CONCERT PREVIEWS THURSDAY13

Big Joanie Frida Kill open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $18. 21+

UK punk trio Big Joanie played their first show at the 2013 First Timers Fest, a grassroots event where all the bands are making their debuts. First Timers seeks to diversify London’s DIY scene by encouraging people to try things they’ve never done before, and every act has to be able to tick two out of three boxes: one or more members must have never played in a band, be playing a new role in a band, or identify as part of a group marginalized in DIY. (Members of Big Joanie identify as queer, and all three are Black women.) A er a couple EPs, the band released their 2018 debut full length, Sistahs, on Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz’s Daydream Library Series label. Big Joanie’s insightful, politically charged lyrics and fresh dance-punk sound (which recalled the minimalist aesthetics of early-2000s feminist punk bands) helped the group build momentum, and they landed gigs opening for the likes of Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. The pandemic would soon sideline the entire music industry, of course, but Big Joanie emerged from it stronger than ever. Last year’s Back Home showcases a retooled style that builds on the strippeddown punk of Sistahs with bolder arrangements and a broader mix of influences. The album questions the concept of home from many angles: Is “home” the place you sleep at night? Is it a community or tradition? Is it something intimate between individuals? “Your Words” combines lush, swirling synths with the choppy guitar of singer Stephanie Phillips, who ruminates on the potentially crushing power of words. “In My Arms” embraces sunny indie-rock melodies and impressive multipart vocal arrangements, and later in the album a slowed-down reprise leans into the song’s romanticism with a “Be My Baby”-style beat. Some of the most poignant moments on Back Home also rock the hardest, such as the yearning grunge-meetspower-pop banger “Happier Still.” Big Joanie were poised to make their debut U.S. tour this spring, but postponed it due to a medical emergency. Their rescheduled dates include this Empty Bottle show.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

LIKE BASICALLY ANYONE who works or plays in a developed country, I’m familiar with the frustrations of technology that stops working properly—it bothers me irrationally that I have to really lean on my laptop’s “R” key to get the letter to appear. Sometimes I repeatedly hammer on the errant key, which produces spelling errors rather than fixing anything. I’ve often thought about failing hardware, but usually as an annoyance—I never considered its potential musicality till I listened to RP Boo’s 2005 track “Pop Machine.” The Chicago footwork pioneer included it on his new Legacy Volume 2 (Planet Mu), which compiles material he created between 2002 and 2007. RP Boo made “Pop Machine” in homage to a malfunctioning vending machine at the Speedway Oil Change near 59th and Western. He worked there at the time, so he tended to hear about it when the machine ate a customer’s cash. One frustrated patron kept pressing the button repeatedly, which RP thought was funny—he went over and started pressing buttons himself, saying “work!” as if he could talk the machine into cooperating. That night he went home and devised a cheeky footwork track that used voice recordings of him saying “pop machine” and “work!” By arranging these vocal samples in loops that run at different speeds on parallel tracks, RP gave the song’s trellis of electronic bass and percussion a giddy, propulsive energy, as though it were bouncing across the surface of the moon. Like much of Legacy Volume 2 , “Pop Machine” continues to reveal new internal patterns on subsequent listens. They can hypnotize me into a dance (or at least a vigorous head nod), and they give me a newfound appreciation for the untapped musicality in my everyday experiences. All I need now is a way to make music from a busted “R” key. —LEOR GALIL

Protomartyr Stuck open. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22. 17+

Protomartyr are the kind of band who create a lot with a very minimal palette. Ever since the Detroit four-piece began releasing music in 2012, they’ve made postpunk with a capital P: wiry guitar, throbbing bass, and jumpy drums topped with the dry, deadpan speak-singing of front man Joe Casey. The first few seconds of Protomartyr’s brand-new sixth LP, Formal Growth in the Desert (Domino), give the impression that the band simply have more of the same in store for you. Casey opens the song drawling over a quiet, spiny guitar line, but then the music kicks in with a dramatic, sweeping, cinematic chord—announcing a bigger and better Protomartyr, who don’t let up once over the album’s 12 tracks. The title Formal Growth proves apt, because Protomartyr flesh out their sound with complex rhythms, layers of synths, cushy pedal-steel guitars, and roomy dynamic shifts. The things that have made Protomartyr so magnetic for more than a decade are still there—the catchy darkness, the locked-in playing—but this time around the music has even more depth, style, and heart. Formal Growth in the Desert is a stunningly sophisticated take on a genre that o en seems like it doesn’t have any new heights to reach—it proves that Protomartyr are the band to lead the drive to discover them. Come early for local four-piece Stuck, who also bring plenty of pleasant surprises to the postpunk revival.

—LUCA CIMARUSTI

Friday14

M. Sage The duo of Zander Raymond & Beth McDonald open. 7:30 PM, International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. DuSable Lake Shore Dr., $25. 21+

Experimental artist Matthew Sage, better known as M. Sage, moved to Chicago from Colorado in 2014, and within a couple years I’d become quite fond of his work. The reflective solo material he’d put out on Atlanta label Geographic North and the gigabytes of other peoples’ recordings he issued via his own label Patient Sounds made him a vital part of Chicago’s music firmament. He wound Patient Sounds down in 2019 with no intention of running a label again, but the pandemic changed his mind, and in 2020 Sage launched Cached Media—an imprint that he initially used to gather together a series of ambient-jazz recordings he made online with saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, violinist Chris Jusell, and multi-instrumentalist Chaz Prymek. That group, better known as Fuubutsushi, brought Sage a windfall of new exposure. Though he’s since returned to Colorado, Chicago remains part of his expanding musical practice. In May, RVNG Intl. released the

M. Sage album Paradise Crick , which Sage wrote and recorded in his Portage Park home before the move.

Sage recently told Aquarium Drunkard that he devised the album’s serene, naturalistic tones entirely with electronic instruments, which helped him avoid a technique that’s become a cliche in experimental music. “One thing I didn’t want to do was use field recordings,” he said. “All the ‘nature’ sounds that you hear on the record are all made on synthesizers. That was part of the motif—like synthesized nature.” Sage occasionally tips that aesthetic balance toward the synthetic, but this doesn’t disrupt his tranquil vision. I’m not sure I’ve heard anything in the wilderness that resembles the lightweight electronic percussion he sprinkles into “Mercy Lowlands,” but when I search for a way to describe its gentle pitter-patter, I can only seem to come up with naturalistic comparisons—sometimes it reminds me of twigs crunching beneath boots or raindrops falling in a pond. In any case, it transports me to an idealized great outdoors, which I have to specify because the real outdoors are a mess—I’m writing this on a day when Canadian forest fires have transformed Chicago’s air into an unhealthy acrid fog. I hope the rest of my summer days remind me more of Paradise Crick —LEOR

GALIL

Saturday15

Footballhead Habitats, Bottom Bunk, and Friko (solo) open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $17.51. 21+

Last year, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Ryan Nolen launched a solo project called Footballhead as an outlet for material too poppy for his ongoing band, Kirby Grip, who play soaring, sometimes serious space rock. On Footballhead’s debut, the July 2022 EP Kitchen Fly , Nolen made his affection for 90s alt-rock radio hits, caramel-sweet emo, and turn-ofthe-century pop punk explicit. But he avoided staid continued from p. 39 retreads of those touchstones by developing sharp arrangements with Eric Reyes, aka local emo sensation Snow Ellet. As Nolen told CHIRP Radio in January, Reyes helped him arrange the EP’s percussion digitally, sampling live drums to give Nolen’s crunching guitars a jolt of energy that carries them alo like a sudden gust of wind. Nolen has since evolved Footballhead into a more fleshed-out project, with a live band that includes bassist Adam Siska (who cofounded the Academy Is . . . and spent a few years touring with Carly Rae Jepsen). He also beefs up Footballhead’s sound on the project’s self-released first album, the new Overthinking Everything

The blustery instrumentation on “Ugly Day,” for example, should win over newly converted punks obsessed with superclean contemporary hardcore bands, and Nolen’s relaxed, understated singing coats the music with a sugary glaze. The high points on Overthinking Everything give me a feeling I rarely get from the radio-ready descendents of goldenera alt-rock: a shot of bliss.

GALIL

The Magic Number An evening of trios and a sextet with Roscoe Mitchell, Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, and Jason Adasiewicz. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25. 18+

The Magic Number is three. It’s the number of musicians that gallerist, record label proprietor, and music scholar John Corbett deems to be ideal for an improvisational encounter. And since he’s organizing this event—which coincides with his observation of a significant birthday that’s divisible by three—he gets to pick the terms of engagement under which the players will perform. This extraordinary all-star lineup includes woodwinds and percussion player Roscoe Mitchell, reeds and brass player Joe McPhee, trumpeter Nate Wooley, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, and reeds players Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson. Each partici- pant (whose ages range from 45 to 83) is a celebrated practitioner of jazz and improvised music. All of them have released records on, played at, or presented work in other media at Corbett vs. Dempsey, the gallery and label that Corbett operates with Jim Dempsey. And while a decades-spanning network of working relationships connects some of them, other players—most notably octogenarians McPhee and Mitchell—have never collaborated before. This ensures that two very different dynamics—established rapports and initial encounters—will come into play at this concert. The evening will include a series of improvisations by subsets of three artists, selected to maximize the number of first-time musical meetings, and will conclude with a piece for all six whose parameters will be determined by Vandermark. —BILL

MEYER

Tuesday18

Imarhan The Arab Blues open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $22. 21+

Imarhan emerged from southern Algeria’s closeknit Tuareg community in 2006. Fans of Tuareg rock greats Tinariwen will already be familiar with the quintet; Imarhan front man Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) is a cousin of Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche, and he’s toured with the band to fill in for members who couldn’t go for conflict- or visa-related reasons.

On their three full-length albums for Berlinbased City Slang, Imarhan (“Those I care about”) sing predominantly in their native Tamasheq language and firmly embrace the musical traditions of their hometown of Tamanrasset, even as they branch out into other styles. Their third album, last year’s Aboogi , is titled after their rehearsal space and recording studio (in turn named for a type of traditional house in the region), and it weaves together light springing rhythms, sinuous vocals, and nimble guitar lines with global modern influences of rock, funk, psychedelia, and jazz. The quintet seamlessly absorb and integrate their guest stars, which on Aboogi include Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas (who sings in Arabic on “Taghadart”), Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys (who sings in Welsh on “Adar Newlan”), and several members of Tinariwen. The bluesy “Tamatidin” features one of the last recordings of poet, guitarist, and Tinariwen cofounder Mohammed Ag Itlale, aka Japonais, who passed away in 2021.

Aboogi is evocative and ever-changing, and it takes its soulful journey at an assured pace. “Achinkad” mixes joy and sorrow in a folktale allegory, while “Imaslan N’Assouf” is reflective and melancholy, with chiming guitars and deceptively so backing vocals. Imarhan’s music acknowledges the grief and horror of poverty and colonialism, but it also celebrates resilience, the beauty of Algeria, and Imarhan’s collaborations with international artists. With Aboogi they present a multifaceted jewel that captures the current moment in every sparkle. This show at the Empty Bottle is part of Imarhan’s first U.S. tour since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it offers a great opportunity to catch the band in an intimate setting.

—MONICA KENDRICK

Thursday20

Louise Post The Dumes open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance. 18+

It’s been nearly a decade since Louise Post played at Lincoln Hall. At that time the guitarist and singer was in good company, alongside her longtime Veruca Salt cohorts Nina Gordon, Steve Lack, and Jim Shapiro during a stop on the band’s 2014 reunion tour. Chicago’s musical landscape has continuously changed since it birthed the 90s alt-rock mainstays (along with contemporaries Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill), and Post has likewise entered a new era of music making.

Last month, Post released her debut solo album, Sleepwalker , via El Camino Media. Though fuzzy rock opener “Queen of the Pirates” and plugged-in power-pop single “Guilty” could easily be dusted-off B sides of Veruca Salt hits such as “Seether” or “Volcano Girls,” she infuses much of the record with a more mature sonic palette and stylistic needle pushing. “Secrets” features a so horn section, and “Hollywood Hills” has a pinch of the alluring magnetism of current Top 40 pop dames such as Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish (in a press release, Post credits her child for introducing her to Eilish’s music). The record was produced by multi-instrumentalist Matt Drenik, who makes music under the name Battleme and opened some dates of Veruca Salt’s 2014 tour. He brings out a new side of Post: compared to her 90s work, Sleepwalker has more complex arrangements, and its instrumentation goes beyond the guitar-bass-drums combination associated with altrock to include piano and synths (Post played most of the instruments on this record). Standout ballad “What About” shows the artist at her most vulnerable—it’s a catchy diary entry that could best Foo Fighters’ suggestive confessional “Everlong,” which Dave Grohl is rumored to have written about his relationship with Post.

This Chicago homecoming show is part of Post’s monthlong jaunt with a touring band that includes former Smashing Pumpkins bassist Nicole Fiorentino, which should thrill anyone with a thirst for that special Chicago alt-rock flavor. So should Post’s set list, which to date has been sprinkled with Veruca Salt staples for a balance of new and old.

—SELENA FRAGASSI

Friday21

Album Reviews

Sam Scranton, Body Pillow Moon Glyph samscranton.bandcamp.com/album/body-pillow-2 ndboard Info.

On his new solo album, Body Pillow , Chicago percussionist, composer, and improviser Sam Scranton presents a menagerie of immersive, bubbly electronics. I’d become familiar with Scranton through his work with local new-music ensemble Honestly Same, so I expected this record to be an electroacoustic sound pastiche—along the lines of The Ceiling Reposes , a stunning album that his bandmate Lia Kohl released in March on American Dreams. Though the two albums do share a joyous, Technicolor approach to experimental music, they couldn’t be more different.

While Kohl’s record weaves field recordings, electronics, and cello together in a delicate, tranquil collage, Body Pillow is a colorful, bugged-out glitch album that’s sure to please fans of contemporaries such as Ulla, G.S. Sultan, and Nobukazu Takemura. Warm synthesizers power its melodic core, though Scranton drenches them in so many layers of percussive sound that it can be hard to differentiate the acoustic from the electronic (not that there’s any need to do so). Some songs, such as “Big Glider,” have noisy textures, while others, such as opener “Luna,” could almost be considered straightforward by ambient-music standards—though there’s always enough lingering weirdness that they don’t quite get there. Linking it all together is a consistently nutty energy that reminds me of Looney Tunes.

Body Pillow is partially informed by Scranton’s use of found objects—many sounds on the album come from a contact-miked piece of balsa wood whose output is run through filters and resonators. But whatever connections the music maintains to acoustic sound sources, they’re balanced out by electronic frequencies that simultaneously recall video-game music and the work of trumpet player and composer Jon Hassell. The record is jittery and constantly busy, but Scranton imbues it all with the sort of introspection that defi nes most great ambient and experimental music. —LEVI

DAYAN

Sleep Sinatra + Televangel, Incorruptible Saints

Self-released televangel.bandcamp.com/album/incorruptiblesaints

Midwest hip-hop is alive and well in . . . Lincoln, Nebraska? The richness of Lincoln’s hip-hop scene may go largely unnoticed by mainstream fans, but that doesn’t negate the subterranean greatness of local stalwarts such as Adrian Madlock, who makes music as Sleep Sinatra.

Sleep’s discography is bountiful and aggressively independent; his Bandcamp page hosts more than 20 titles. The MC has also done plenty of collaborative work, including releases with Chicago-linked rappers, including Vic Spencer, Davis, Skech185 (who now lives in New York), and Säge, the 64th Wonder. And Incorruptible Saints , his new fulllength with Ian Taggert, a producer from Portland, Oregon, who goes by Televangel, is a gratifying no-skip project that begs for repeat plays at high volumes.

On opener “S.L.E.E.P.,” Sleep declares, “I done been through so much shit and I ain’t broken,” setting the tone for an album full of survivalist grown-man bars, which he delivers over crumbly, cloudy samples and smartly calculated breaks where Televangel’s production work soars. The bountiful, jazz-injected break on “Widows Peak” comes through like a concerned stroll through a colorful concrete jungle, following as it does Sleep’s poignant lines: “Been training my mind for warfare, that’s how we hit reps / Crazy how we create beautifully amongst a grim death.”

Drums emerge from the abyss on “Fire Forged” to smack hard, front and center, amid de guest verses from Pacific Northwest rappers Milc and Lord Olo. Prolific Seattle underground hiphop artist AJ Suede turns in an arresting verse atop the dusty horns, staccato snares, and electric piano of “Blaksmith.” Incorruptible Saints is a wake-up call for anyone snoozing on Televangel’s ornate production, Sleep Sinatra’s nimble lyricism, or Nebraska hip-hop in general—I have no doubt that it will grace more than its share of “best-of” hip-hop lists later this year.

—CRISTALLE BOWEN v

SAT JUL 22 / 6PM / ALL AGES

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

+Gully Boys / Destructo Disk / Jigsaw Youth

THU AUG 17 / 8:30PM / 18+ SEAN HEALY PRESENTS

Music by: Zolita / BOOTS! (DJ SET)

Hole Kardashian (Putivuelta Bogotá) and more!

SAT JUL 29 / 7:30PM / 21+

Neo Reunion 2023

with DJs Suzanne Shelton / Jeff Moyer

Rob Kokot / Glenn Russell & More

FRI AUG 11 / 11:30PM / 21+

JOE FIORE PRESENTS

FURBALL: MARKET DAYS

Music by DJ Tom Stephan

Ann Marie

FRI AUG 18 / 8PM / ALL AGES

GLAIVE

With Special Guest Oso Oso / Polo Perks