MUSIC

which features devilishly distorted selections from the poetry collection Against Heaven by Chicagobased Kemi Alabi.

Like other live iterations of Diffi cult Grace , this Harris Theater performance will feature projected visuals, including works by late painter Jacob Lawrence and his protégé Barbara Earl Thomas, whose art adorns Difficult Grace ’s album cover. All the works on the program were premiered by Woods, save for “Cavalry Ostinato,” a haunting, entirely pizzicato movement from Perkinson’s 1973 composition Lamentations: Black/Folk Song Suite. In its curated cacophony, Difficult Grace elicits the same kind of awe you feel perusing your smartest friend’s bookshelf: Here are the ideas, artists, and words that shaped Woods, arranged in plain sight. Luckily for us, his library is ever growing.

—HANNAH EDGAR

Saturday22

No Men Heet Deth and Bussy Kween Power Trip open. 8:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $15. 21+

When Chicago punk trio No Men issued their 2016 debut, Dear God, Bring the Doom , they proved to me they could hurl noise with crushing force. Their new third album, the self-released Fear This, proves that they can also make that bracing racket groove like hell. Bassist DB saturates No Men’s songs with thick, melodic riffs that provide plenty of swing at any speed. Front woman Pursley sings in a wrought-iron holler with intense but tightly controlled vibrato, and sometimes she also plays a floor tom and snare to double or punctuate Eric Hofmeister’s whirlwind drums. Fear This also spotlights No Men’s range: they could easily play loud and fast from wall to wall, but their frequent midsong shi s leave a deeper mark. The doomy “California Rocket Fuel’’ alternates between a seesawing grind and continued from p. 45 a sinister, plodding drone, and its sloshing rhythms will rattle you worse by hitting you both ways. Steve Albini engineered Fear This, and it sounds great— but just as important, his famous name might bring more underground rock fanatics to their new favorite band.

—LEOR GALIL

Sunday23

Lies See Pick of the Week, page 44. Aitis Band open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $22, $20 in advance. 21+

Thursday27

Kokoko! 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $16. 21+

On Kokoko!’s first and only Chicago visit till now, the Congolese group put on the most bonkers fun show of the 2019 World Music Festival. Decked out in their signature yellow jumpsuits, they moved like they were sunk in trance or electrified by emergency, and their bracingly cosmopolitan junkyard beats—which they call “hot temperature music”—had the crowd dancing so hard that sweat fogged the air. The band’s setup included a table of metal rods, pots, plates, and trays, a row of plastic bottles tuned to different notes with water, and a steel air-duct box that served as their relentless kick drum. This bustling matrix of trash percussion meshed with hooky, acidic ostinatos on homemade one-string guitars to form rickety rhythmic contraptions that barreled like locomotives, cushioned by plush electronics and inflamed by rousing chants and singalong melodies.

Kokoko! are oddballs even in their hometown of Kinshasa, whose population of around 16 million leaves room for every kind of human. The collective formed in 2016, when French producer Débruit (aka Xavier Thomas) visited the city’s Ngwaka neighborhood. He met lead singer Makara Bianko, who brought aboard instrument builders Boms Bomolo, Dido Oweke, and Love Lokombe to complete the five-piece lineup that performed in Chicago in 2019. Kokoko! share the practice of recycling discarded objects with many other avant-garde Kinshasa artists, including the band Fulu Miziki and the costumed collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle, and it isn’t just a response to privation. While it’s true that professional instruments are so expensive for Congolese musicians that most will only see them in church, creating music with garbage is also a comment on extractive postcolonialist practices in a country where censorship suppresses explicit political expression. The coltan in your smartphone was probably mined in the Congo, but the country is one of the five poorest in the world.

“Our raw materials are stolen; all our riches are taken from us. They’re used to build technologies elsewhere,” a member of Kokoko! says in a French voice-over from Renaud Barret’s 2019 documentary Système K. “When the world is done with our products, they come back here worn out. We use the trash to create instruments. There’s no need for words—our instruments are the message.”

Homemade instruments complicate touring— road cases don’t exist, of course, and when something wears out or breaks, replacement parts may not either. But they have clear advantages too.

“You may have an instrument that nobody else has, and nobody else knows how to play,” Thomas told Exberliner in 2019. “That makes you the only person who can do what you can do, and that is very empowering.”

Kokoko! have only one album so far, 2019’s Fongola, which Noah Berlatsky described in the Reader at the time: “The mix of smooth grooves and rusted, serrated beats is weirdly accessible and accessibly weird—a soundtrack for a hole-in-thewall party with guests from everywhere.” Their most recent release is a two-song EP from last summer, Elongi Na Elongi , but in January they teased what might be a forthcoming album called Bazo Banga. (I couldn’t get a reply from the band’s publicist or management to confirm.) At home in Kinshasa, Kokoko! shows get even wilder than the gig I caught in Chicago—their block parties bring out the parts of the collective that don’t tour, including dancers and costumed performance artists— but I’ve found evidence online that the band have had to slim down on the road since 2019. Photos and video from European dates late last year appear to show a trio, with no one-string guitars or homemade drums—I could see three rototoms, a snare, and sometimes the plastic bottles and metal scrap from the old setup. But even when Kokoko! rely heavily on Thomas’s synths and programmed beats—as they do on many of their recordings— they can have a crowd hanging from the ra ers in 20 minutes flat. —PHILIP

MONTORO

Saturday29

Glow in the Dark Flowers Midwife and Desert Liminal open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 21+

It’s hard to believe it’s been 11 years since Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Lesicko le Chicago for the teeny downstate town of New Douglass (population: 350 as of the 2020 census), partly because you can still feel their influence in our underground rock scene. With their old duo, the Funs, they’ve played noisy but comforting rock in Chicago venues; they’ve released music by Chicago artists on their Manic Static label; and they’ve recorded plenty of locals at Rose Ra , the rehabbed funeral home they’ve transformed into an arts hub and studio.

And if you’ve heard the Funs (if you haven’t, you definitely should), you’ll be able to hear their bracing minimalism reflected in the work of Dehd and Lala Lala—the latter recorded their outstanding 2018 album, The Lamb, at Rose Ra . I find it appropriate and even touching that local indie label Born Yesterday, one of the scene’s mightiest emerging forces, is releasing Crane and Lesicko’s new selftitled album as Glow in the Dark Flowers. The duo’s best work together has long had an alluring sparseness, and Glow in the Dark Flowers doubles down on that approach. Sonorous guitars envelop the funereal “When the Leaves Have Fallen” with simple, spacious lines, while Crane’s murmured vocals dri across skeletal drums; at eight minutes, it’s the longest track on the album, but I wish it were as long as a Peter Jackson movie.

—LEOR

GALIL

Sunday30

Suba Trio Suba Trio consists of pianist Omar Sosa, kora player Seckou Keita, and percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. 7:30 PM, Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland, $25-$200. 21+

Cuban pianist and composer Omar Sosa has spent nearly 30 years exploring different facets of African music. He’s recorded more than two dozen albums, and each one is a journey of discovery and wonder. Among the most sublime are his collaborations with virtuosos from Africa and the African diaspora, including his two most recent, 2017’s Transparent Water and 2021’s Suba , where the lineups include Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita and AfroVenezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles.

Under the name Suba Trio, Sosa, Keita, and Ovalles deliver performances rich with affectionate instrumental dialogue, effervescent dynamics, and jazz improvisations. Sosa alternates between grand piano and Fender Rhodes, Keita plays talking