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Campy and fun, Elizabeth A.M. Keel’s Corona follows the voyage of the starship Corona Borealis and its captain, Ariadne, on a mission to bring 14 sacrifices to the minotaur on planet Crete. A spin on the classic Greek myth, it hits every great sci-fi trope: a computer gone bad, a spaceship with a monster, a Kirk-like dude who wants some space sex, and an alternative mission only one person knows. There is humor, mystery, fighting, gods, sacrifices, and a bit of bestiality....

Manuel Gaines, who performs as DJ Manny, was ten years old when he first heard footwork music at a party. Before long, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based producer met two titans of the genre, DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad, with whom he eventually collaborated on a handful of tracks. Manny has multiple releases under his belt, but the new Signals in My Head (Planet Mu) is the first to be specifically focused on R&B and centered on love....

Duk Ju L. Kim’s paintings burst and seethe with life. She’s called her current show at the Chicago Cultural Center “De-skinned,” and indeed there’s a raw, exposed feel to many of her pieces. Though nominally abstract, they are full of limbs, eyes, blood, and other uncharacterizable but obviously organic elements, all in furious motion. It may not be clear where these loose masses of flesh are headed, but they seem desperate to get there....

Chicago’s diagonal streets mean that the city has a fair share of oddly shaped buildings—and businesses with unusual layouts—but I’ve never seen one embrace its triangular configuration as completely as Estereo, the Latin-inspired cafe and bar at the pointy intersection of Milwaukee and Sacramento that Heisler Hospitality opened this summer. Not only does the bar itself form a triangle, following the lines of the walls, but the track lighting is also arranged in concentric triangles....

Israel-born, New York-based guitarist Yonatan Gat is still best known for his stint in Tel Aviv trio Monotonix, who made a lasting impression on rock audiences last decade with their maniacal anything-goes showmanship and fiendish take on heavy garage rock; in fact their performances were so legendary their records often got short shrift in comparison, possibly due to lack of Smell-o-Vision and the slight but real chance of physical danger that came with being in their crowds....

(Note: This essay contains spoilers) Or maybe that’s just me. As a former fundamentalist Christian and missionary, I’m one of the few people in Chicago that may have needed something akin to a trigger warning in lieu of the otherwise G-rated trauma portrayed in The Christians. After reading a review, I nearly decided to skip it because of my personal connection to the material in a way that goes beyond the general theme of a evangelical church divided amongst itself....

Footwork producer, Teklife member, and south suburban high school science teacher Nate Boylan turned 40 last month, and on Friday party promoters Custom Vibes throw him a belated birthday bash at Exit. “Boylan said he hasn’t had a birthday party in forever,” says fellow DJ Erik “Pranas” Voit, who cofounded Chicago electronic collective Mucho Culo. “You only turn 40 once, so we agreed to help him put this together.” The performers with their names in the biggest type on the flyer are ghetto-house legend DJ Deeon and underappreciated footwork veteran Jana Rush, but there will also be an extremely special guest whose identity won’t be announced in advance (trust me on the “extremely” part)....

Chicago Opera Theater’s double bill of two rarely performed one-act operas by Gaetano Donizetti presents the composer’s first work, Il Pigmalione (written in 1816 when he was 19 years old), and one of his last, the farce Rita (written in 1841). They’re both about love—one idealized, the other gone wrong—and COT has attempted to link them with a tough-to-pull-off intermission performance by members of the 500 Clown troupe, who also function as a silent, comic chorus in Rita....

On an Amtrak platform in Springfield, I met that rarest of Illinoisans: a woman who divides her time and her loyalties between downstate and Chicago. Pat Staab lives in the state capital most of the time, but she was on her way to Chicago, where she keeps a condo in River North. “I’m from New York,” she told me. “I need a big city.” As a result of her peregrinations between upstate and down-, Staab is well versed in how the state’s rival regions view each other....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 2, 2017. Kenneka Jenkins’s family appears on Dr. Oz to question investigation into her death The family of a west-side teenager who was found dead in a hotel freezer in Rosemont in September appeared on the Dr. Oz Show Tuesday. Infamous former Headline News television personality Nancy Grace also appeared, saying she is “outraged” by the Rosemont Police Department’s investigation into Jenkins’s death....

It’s been four and a half years since Los Angeles-based noise-rock duo No Age released An Object, their most recent full-length record. At that point, drummer and vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall had been going hard as No Age for six years or so—beginning in 2008, they’d released three acclaimed full-length records on indie giant Sub Pop, and they’d toured unstintingly, including a handful of international trips. Onstage they burn a whole lot of calories, fueling outbreaks of sweaty, euphoric moshing, and for the LP release of An Object they took a similarly effort-intensive approach, making everything but the actual vinyl themselves by hand....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, September 29, 2017. Have a great weekend! Rauner signs House Bill 40 expanding abortion coverage and protecting the procedure Outraging many Republicans, Governor Bruce Rauner signed House Bill 40, expanding insurance coverage for abortion and ensuring it remains legal in Illinois if Roe vs. Wade is overturned, the Sun-Times reports. “I am being true to my values and my views,” he said Thursday at a news conference announcing his decision....

Best of Chicago, the Reader‘s biggest issue of the year, came out November 7. Find out who won!

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.

Amy Rigby was already a veteran of two New York indie bands—proto alt-country quartet Last Roundup and female harmony trio the Shams—when her first solo album, 1996’s Diary of a Mod Housewife, drew critical raves and catapulted her into the national spotlight. By turns angry, funny, and heartrending, its songs fused folk-rock melodies with country-western lyrics as they chronicled a disintegrating marriage (to drummer Will Rigby of power-pop legends the dB’s) and a life of transient, low-paying office jobs....

In the years since Gossip Wolf covered the live debut of experimental postpunks Facs in January 2017, they’ve become one of the best bands in town, dropping dense albums at least yearly and playing consistently high-caliber concerts. (The Sleeping Village release show for Void Moments last spring, with Melkbelly and CB Radio Gorgeous, would’ve been great if COVID-19 hadn’t canceled it.) On Friday, May 21, top-shelf Chicago label Trouble in Mind releases Facs’ fourth album, Present Tense, where drummer Noah Leger, bassist Alianna Kalaba, and guitarist-vocalist Brian Case marry the dark, rumbling energy of their earlier efforts to a broader and more melodic songwriting palette—to this wolf, it sounds like a light at the end of a long tunnel....

“Humor can often be the most disarming thing and put people in a position where they’re questioning things that they might not have otherwise,” said Matt McLoughlin, a lanky man with a thick handlebar mustache and a tiny ponytail, as he and a few acquaintances settled at a table in the center of Ceres Cafe in the Board of Trade building. On the night of Wednesday, October 16, Ceres became ground zero (or perhaps one of several ground zeros) for an evening of drinking and alleged romantic indiscretions by Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson....

In 2015, Jesús “Chuy” García, longtime Cook County commissioner, former alderman, and state senator, became the only challenger to ever push a Chicago mayor into a primary runoff. Now García is running to represent Illinois’s Fourth District in the U.S. House of Representatives—a spur-shaped area gerrymandered to capture large Mexican and Puerto Rican communities on the west side of Chicago and in the western suburbs. Current congressman Luis Gutiérrez, in office since 1993, endorsed García’s candidacy in the same breath as he announced his retirement....

The Reader is being sold to a group led by Chicago Crusader publisher Dorothy Leavell. She vowed to continue the Reader’s tradition of investigative reporting and cultural coverage and to expand it throughout the city. The Reader, which has been publishing since 1971, has a circulation of 85,000.

The Mountain Movers are among my current faves, because they know how to freak the fuck out. Formed in the mid-2000s, the Connecticut band started as a showcase for the songs of New Haven indie rocker Dan Greene, and since then their cosmic trajectory has been eerily similar to that of many mid-60s rock groups who started out playing fairly straightforward pop but ventured into blistering psychedelia by the end of the decade....