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If you’re ever tired of hearing standards, coax guitarist Marc Ribot into playing them. Reconciling the Dave Brubeck original and what’s called “Take 5” on Ribot’s latest work with his trio, Ceramic Dog, is almost too difficult to do. A phrase kicks up every once in a while harkening back to the ur-recording, but the punky rhythm section allows Ribot to lose it and wander back into the fold. The tact Ribot takes here is roughly how he approaches whatever can be considered jazz today. Having worked with gutbusters like Tom Waits and chord chompers like McCoy Tyner allows for a ridiculous range of music to hue Ribot’s guitar playing. Dude’s confident and adventurous enough to take Mary Halvorson, another guitarist, on tour—something folks more concerned with the spotlight than the end product just wouldn’t do. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: John Mourlas

By Dave Cantor

Black-clad freaks, gather. We’re here today eulogizing Oyarsa and its untimely demise. The metal duo still had so much to explore. But Noah Coleman has seen fit to take his guitar to the unknown wilds of northern Idaho, where the only thing outnumbering trees and mountains are militia men, dedicated to wresting freedom from some invisible tyrant—some secret Muslim.

The death rattle, its fits and shivers, has made seeking perspective on Oyarsa’s final Chicago performance from musicians sharing the bill a healing thing—one that can’t replace what Chicago’s losing, but can serve as a coda to the band’s truncated career. Read the rest of this entry »

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As the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. At the end of October, Matt Clark and Jeremy Lemos of the unconventional sound-based band White/Light performed a live re-creation of Funkadelic’s immortal rock/psych/funk album, “Maggot Brain.” Their set was part of Playing Favorites, a musical series occurring the last Sunday and/or Monday of every month at the Whistler in Logan Square.

This White/Light show went far beyond a forced attempt at covering assorted P-Funk hits. Clark and Lemos revealed a candid sense of Maggot Brain’s true influence by interpreting the album in their own musical style—which is often described as experimental drone-guitar. Lyricless, it sounds like the music that might exist if the fate of the human race fell subject to computer domination, like in “The Matrix:” hypnotic mainframe pulsations layered with screaming drills evocative of dental machinery. An unlikely comparison for innovators of the funk music sound. Read the rest of this entry »

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What ties this bill together isn’t necessarily going to be audible to casual listeners. Detroit’s spazzy Tyvek, krauty CAVE and the hard-to-palate Running sound remarkably different, while each act attempts to assimilate music from the seventies and early eighties into some sort of contemporary context. Tyvek and Running deal in more punky strains, the latter pulling on hardcore’s yolk more than the other two groups performing. Tyvek turns over the corpse of early Rough Trade acts, adding in a downer Midwest vibe that dour Brits wouldn’t be able to conjure even if it were their goal. With a headful of their hometown’s history, the ever-shifting Tyvek lineup has been able to dash its jangly paranoia with a garage intent, resulting in weirdly satisfying simplicity. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Since 2007, Chicago’s Mako Sica—Polish-born guitarist and trumpeter Krys Drazek, guitarist Brent Fuscaldo and percussionist Mike Kendrick—has released an international stew of rock, jazz and noise, culminating in the pending release of “Essence,” its fourth proper disc.

Earning the opportunity to issue music through imprints like Permanent Records, Plus Tapes and La Société Expéditionnaire, it’d be expected the band has amassed significant attention around the city. It hasn’t. But what brought Mako Sica to the attention of those label honchos is a genuine desire to dash its music with monkish moans and skittering guitar, all supported by intuitive percussion.

The band’s latest offering, “Essence,” sports three extended tracks, including a studio version of “Fate Deals a Hand.” The track, which was initially released on a tape simply called “Live at the Subterranean,” is drawn out a bit in its latest incarnation. But the composition also takes on a lighter tone on the newer recording. Fuscaldo says the track’s studio realization came at a time when the trio was properly prepared to get it down on tape. As a living organism, “Fate” groans in and out of its various sections, vaguely jazzy noodling heaped atop of Kendrick’s free-drumming while Drazek’s trumpet inspires visions of Miles cooling out, slumped over with shades on.

It’s on the version opening “Essence” that Mako Sica more easily approaches a shamanistic vibe, something that’s spread out over the course of its recorded career. Here, Fuscaldo harmonizes with his bandmate’s guitar coloring, bells and sundry percussive noises, making the music seem fitting for play at a monastery or any one of Chicago’s DIY venues. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine getting a glimpse of your favorite band’s entire career, from their earliest output to their most famous work, with detailed liner notes accompanying more than two decades of recordings.

That’s how Allison Schein describes the Malachi Ritscher Collection, an archive of more than 4,000 unique live recordings of Chicago’s experimental and improvised music scene. Schein is the archive manager of the Creative Audio Archive, an initiative of the Experimental Sound Studio that launched a recently successful Kickstarter campaign to preserve the late Ritscher’s personal library.

“It is the most complete documentation of what was going on in a very important music scene,” Schein says. Read the rest of this entry »

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So late in the year, the frequency of quality festivals tapers off. But setting off that autumnal awe is the tenth installment of Adventures in Modern Music, a joint venture between the Empty Bottle and The Wire, to bring together a sizable selection of out-sounds from different genres. One of the better-known acts to be fitted into this sprawling look at contemporary music is R. Stevie Moore, who’s been given credit for presaging the slew of home-recording projects clogging up the internet nowadays. His work’s something like Daniel Johnston’s in that there’re clearly some ghosts being worked out in each affectional composition. He performs Wednesday. To highlight Adventures’ desire to strip genre of meaning, Rob Mazurek’s São Paulo Underground takes a spot on stage during the same evening, raving up experiments that use jazzy frameworks birthed from south of the equator. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s almost impossible to properly comment on a music so mercurial that its performer can spread recordings over sundry tapes, records and digital pursuits without having followed a single path to its conclusion. M. Geddes Gengras, a multi-instrumentalist and electronics whiz from Los Angeles, is best understood through his relationship with the Not Not Fun crew and Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones. That latter figure and Gengras recently headed to Jamaica and recorded alongside a roots group, famous for its work a few decades back. It’s not the resultant music that should help define Gengras—although it was as engaging a clutch of tracks as any to be issued during the past year—but the spirit of invention that went into the project. Toying with synthesizers and whatever vintage Moog is sitting around only has a finite shelf-life. Gengras is able to coax emotive swooning sounds from his electronic companions, pushing past whatever the instrument’s pioneers could have intended. Read the rest of this entry »

Sun Araw/Photo: Fabian Villa

By Dave Cantor

Electronic experiments in the States  and Jamaica’s vocal tradition may be one of the few remaining untapped combinations in the music world. Luckily, Cameron Stallones, who performs and records as Sun Araw, was already privy to the work of a North Carolinian who wouldn’t distinguish between acoustic folk traditions and 1950s minimal compositions. Unwittingly influenced by Henry Flynt’s recombination, Stallones generates at the crossroad of disparate sounds.

“Some of that stuff is the most relentlessly psychedelic music—like the violin strobe stuff,” Stallones says of Henry Flynt’s fiddle improvisations, which are set atop looped drones for 1981’s “You Are My Everlovin’.” Read the rest of this entry »

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From track to track, it’d be difficult to deduce which Lightning Bolt long-player one’s listening to. But with the drums-bass setup, that’s unsurprising. What is out of the ordinary is the ruckus drummer Brian Chippendale and basser Brian Gibson are able to summon from their pair of instruments. Beginning as a Rhode Island School of Design project and branching out to international van dwellers, Lightning Bolt’s sub-terra popularity followed the broader emergence of a self-sufficient noise scene, replete with low-rent tape releases and enough DIY venues to support a torrid touring schedule. Read the rest of this entry »