi Moritani has been making music by her own rules. She’s largely known for the short-lived art-rock band Aunt Sally, which she started as a teenager in late-70s Osaka, and for her 1981 self-titled solo album under the name Phew. Since then she’s continually honed her craft as Phew, expanding …
Warning: This review contains spoilers. When HBO’s Lovecraft Country started filming in Chicago, excitement surrounding the upcoming TV show quickly spread. And halfway through its debut season, the drama delivers on its examination of both supernatural horrors—ghosts, monsters, and magic—and very real ones such as economic inequity, the inhumane treatment of Black bodies in science, …
MEgan Kirby I watch a TikTok where the Rainforest Cafe frog sits on a trailer in a parking lot, dismantled. When I fall asleep, I dream I have adopted the frog. I am trying to convince my roommate we have the space. “You can use it as a plant stand,” I tell her. “Besides, think …
CHICAGO—The new Reader Institute for Community Journalism, Inc. (RICJ) has received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status from the Internal Revenue Service. On January 1, 2021, RICJ will take over the Chicago Reader newspaper from its current owners. RICJ is an Illinois nonprofit that was formed earlier this year to create an ownership structure for the Chicago Reader …
I’ve spent a lot of Reader ink gushing about Uniform and the previous projects of their members. With the release of their new fourth full-length, Shame, the band’s sonic assault continues—and so does my adoration. Formed in 2014 as a wildly abrasive industrial-noise-rock-drone duo of vocalist Michael Berdan (formerly of unreal noisecore trio Drunkdriver) and …
“I’m sure you’ve heard the words to describe Englewood are ‘Black, dangerous, poor, gun violence,’” says Tonika Johnson in one of the opening lines of her short film, The Folded Map Project. Englewood is where Johnson was born and it’s where she still lives. Englewood is home. In her film, Johnson asks the viewer to …
In 2019 Bill Callahan broke a bout of writer’s block that had lasted more than five years with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, a 20-song concept record about the satisfactions of family life. Gold Record, which arrives just 14 months later, sustains its predecessor’s sparse country-rock sound. And while it wastes no effort on trying …
There’s a video of Young Jean Lee performing her 2011 play We’re Gonna Die on Vimeo. It’s an exercise in minimalism and mortality: a single person with a mic backed up by a band—part stand-up, part rock concert, part TED talk, and part campfire confession—relaying a series of humiliating, horrifying, gory, and mundane incidents-in-the-life-of, and …
این هفته من خواب دیدم که من مخفیانه طاس مانند آقای پاک طاس—اما تنها در نیمی از سر من. روزانه من سبک بود به انجام استادانه درست شده combover با مو است که در سمت چپ بود. در رویای دیگر, من در تلاش برای داشتن روابط نامشروع با کسی در حمام عمومی, اما آنها به …
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s twangy, peppy hits bounced up the country charts in the 90s, but their cowboy boots always seemed like they pinched a bit. Twenty-some years later, Carpenter’s records have eased into a more comfortable idiom, scuffing up their coffeehouse folk with a bit of rock. On The Dirt and the Stars (Lambent Light), …