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Since the release of their self-titled debut in 2017, Chicago’s Mute Duo—aka pedal steel guitarist Sam Wagster and drummer Skyler Rowe—have become one of the most versatile live acts in the city, performing and improvising in an array of configurations, including a quintet at the Empty Bottle’s Mirrored Series (curated by Rowe and devoted to improvised jazz and experimental music) and a thunderous quasi-orchestral octet that opened for Grouper at Bohemian National Cemetery....

Pennsylvania rapper Lil Skies likes to talk about his face tattoos, specifically about how his decision to permanently install a small gallery’s worth of art all over his head (and neck) provided him the fuel required to focus on a career in music—he’s well aware that no conventional workplace would hire a guy who looks like a walking Sailor Jerry billboard. Regardless of whether or not his explanation is earnest, Skies has found some musical success in music at the moment, which shows on his Atlantic debut, January’s Life of a Dark Rose....

About nine years ago, Mario Luna got a call from his mother. She’d been doing some spring cleaning in her home in Pilsen—the same house where he’d grown up—and she’d found a shoebox that clearly belonged to him. It held a stack of “pluggers,” which is what people in the local house-music scene called show flyers during the culture’s infancy. She wanted to toss them. Luna thought better of it....

Umlaut Records is one of Europe’s most interesting improvised-music labels, run by a collective with members in Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. It’s released a ton of great music, including aggressive free bop, austere free improvisation, and contemporary classical music (such as a recent a recording of the brilliant and challenging vocal work 14 Recitations by composer Georges Aperghis). The generally forward-looking slant of Umlaut’s catalog makes the music of the Umlaut Big Band, based in Paris, even more fascinating in contrast....

Ike Holter’s Red Rex, the sixth in his seven-play Chicago cycle set in the fictional neighborhood of Rightlynd (aka the 51st Ward), is a play at war with itself. On the one hand it wants to entertain: the play is a spot-on send-up of Chicago storefront theaters and the quirky people who make up those ragtag companies. On the other hand, it wants to be a serious play, packed with meaningful observations about life and art....

The homecoming prompted by weddings and funerals is a staple of American family dramas. But in Leah Nanako Winkler’s hands, old tropes burst open with startling insight and dollops of acidic wit. In 2015’s Kentucky, now in a local premiere at Gift Theatre (which has moved into more spacious digs at Theater Wit for this show), Hiro (Emjoy Gavino), the eldest daughter of foul-mouthed abusive lout James (Paul D’Addario) and lonely beaten-down Masako (Helen Joo Lee), goes home to Kentucky to try to talk her younger born-again sister, Sophie (Hannah Toriumi), out of marrying at age 22....

Late last month one of the hardest-working bands in town, La Armada, digitally released Anti-Colonial Vol. 1, their first new music in four years. The album blends crusty hardcore and monolithic metal with a whiff of the rhythms of the Dominican Republic—where La Armada formed in 2001 (they moved to Chicago in 2008). Front man Javier Fernandez sings about injustice and corruption in Spanish and English, and his furious but playfully elastic vocals make him sound like an heir to the throne Serj Tankian seems to have vacated....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Theodore Hahn, 42, hot-sauce hobbyist. “Finally I got to a version that I thought people might like. It’s called Wrath of Hahn, and I want to give 100 percent credit to my genius friend Holly Dunsworth for coming up with that, because there is literally no other possible fucking name for this hot sauce....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 27, 2016. What Trump didn’t mention about Chicago violence: the guns are often from Indiana GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump frequently points out Chicago’s gun violence epidemic, but he has so far ignored Indiana’s role in the crisis. Studies have shown that many of the guns used in gang shootings in Chicago were purchased in Indiana, thanks to the state’s looser gun laws....

R Martinez has a peculiar, three-pronged way of telling this story. One prong focuses, naturally enough, on the principal players, Reagan and Gorbachev, as well as their wives, Nancy and Raisa, whom we see practicing their own sharp-elbowed, sotto voce form of diplomacy on their husbands and each other. Another concentrates, also naturally, on Shultz and Shevardnadze, the resourceful underlings who find themselves forming a team of rivals as they attempt to make history....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times 43rd Ward alderman Michele Smith, fighting hard for reelection When you’re an incumbent alderman in a race with three opponents (plus one write-in), it should be pretty good news that you’ve raised the most money and that you’re leading the latest poll by 15 percentage points. And that’s a poll conducted for Aldertrack, an impartial source. Hooray for you! Her opponents, she claimed, are naive and inexperienced and have no clue what it’s like being an alderman....

It was just about a year ago that I was happily proclaiming the ascendance of the Iberian way of eating in Chicago, most notably with my review of Wicker Park’s Bom Bolla, which so far had come closer than any place in town to approximating the casual Spanish tapas bar, where no wine is ever drunk without a bite of something to wash down. Just a little more than six months later, it shut its doors, unable to capture the imagination of Wicker Parkers with fried whitebait, bocadillos, and splashes of vermouth....

Every time Angelina Nordstrom wanted to use the restroom, it took ten minutes to get there and ten minutes to get back. Nordstrom, who is transgender, says that a former employer forced her to use the bathroom in a separate building after coworkers complained about her using the women’s facility. Democratic state senator Melinda Bush of Grayslake and state rep Sam Yingling, Democrat of Round Lake Beach, were joined by 15 other Democratic lawmakers in sponsoring SB 556....

Despite plenty of examples to the contrary, hotel restaurants have a reputation for being stodgy and overpriced, the last resort of business travelers with expense accounts who are too tired to venture out in search of more interesting options. (To be fair, there are also plenty of mediocre or downright bad hotel restaurants.) The Dana Hotel has struggled for the last ten years to figure out what works in its restaurant space, starting with Ajasteak, a steak and sushi spot that was later rebranded as Aja....

Back in January, Chicago powerviolence monsters Weekend Nachos announced that they’d call it a day at the end of this year. Before ending their run, though, they’d tour the world and release one final record—and yesterday, the first track from that record saw the light of day. It’s called “Writhe,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track—a classic Nachos explosion where they sound meaner and more frenzied than ever. The band’s final album, Apology, will come out via Relapse on May 20, and the punishing brutality of “Writhe”—even though it lasts only a minute and 45 seconds—will have Nachos fans itching for that day to come faster....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday January 21, 2016. “Resign Rahm” spreads to Washington, D.C. Chicagoans have gotten used to seeing “Resign Rahm” signs on the streets. Now a protester has brought the message to the nation’s capital. A woman holding a sign calling for Emanuel’s resignation interrupted a mayors’ conference there Wednesday. [ABC7 Chicago]

Now that Chicago’s been granted, in quick succession, two full-scale, well-acted productions of Lolita Chakrabarti’s biodrama Red Velvet (Raven Theatre’s 2016 version closed a year and three days before Chicago Shakespeare Theater opened its current staging), it’s clear how singular an anti-achievement Chakrabarti’s play is. She manages to take the fascinating, complicated life of Ira Aldridge, perhaps the 19th century’s only African-American international theatrical star, and drain from it most everything that makes it fascinating and complicated....