With his bands Sic Alps and the Peacers, Bay Area oddball Mike Donovan has treated his sprawling, postpsychedelic sensibilities with a modicum of rock-music orthodoxy as his collaborators lend shape and sinew to his delirious, wobbly tunes. There’s no missing an essence that wants to drift unmoored on last year’s Peacers album Introducing the Crimsmen, but the loose, shaggy grooves keep things more or less centered. Last month Donovan dropped his second solo album, How to Get Your Record Played in Shops (Drag City), and it seems to serve as a corrective to the comparatively polished sounds of the Peacers....

This week the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing two superior debut features by women directors that are set in the 19th century. Marine Francen’s French film The Sower plays through Thursday, and Ash Mayfair’s Vietnamese drama The Third Wife opens for a weeklong run on Friday. Both are highly assured works that interrogate the sexual mores of two centuries ago in subtle, provocative fashion. I prefer The Sower—its visual aesthetic (seemingly inspired by Millet’s paintings) is richer and its montage more surprising—but The Third Wife is nothing to sneeze at....

As Atlanta trio Omni have readied their Sub Pop debut and third LP overall, Networker, I’ve had as much fun parsing the lineage of their sparse, anxiously playful postpunk as I’ve had listening to their catalog. Longtime Reader critic Peter Margasak has compared the band’s sound to the feverish early-80s output of Scottish indie label Postcard, while Atwood Magazine has suggested that Omni’s 2018 two-song single for Chunklet Industries bears similarities to Parquet Courts....

In March, Providence postpunk trio Minibeast launched a Kickstarter to raise funds to master and manufacture vinyl editions of two albums called Ism—one subtitled Volume Silver, the other Volume Gold. The band reached their goal at the end of the month, and in September they self-released those two LPs of expansive, oddball rock, which they’d infused with Afropop rhythms, spiraling psych guitars, and a healthy shot of feral punk attitude. The voice that bellows and yawps through the haze should be familiar to anyone well versed in the music of the 80s American punk underground: it belongs to Peter Prescott, who famously played drums and sang with Boston art-punks Mission of Burma....

Founded in 1987 in response to the arrival of the AIDS crisis in Chicago, Season of Concern has provided direct, short-term emergency financial assistance to anyone working in the Chicago-area theater community who has found themselves temporarily unable to work due to injury, illness, or circumstance—including COVID-19. As theaters remain closed during what is otherwise a peak fundraising period for the nonprofit, the organization has had to get creative with their fundraising initiatives, especially at a time where the community they support is facing unprecedented need....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 4, 2016. Damage to Union Park from Pitchfork will cost $4,700 Fixing up Union Park from the Pitchfork Music Festival isn’t going to be cheap. The security deposit from host Big Stik will cover the bill, which is expected to be $4,723.50. It’s still not nearly as expensive as cleanup after the 2015 festival, which rang up at $6,500 due to heavy rain....

One of the production companies behind The D Train is England’s Ealing Studios, which produced such immortal comedies as Whisky Galore! (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). The company went dormant in the late 1950s but was resurrected about 15 years ago and has been producing movies ever since, albeit to relatively little fanfare on this side of the pond. The D Train harks back to the old Ealing style in its sensitivity to character and lower-middle-class disappointment; in fact, these qualities are so strong that they can overwhelm any sense of narrative development....

This long weekend has far more than just Fourth of July festivities in store. Here’s some of what we recommend: Through 7/3: Celebrate America by consuming as many ribs as possible at the eighth annual Windy City Ribfest (4800 N. Broadway), which will bring in ribbers from Australia to Arkansas, along with local fare like the Chicago BBQ Company. Fri-Sat Noon–10 PM, Sun noon-9 PM For more stuff to do this weekend—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

This week I published my annual gift guide—an eclectic selection of box sets designed to appeal to the most finicky of listeners. I always have to leave a few worthy gifts out, so I’ve decided to address a few of them in a handful of blog posts—beginning with this one and continuing with a couple more next week. Today I want to mention two stunning 2017 photo books focusing on music....

On Thursday, in the massive William Mason Rehearsal Room named for his predecessor, Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud announced what is sure to be a memorable upcoming season. In 2019-2020, Lyric will top off its regular offerings with three complete postseason Ring Cycles. The logistics for that are a hugely complicated jigsaw puzzle, Freud said, and are the reason the regular opera season for 2019-2020 has been reduced to seven operas (from eight)....

When young guitar hotshot Harvey Mandel was hanging out in Canned Heat’s dressing room at San Francisco’s Fillmore West in summer 1969, he had no clue he’d stumbled into an appointment with destiny. Guitarist Henry Vestine had quit the band that night, leaving them in the lurch with a show to play—Windy City shredder Mike Bloomfield filled in for the first Heat set, and fellow Chicagoan Mandel stepped in for the second....

New York percussionist and composer Sarah Hennies digs deep into the music she writes, developing minimal sound worlds she inhabits for extended durations. On her new album, Embedded Environments (Blume), she pushes what seem like simple ideas to extremes. “Foragers,” a piece for four percussionists, was recorded in a vacant grain silo in Buffalo, and the structure’s acoustic properties allow the track’s series of murmuring thrums and extended silences to take on a life of their own....

The historic Pullman neighborhood is getting 38 units of affordable housing inside a new $18 million artists’ enclave—some 124 years after Pullman railroad car workers went on strike over the company’s refusal to lower their rents after cutting their pay. Alspaugh volunteers as a community member; the project architect is the Chicago firm of Stantec (formerly VOA). Alspaugh said she’s satisfied that the lofts fit in with the surrounding historic architecture....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, January 26, 2016. Alderman: Loyola University student was likely not target of shooting The 19-year-old Loyola student who was shot in the back while walking near the school’s Rogers Park campus on Friday night was probably not the intended target of the drive-by shooting, 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore told NBC Chicago. The student was taken to a hospital in critical condition and underwent surgery....

Chicago playwright Amy Crider creates a tidy Proustian universe in this evening-length monologue, delivered by a 75-year-old small-town Hoosier named Charlie Johnson. He appears before us because he once dipped a madeleine in his coffee, whereupon his uppity daughter-in-law Patricia, witnessing this seemingly inconsequential act, promptly offered a condescending minilecture on Remembrance of Things Past. Determined to prove he’s no rube (or at least less of one than Patricia suspects), he sets out to read all seven volumes, but in short order gets sucked into his own search for lost time when the taste of cornmeal mush (his madeleine, as it were) evokes consequential memories of his rural Indiana boyhood....

ARTIST: Daniel MacAdam SHOW: Jeff Tweedy at the Vic on Fri 4/27 and Sat 4/28 MORE INFO: crosshairchicago.com

“If we stay silent, it will be the end of us,” Mdou Moctar sings in French on the title track of his new album, Afrique Victime (Matador). If there’s one thing you can say for sure about Moctar, it’s that he’s not silent. The Nigerien guitarist keeps one hand on the tradition of Saharan Tuareg blues that Tinariwen made internationally famous and runs the other frantically over the fretboard of psychedelic rock....

Remember back when the Reader was divided into four, thick, black-and-white sections that stained your fingers by the time you paged through the Adult Services ads? Some people thought that was a real drag. A writer for a local online aggregator used to regularly refer to us as the “Old Gray Doorstop.” That site, whose frequent m.o. was to pick the pockets of journalists who performed actual legwork, is now languishing in a popular entertainer’s sock drawer....

Today through Friday, I’m counting down my 40 favorite albums of 2017. The usual caveat applies: I love all this music, but you should take my rankings with a grain of salt. And please bear in mind that I’m not trying to be definitive. 34. Arto Lindsay, Cuidado Madame (Northern Spy) Arto Lindsay has spent decades making art-pop that fuses koanlike poetry with the sophisticated Latin pop he grew up hearing while living in Brazil with his missionary parents....