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For more than a decade, pop culture has witnessed an explosion of 1980s sci-fi and horror revivalism in both music and film with dark electro-pop acts such as Kavinsky and creepy period dramas such as Stranger Things garnering cult followings. Amid the nostalgia, an anonymous, instrumental, Boise-based synth-rock trio named Magic Sword has carved its own stylistic niche. Its members—credited as the Keeper of the Magic Sword, the Seer of All Truths, and the Weaver of All Hearts and Souls—take as much inspiration from John Carpenter as from Daft Punk to create a funky, metallic, ominous soundtrack to their own comics-inspired canon....

Role-playing games and theater seem so closely aligned that it’s surprising more companies haven’t fully embraced gamer culture as part of their aesthetic. (If you can believe that pirates somehow miraculously appear in the nick of time to save Marina’s life in Shakespeare’s Pericles, you can pretty much believe any of the narrative twists in LARPs.) And in pragmatic terms, there’s also a helluva big potential audience in gaming fans for theater companies eager to reach new patrons....

It’s hard to believe, but one of Gossip Wolf’s favorite vinyl shops, Permanent Records, has run its brick-and-mortar location in Ukrainian Village for ten years! (It’s been a label too for almost as long.) On Monday, October 24, the Permanent crew take over the Empty Bottle to celebrate their tin anniversary with a free Monday show headlined by noisy malcontents Running, who released their self-­titled debut on Permanent in 2010. Also on the bill are Ohio postpunks Counter Intuits (aka former Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments front man Ron House and Times New Viking guitarist Jared Phillips), ethereal synth avatar Matchess, and Nude Attitude & No Dreams—that is, a collaborative set by two solo projects from members of Rectal Hygienics....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Happy New Year! Emanuel has made an average income of $365 K over the past six years Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made an average income of $365,000 a year during his first six years in office, according his tax returns. He has made a total of $1.1 million from his mayoral income of $216,000 a year and another $1 million from investments, according to the Tribune....

On their second album, 2018’s Pop Therapy (Inflated Records), New Orleans indie duo Video Age liberally apply the glassy, frictionless keyboards and cheesy affectations of 80s synth-pop. But fortunately, Ray Micarelli (drums) and Ross Farbe (guitar, vocals, production) aren’t interested in simply replicating the unmistakable sounds of the Reagan years—the duo transplant them into a slightly different context, building a connection to some of modern indie pop’s illustrious ancestors. Video Age have cited Donald Fagen and Paul McCartney as influences, and Pop Therapy nods to more than just the digital production of Fagen’s classic 1982 LP, The Nightfly—it borrows the sly, sophisticated, slightly bent songwriting of both stars’ 80s work....

It’s September 2019 and Johnny Christmas is getting ready to enter an abandoned children’s hospital in Berlin’s Weissensee neighborhood. “We weren’t ghost people, we weren’t Wiccans in junior high,” Christmas says. “Even now, when I speak of them, I say ‘the ghosts’ and ‘they,’ but then also try to claim I don’t believe in them. It’s this weird internal conflict.” “My own personal theory is ghosts were once human, and they’re probably lost and confused and want to get back home,” Christmas says....

The backbone of Chicago’s illustrious history of improvised music is made up of a small handful of indefatigable players who endlessly explore and play gigs—sometimes for just a handful of folks—but few have been as long devoted to spontaneous experimentation as keyboardist Jim Baker and percussionist Michael Zerang. Each Tuesday this month at the Hideout they’ve been celebrating their musical relationship, which goes back 35 years. Baker is a jazz-trained master who’s long bridged the divide between Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, while Zerang, who grew up playing in his father’s Assyrian band, Kismet, has crossed lines between Arabic traditions, free jazz, and theater music, and for decades has served a crucial role as a live music programmer....

In my last column, I wrote about Brian Loevner and the white paper he’s created through his company, BLVE Consults, on the subject of “cultural triage” and what arts leaders and funders might need to do to ensure the survival (or help the ending process) for the arts in a post-pandemic world. But as Loevner himself acknowledges, the lens through which many arts consultants view the future of the field tends to be dominated by the experiences of predominantly white institutions (PWI)....

Chris Hillman has built a sturdy career as a bluegrass musician, bringing a melodic sweetness to a chill strain of virtuosic mountain music since forming the Desert Rose Band in 1985, and carrying on in recent years through a durable partnership with cofounder Herb Pedersen. But he remains best known for his fruitful memberships in country-rock avatars the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers as well as in Stephen Stills’s Manassas....

Nashville’s Lost Dog Street Band mixes old-timey music with touches of contemporary Americana, but what most distinguishes the group is the voice of front man Benjamin Tod Flippo. He’s not a powerhouse singer—his delivery wavers somewhere between high-lonesome bluegrass and Bob Dylan-style talk-singing. As he flirts with the wrong key, or scrambles to keep up with the rollicking pace of songs such as “Hard Road Again,” his ragged-but-right approach adds a pleasingly uncertain punk edge to the band’s sound....

Profiles Theatre has shut down permanently, effective immediately. Just six days after the Reader published an investigation into alleged abuse at the acclaimed storefront theater, Profiles posted the following announcement on its website, Facebook, and Twitter late Tuesday night: We want to thank all of the artists who have worked with us during the past three decades. We are very proud of the many successes we have achieved together. We care about all of you tremendously and wish you only the very best....

More postapocalyptic plays about staging Chekhov in people’s living rooms, please! The digital has eclipsed the physical in this new show by playwright and theater instructor Jason Hedrick, directed by Kayla Adams. Feral vagabonds snort across empty stretches of what used to be America. Cops make the rounds of the few outposts of organized human life that still exist on the fringe. There are barely any more phones or screens now, only an Internet of vivid, government-sanctioned visualizations, called “dives,” that fuzz together dreams and reality past all distinction....

On Thursday afternoon, all the content vanished from the DNAinfo and Gothamist network of websites, replaced by a letter from owner and CEO Joe Ricketts announcing that he’d “made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing.” Some 115 employees have been laid off, the New York Times reported, including those working at DNAinfo Chicago, which Ricketts launched in 2012, and Chicagoist, the 13-year-old blog he acquired in March. Staffers will be placed on paid administrative leave through February 2, according to CNN....

You’re standing in pure sunlight in a crystal pavilion levitating over an infinite green melon patch. You move into the structure and pedestals rise from a platform, each one supporting a perfectly spherical green melon. Meanwhile, a soothing disembodied narrator congratulates you: “We made this,” she says. “Together.” Brooks is the artist constructing the very real backpack that will contain a “taste display” that pumps randomized liquid flavor combinations through an array of converging straws into the waiting mouths of players each time one approves of a particular melon’s sound and elects to take a taste....

Still Alice The ads for Still Alice (which is currently playing around town) make it seem less like a film and more like part of a PR campaign to win Julianne Moore an Oscar. Having seen it, I’d say that’s a fair representation. Alice often calls upon Moore to illustrate some symptom of Alzheimer’s disease or to remind us of the character’s integrity in the face of suffering. Moore performs these things with the care and consideration you’d expect from an actress of her caliber, but the film gives us little to consider beyond her performance and the basic facts of Alzheimer’s disease....

A couple of things we can count on during any presidential election are partisan orators assuring us that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes” and media critics complaining that nobody’s paying enough attention to the issues. I’ve been one of those critics myself a time or two, though a half-hearted one, as I don’t honestly believe anyone ever lost the White House because voters didn’t hear enough about his trade policy....