Hyunhye Seo, also known as Angela Seo, has been a member of inscrutable experimental-rock band Xiu Xiu since 2009, providing synths, piano, and vocals to flesh out their consistently beguiling, unsettling sound. On her debut solo record, Strands (Room40), Seo conjures discomfort in new ways, trading in Xiu Xiu’s outré pop grotesqueries for two 18-minute pieces, one of ambience and the other of solo piano. “Strands I” starts off surreptitiously, with a low, nondescript hum that quietly grows....

Two clear messages emerged from a blizzard of opinions expressed Wednesday evening at the most highly charged meeting yet about the Obama Presidential Center: An actual blizzard in New York kept architect and panelist Michael Sorkin from making the trip (his remarks were read by Mitchell). But Charles Birnbaum, president of the D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation was there, arguing against putting the Obama Center in Jackson Park, invoking Janet Jackson....

Since 1996, Chicago electronic producer Christopher Grabowski has experimented with IDM under the name K-Rad. The name initially represented a small, loose collective with Grabowski, Joe Hahn, and Mark Hardy at its center; all three producers worked on K-Rad’s debut for the Someoddpilot label, 2002’s Deli Mood Spot. Since then Grabowski has made K-Rad his solo project, and while he’s sometimes issued collaborations with other producers as K-Rad singles or full-lengths, in recent years he’s made all the material on his own....

Chicago drummer Tommy Carroll first came to prominence as a skateboarder in the late aughts. Blind since he was two years old, he picked up the sport in third grade, and by age 15 his skills and dedication had caught the attention of Tony Hawk, who traveled to Glenview in 2008 to skate with him. But in a 2013 interview with McSweeney’s, Carroll briefly noted his interest in drumming and jazz, and since then, public interest has focused more on his music than his skating....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Gucci Mane & Future, Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition What do you get when you take two of the trippiest, most prolific rappers out of Atlanta and put them together on one mixtape? Six of the hottest hip-hop tracks to come along in ages. Gucci and Future’s outer-­space trap is simply unstoppable, packed with some of the oddest lyrics I’ve ever heard (e....

DEAR READERS: This is the final week of my summer vacation—but you’ve been getting a new column every week I’ve been gone, all of them written by Dan Savage, none of them written by me. A: First off, I think a long time between relationships is good. I also think not having things in common can be OK if you create new hobbies and experiences you can share. Having said that, TDTBW, four months is plenty of time to know if it’s working....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Looks like public parking spaces are just reserved for chairs now. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That a State Supreme Court chief justice told local Alabama judges not to issue same-sex marriage licenses? —Cassidy Ryan • How to be a friend in deed? —Sue Kwong

Living in Vancouver in her mid-20s, Jeanette Tran-Dean was struck by the similarities between the food she grew up with and the food her Guatemalan friends ate. “I’d go over for their grandfather’s birthday party or something and they’d have, like, a tamale wrapped in a banana leaf,” she says. “I was like, ‘Vietnamese people wrap everything in banana leaves.’” Another friend’s mom regularly made the Central American-style quesadilla, which is a lot like a sweet, cheesy, rice-flour pound cake—and a lot like the Vietnamese cassava-coconut cake called banh khoai mi nuong....

Dwid Hellion, founder and core member of Integrity, sure can be intimidating, what with his burly stage presence, fierce intelligence, and dogged devotion to unblinking study of the darkest sides of the psyche, but his real superpower is his work ethic. Throughout Integrity’s two-decade career with constant personnel changes (including periods that included stars from bands such as Hatebreed and Sepultura), the iconic metalcore band have maintained a steady maelstrom of releases, including singles and EPs in between albums—and each one has been fiercer than the last....

ARTIST: John Regan SHOW: High Priest, Huntsmen, Fool’s Ghost, Snow Burial at the Burlington on Sat 4/20 MORE INFO: instagram.com/highpriestdoom

Three years ago, when Chance the Rapper‘s career went into hyperdrive after the release of Acid Rap, music sites had a field day pillaging the Internet for public traces of his history. It became almost a sport to “unearth” videos and mixtapes that featured Chance performing under a different name (he sometimes goes by “Chano”) or with his old band, Instrumentality. Of course, as so often happens during media feeding frenzies (which prize speed and quantity over nuance), sometimes the history surrounding those recordings would get distorted or lost....

A few days after the city finally got around to releasing the horrific video of a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo, Mayor Lightfoot called for Chicago to come together and rally around her plan. The official reaction from Mayor Lightfoot and her editorial and corporate enablers went a little like: Shut up. Take your pay raise. And get back in those classrooms. If we wanted your opinion, we’d ask for it....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, December 4, 2017. Report: The generational fault lines in local Latino politico have emerged The unexpected departure of U.S. representative Luis Gutierrez last week has “brought to the surface some of the political fault lines that have long made it tough for Latino politicians in Chicago to speak with one voice,” according to the Tribune. In addition to the historic political tension between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and establishment and independent Latinos, there is a generational conflict brewing “as the next wave of Latino politicians is chafing against its elders’ hold on power while trying to take advantage of the district’s changing demographics to wrest control,” the newspaper wrote....

This past Monday evening, the same day a Google Doodle commemorated what would have been the 131st birthday of Alice Paul—a prominent suffragist who believed public demonstrations were the most effective way to voting rights for women—three members of FURIE (Feminist Uprising to Resist Inequality and Exploitation), a Chicago grassroots feminist organization, sat in a coffee shop in Ukrainian Village discussing their own upcoming public demonstration, a counterprotest against this Sunday’s Illinois March for Life, which they have taken to calling the “March for Lies....

Pop music moves fast: new instructional-dance songs, new Drake songs, and new instructional-dance songs by Drake can bombard the zeitgeist one week and all but evaporate the next. Footwork, the lightning-fast Chicago-born house subgenre, is well suited to capture that frenetic pace. Young footwork master and Teklife member DJ Taye instinctively understands how to combine footwork’s adrenaline rush with the pop’s euphoric glee to build tracks with a distinctive energy. Last month he self-released Pyrot3k, the third entry in the Pyrotek mixtape series he launched in October....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 17, 2016. City Council unanimously approves Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s latest budget The City Council approved Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2017 budget Wednesday with a 48-0 vote. The budget includes a parking-rate increase and a new plastic-bag tax, both funding sources for his plan to hire nearly 1,000 more police officers. “This is the first year in recent memory that we’ve made investments in public safety with the addition of 1,000 police officers,” 28th Ward alderman Jason Earvin said....

Brian Solis Elon Musk is expanding his empire to the cosmos. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the art and science of bibliotherapy? —Aimee Levitt • That you’re too old to go to this Chance the Rapper-curated music fest? —Gwynedd Stuart

Two and Half Men bows out with a strange series finale. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That the Two and a Half Men series finale was really weird? —Drew Hunt • That Starbucks will stop selling CDs? —Leor Galil

Three days before the national elections, the racehorse California Chrome, undefeated in 2016, went off at even odds in the Breeders’ Cup and was beaten at the wire. Handicappers didn’t search their souls over that one, but they would the following Tuesday when Hillary Clinton, an even heavier favorite, wasn’t elected president. Ultimately, the minds of human beings are just as hard to penetrate as the minds of horses. As some wise Facebook users commented once the election results were in, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown....

Blake and Wycke Malliway, owners of a witchcraft shop in Rogers Park, refuse to let COVID cancel Halloween. “We’ve had to give up a lot right now because of the pandemic; a lot of people feel powerless. Turning to witchcraft can help them realize some aspect of themselves that they want or that they’re yearning for,” Blake says. Lately, visitors to the Malliway Bros. shop are seeking love, money, protection—and alternatives for celebrating this spooky season safely....