CONCERT PREVIEWS THURSDAY23

They Are Gutting a Body of Water Knifeplay, Old Coke, and Illusion of Choice open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+

Philadelphia band They Are Gutting a Body of Water toy with shoegaze like Van Leeuwen screws around with ice cream—their delightfully askew music draws me in, though, while Van Leeuwen’s Hidden Valley Ranch flavor repels me. TAGABOW have made a lot of creative choices that depart from shoegaze’s traditional wall-of-sound warmth. They’ve collaborated with Chicago breakcore heartthrob Casper McFadden on the frenetic, throbbing “Menthol Box,” from the 2021 EP EPCOT. They’ve incorporated samples and electronic percussion, such as the stuttering harp and reggaeton-inspired riddim on Destiny XL track “ES Beautyhand.” And on the title track of last year’s self-released Lucky Styles (uploaded to streaming services as S, in a mistake they turned into an inside joke), the band foreground a whimsical steam-whistle melody that could score an aquatic level on Super Mario 64 TAGABOW’s musical weirdness is less surprising when you consider their hometown. The Philly scene has developed a reputation for (or at least an acceptance of) indie rockers with mischievous experimental streaks. “It’s always been wacky here,” front man Douglas Dulgarian recently told the Pittsburgh City Paper . “Like, motherfuckers are using children’s keyboards on every song. You know, Alex G set the tone with pitch-shi ing his voice and now he’s on the auto-tune wave. There are things here that aren’t happening elsewhere.” Everybody should encourage more wackiness in their own scenes, especially if it leads to more of the loose, uninhibited creativity that makes Lucky Styles so charming and confounding. —LEOR GALIL

Friday24

Djunah See Pick of the Week at le . Huntsmen open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10. 21+

I WISH MORE HARD-ROCK BANDS played with the fervor and aggression of heavy Chicago two-piece Djunah. The duo’s music blazes with such bracing intensity that I’d half expect a vinyl copy of their 2019 album, Ex Voto, to scorch my fingers. Front woman Donna Diane delivers much of the band’s power, in part because she creates so much of their sound. She sings, she plays guitar, and she uses her right foot to operate a Moog Minitaur synth bass via a Roland PK-5A MIDI pedal controller—and seeing her do it all at once adds to Djunah’s already striking live performances. These days, Djunah is rounded out by drummer Jared Karns of Hidden Hospitals and Their/They’re/There, who also appears on the band’s new selfreleased album, Femina Furens. Diane roots the album in a series of her poems, which incorporate allusions to poets Sylvia Plath and John Donne and take inspiration from Greek and Egyptian myths. In the middle of writing these allegorical pieces, she was diagnosed with complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), which further influenced their tone and shape. When Djunah launched preorders of Femina Furens, they made two di erent limited-edition vinyl sets that included chapbooks of Diane’s poems. Both have already sold out, but you don’t need the chapbook (or a master’s degree) to understand Femina Furens: Djunah’s controlled ferociousness ensures that even the album’s nuanced points about autonomy and feminine power come to the fore. Knockout single “Seven Winds of Sekhmet” invokes an Egyptian war goddess who could heal anything, and when Diane’s mighty bellow cracks into a snarl to match its razor-blade guitars, she sounds like she has the same power. —LEOR GALIL

Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra 8:30 PM, Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive, sold out with waiting list. b

Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra sounds like a tributary of Chicago’s avant-jazz traditions. In 2005, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute of Chicago commissioned the multidisciplinary artist and trumpeter for a concert at Pritzker Pavilion, which inspired him to assemble a supergroup of the city’s bleeding-edge creative musicians. Together, they bundle the cosmic trippiness of the Sun Ra Arkestra, the large-group intricacy of the AACM’s Great Black Music Ensemble, and the coolly sophisticated experimentation of the 90s postrock scene that coalesced around Chicago label Thrill Jockey (which released Exploding Star’s first two albums). The members have hung together in a loose constellation ever since, even as some core players, including guitarist Jeff Parker, flutist Nicole Mitchell, and Mazurek himself, have le Chicago.

On March 31, the Exploding Star Orchestra will release their latest album, Lightning Dreamers, on International Anthem. To celebrate, they’re making their first hometown appearance in five years. A nine-piece iteration of the ensemble that consists of Mazurek, Mitchell, keyboardists Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, drummers Chad Taylor and Gerald Cleaver, and narrator and sampler maestro Damon Locks will perform in the Adler Planetarium’s domed Grainger Sky Theater amid enveloping projections of Mazurek’s abstract video art.

Lightning Dreamers was mostly recorded in September 2021 in a West Texas border town near where Mazurek now lives. After beloved experimental trumpeter Jaimie Branch passed away last year, Mazurek dedicated the album to her memory and stitched in samples from a 2022 Exploding Star concert featuring Branch on synths. That became the basis for the album’s tour de force, the teeming, unabashed “Black River.” At first it sounds raw and writhing, but during a recitation by Locks a few minutes in, the heavens seem to open up. Sounds of the past and present mix freely until listeners can scarcely tease them apart. It’s beautiful chaos. Isn’t that the best any of us can hope for, during our toobrief planetary stay?

—HANNAH EDGAR

Wednesday29

TmbaTa Orchestra 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25. 18+

Armenian folk music has retained its compelling singularity for centuries, through all the tribulations faced by the nation and its people, but TmbaTa Orchestra show that a deep respect for this tradition does not preclude reinventing it. The band, whose name derives from a musical exercise, grew out of an education program launched a decade ago by guitarist Arik Grigoryan at the teen-oriented Tumo Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan. In the spirit of that youthful energy, TmbaTa titled their 2019 album ZarZ’ng’ , which translates to “ring the bells”—short for the even more enthusiastic phrase “ring the bells so we can dance all night long.”

Here, electric guitar and bass re-create the type of lines traditionally made by ancient strings, such as the oud and kanun, while arrangements for clarinets and brass transpose Indigenous woodwinds, including the double-reed apricot-wood horn called the duduk. While TmbaTa’s driving rhythms take their cues from rock, their melodies adhere to long-standing Armenian modal lines that occasionally echo Middle Eastern idioms. Similar to their more folkloric peers, such as Armenia’s Shoghaken Ensemble, TmbaTa’s repertoire mixes such upbeat tunes as “ZarZ’ng’” with quieter devotional pieces. In 2021 TmbaTa self-released Fantastic Komitas, titled in honor of Komitas Vardapet (born Soghomon Soghomonian), an Armenian priest and musicologist who collected thousands of folk songs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. TmbaTa adapt a selection of those songs for this record, and their version of “Ampel a Kamar” (“Heaven Has Become Clouded in Arches”) features serene vocal harmonies over a slow, enthralling beat. If Komitas could time travel to the present, he might not quite recognize the tune in its modern, electrified state, but the orchestra’s spirit and dedication nonetheless embody what his work was all about. —AARON COHEN

Thursday30

Algiers Party Dozen open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $18. 21+

The cover imagery on Algiers’s new album, Shook, can be interpreted as empowering or forsaken. A black wolf with feral or fawning eyes—you decide— stands in profile with its head lowered, a chain dangling from its mouth. I like to think that the wolf isn’t genuflecting but rather holding the tools of its oppressor between its teeth—and it’s not a stretch to say that the band think the same.

The apocalyptic soul quad have always made staunchly political music. They named their band a er the capital city of Algeria, a home base in the battle against French colonization for more than a century. On Shook as on their previous albums, the band’s lyrics reflect that spirit of resistance.

Conceptualized by bandleader Franklin J. Fisher and bassist Ryan Mahan, Shook centers racial sol-