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The 2020 Sundance Film Festival featured quite a few flicks full of thrills and chills, and one in particular showcased Chicago’s very own Chris Redd: the psychological horror-comedy Scare Me, which was acquired by Shudder, the horror streaming service, just ahead of the festival. Although now a nationally known comedic star appearing on Saturday Night Live, Redd was born just a regular kid in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to Naperville at the age of eight, but because his family was originally from Mississippi, he always felt that he had a southern upbringing....

Sometimes Lea Bertucci treats architecture as an extension of her instruments. For the 2019 album Resonant Field (NNA Tapes), the composer, sound designer, and instrumentalist brought her alto saxophone into the confines of the Marine A Grain Elevator in Silo City, a collection of three such elevators in Buffalo, New York. The structure’s size—it’s 13 feet wide and 90 feet high—resulted in a 12-second natural delay that let Bertucci play with or against her own improvisations....

After enjoying the burst of 50-degree weather this weekend, I decided to pop into Heaven Gallery with a few friends. Heaven, which has served as a vintage shop and DIY gallery in Wicker Park since the late 90s, was exhibiting Gwendolyn Zabicki’s solo exhibition “In a Room with Many Windows,” titled after a poem by Jane Hirshfield. It’s a fitting name for Zabicki, who has worked with themes of mirrors, windows, and passageways in previous paintings and projects....

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 guitarist Ben Greenberg (who’s played in Zs and Pygmy Shrews and engineered records by every good band coming out of NYC), Uniform have continually streamlined their sound, toying with Wax Trax!...

Ever since John Cage popularized the idea in the 1950s, musicians have worked to find music in the everyday noises of nature and the human-built world. Many composers have sought to transcribe such sounds, as Olivier Messiaen did with the songs of birds and John Luther Adams has attempted in his evocations of Alaska’s great outdoors. Other artists—among them Chris Watson, Annea Lockwood, and Christina Kubisch—use field recordings to create immersive compositions, sometimes complementing the tapes with musicians on conventional instruments....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

On February 12, 2019, Qari Delaney spent a candlelit evening smoking a joint alone in his roommate’s jacuzzi tub with a lavender bath bomb. To further set the mood, the 23-year-old Chicago rapper listened to his own music: Operation Hennessy, his first full-length collaboration with local producer, rapper, and DJ Green Sllime, which would come out the next day. “It was honestly deeply meditative—I felt like I was in the ocean or some shit,” Qari says....

Courtesy the artist Adventures Bay Area shoegaze revivalists Whirr are returning to town tomorrow night, Saturday, April 4, playing an all-ages show at Subterranean. These guys are constantly touring with amazing acts—the first time I saw them, high-volume Philadelphia-based shoegaze band Nothing was opening, then down the road they were out with emotional space-rockers Cloakroom. Opening tomorrow’s show is Pittsburgh’s Adventures, a female-fronted emo band that boasts the Cranberries as a huge influence, and on today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Heavenly,” it’s easy to see why the 90s Irish alt-rockers are a perfect touchstone....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is notoriously hard to access for interviews, and notoriously evasive even when he does make himself available. As his next reelection campaign approaches, you’d hardly expect him to lay himself bare in lengthy recorded conversations with citizens. And yet that’s exactly what the mayor has been doing since June on his podcast Chicago Stories. Though it’s been a near-weekly component of the mayor’s public life for months, Emanuel’s podcast—available on SoundCloud and iTunes and accompanied by lengthy promotional stories on Medium—has flown mostly under the radar....

Sky Cubacub identifies as a QPOC, or genderqueer person of color, and disabled because of ongoing anxiety and panic disorders. As a high school student, they became interested in fashion, creating garments out of chain mail. “It gave me strength,” Cubacub says. “It was emotional armor.” A friend’s mother taught them how to sew unitards to wear under the chain mail (“chain mail was too naked for high school”), and Cubacub became interested in making clothes for other gender-nonconforming people....

At first glance the Buehler Enabling Garden just looks like another plot in the Chicago Botanic Garden, with brick-paved walkways, hanging planters, and raised beds filled with flowers. A closer look, though, reveals that the paths are flat and wide to accommodate people in wheelchairs, the hanging baskets are on pulleys that allow their heights to be adjusted, and the flowerbeds are at various elevations so that gardeners can work on them from a seated or standing position....

I was sitting in a bar in Los Angeles last year, watching the NBA finals, and the bartender said to me: “So you’re a Bulls fan, eh?” That’s when it hit me—I’ve turned myself into a walking billboard for the franchise. No, it’s more like 1991 and I’m in the second balcony at Chicago Stadium, screaming my lungs out as Jordan blows by Joe Dumars for a dunk and the Bulls finally get past the Pistons....

It speaks to how amazingly prolific Raúl Ruiz was that he’s still managing to entertain us from beyond the grave. This week Facets is screening the Chicago premiere of The Wandering Soap Opera (aka La Telenovela Errante), a collection of scenes the Chilean-born filmmaker shot in 1990 and that his widow, Valeria Sarmiento, completed in 2017. As I wrote in this week’s issue of the Reader, The Wandering Soap Opera touches on all the filmmaker’s favorite themes—paranoia, narrative intricacy, fleeting but meaningful friendships—while advancing the baroque (yet proudly low-budget) aesthetic for which he was beloved by cinephiles worldwide....

Zoey Victoria has been a vital force in Chicago’s DIY underground since becoming infatuated with the scene in high school. Now 22, she’s managed artists such as Cold Beaches and Morinda and founded the Femifest Music and Art Festival, which would’ve had its sixth year in 2020. She’s also helped launch the DIY CHI Mutual Aid Fund, which collaborated with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers last month on a stellar livestreamed benefit at the Hideout that featured Gossip Wolf faves Tenci, Ariel Zetina, and Lala Lala....

A multinational drug company has quietly carved out a lucrative, publicly subsidized market for an expensive—and risky—medicine that the company promises can help rescue Illinois from its opioid crisis. Vivitrol is also being dispensed by other public health officials and in private treatment clinics all across Illinois. Alkermes’s website lists at least 60 different Vivitrol providers in Chicago and the suburbs. Last year, Vivitrol was written into Governor Bruce Rauner’s “Opioid Action Plan” along with two more established drug treatments....

There’s something oddly comforting about the young adult novel adaptation. Regardless of genre, there’s often an element of predictability to the stories and an effortless relatability to the characters that make for a satisfying viewing experience. But at a certain point, audiences of all ages were burnt out by the sheer volume of these adaptations coming out at once, especially those with a more dystopian flair: The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Maze Runner, among others....

Melissa DuPrey sits across from me, in an updo she swears she never wears, positively radiant even as she discusses one of the most tender topics in America—grief. This contrast in presentation underscores the motivation behind DuPrey’s work on her upcoming solo show, Good Grief, coproduced at Free Street Theater. “It was not going to be Good Grief. It was going to be the story of me and my mother, and exploring mother-daughter relationships....

Kelsey Henderson Uniform Uniform, the New York noise-rock duo of Ben Greenberg (formerly of the Men and Pygmy Shrews) and Michael Berdan (who used to sing in Drunkdriver) have been one of my favorite bands to emerge over the past couple years, creating a perfectly damaged racket with their punishing recordings and confrontational live performances. This week the band announced that their debut full-length, Perfect World, would be out in early June via 12XU, and along with that came a preview of the record, the title track, which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Blake Karlson says that when he founded the label Chicago Research late last year, he’d been thinking about building “a more cohesive platform for the current state of postpunk, electronic, and industrial music. This city is too often overlooked as a musical hub. Great things are happening right now.” This wolf couldn’t agree more—and those great things have helped Chicago Research leave the gate firing on all cylinders! Karlson describes the label as a “collective, with a solid group of musicians, artists, designers, and writers that all collaborate,” and its initial batch of releases includes a vinyl version of the first single from Death Valley (aka the chilly synth-wave solo project of Ariel Motto) and the plodding, hooky postpunk of Bruised, whose LP Rotten Codex includes the neck-snapping “(Beneath A) Heap of Glass....