I feel fortunate to have retained any memory at all of seeing Negative Scanner guitarist and singer Rebecca Valeriano-Flores fronting her first band, Tyler Jon Tyler, at the Empty Bottle ten years ago. I’m foggy on the details—I doubt I could even tell you who else was on the bill that evening—but I absolutely remember coming to the conclusion Valeriano-Flores was a force to be reckoned with. Her bellowing voice wasn’t just a hair-raising surprise coming out of someone so small, it also flat-out commanded your attention....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 6, 2017. Even New York Mayor de Blasio is sick of Trump’s obsession with Chicago violence New York mayor Bill de Blasio defended Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and criticized President Donald Trump during a visit to Chicago Friday. De Blasio told the City Club of Chicago that he’s sick of Trump “denigrating” Chicago on social media and in speeches. “And again, it’s become his surrogate for what he thinks about all cities,” he told the crowd....

Last weekend I made the trek down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to take in some of the abundant offerings presented at the Big Ears Festival, arguably the most eclectic and interesting large-scale music fest in the U.S. Few other events juggle such a wide range of approaches—folk, contemporary classical, international, experimental, noise, rock, jazz, electronic, and any number of hybrids. I’ve attended the event three years running, and the sprawl tends to be overwhelming, with concerts stacked up against one another....

PrEP4Love AIDS Foundation of Chicago events.aidschicago.org/site/Calendar?id=101722&view=Detail @AIDSChicago Runner-Up Domu Chicago Apartments

Connect Hyde Park Art Festival Various locations arts.uchicago.edu/event/connect-hyde-park-arts-festival Runner-Up Art In Public Places

If you can’t appreciate watching video clips of Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn wearing costumes by Halston and Bob Mackie and singing “All That Jazz” while going full-on fucking Bob Fosse, then you might as well just stop reading this entry right now. (Note: the clip is from the 1980 TV special Goldie and Liza Together, and I really was rapt when it came on the televisions during a show-tunes happy hour at Sidetrack....

Ingrid Laubrock & Tom Rainey The Blackout, HoZac Records’ annual rockin’ blowout, returns this weekend, and I suggest preparing for it by reading our recent Artist on Artist with “Handsome Dick” Manitoba of Dictators NYC, who headline the festival Saturday. If that’s not your bag there are plenty of other shows to check out this weekend. “Twenty-four-year-old Swedish EDM producer Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, burst onto the pop scene in 2011 with a maximalist, arena-ready sound—and his single ‘Levels,’ a hit on several continents, propelled him so fast and so far that he was playing in actual arenas seemingly overnight,” writes Miles Raymer....

Small Wonder main man Henry Crawford calls his music “agnostic gospel,” and that tag well fits his band’s new EP, Wendy; the kitchen-sink indie-rock songs have nothing to do with religion (or gospel music for that matter), but they’ve got an otherworldly spiritual energy that’s got me hooked. I’ve had Wendy on repeat since I heard it over the weekend, and my favorite tune is “Until I Open My Wings,” which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Just so we’re clear, despite its name, which means “father” in Hebrew, Aba is not an Israeli restaurant. Israel is too polarizing: too much nasty politics, too much war and death and religious strife, too many things you’d rather not argue about when you’re about to spend a lot of money on a really nice dinner. So even though hummus, falafel, labneh, kefta, and a bagel are all on the menu, Aba is a Mediterranean restaurant with, our waiter informed us, “a California accent....

With the results from Tuesday’s suburban municipal elections finally tabulated in several razor-thin races, the time’s come for me to write another one of my world-famous stories about who really won and lost—aside from the candidates, of course. Bolingbrook. The mayor of this distant southwest suburb is Roger Claar, a 31-year incumbent whose record over the years includes getting pulled over by Naperville cops for drunk driving, using his post on the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to help Bolingbrook annex land alongside I-55, and having to step down from his position as village liquor commissioner after it was revealed that he’d accepted donations from one of the bars he was investing in....

Since returning from decades of dormancy in 2007, Chicago art-rockers Ono have become one of the city’s most dependably far-out live acts—they’ve definitely curled Gossip Wolf’s ears a few times! On Saturday, August 25, Ono drops a live cassette on American Damage, the tape label run by synth player and backup vocalist Jordan Reyes. Your Future Is Metal was recorded at the Hideout in July, and Reyes says it features “a 15-minute version of ‘Albino,’ a meditation on suicide, black survival, and the color white in West African communities....

Austin Vesely vimeo.com/austinvesely @AustinVesely Runner-Up The BMP Film Co.

Handi-wash out by the interstate was cheaper, $1.25 per load. I prefered Cheryl’s Laundry on the other side of town. There were no TVs. A true perk. Once a day, a truck drove by stuffed full from the chicken farm down the road. One time, I saw a chicken fall off and, dazed by how large the world suddenly was, break its neck on the pavement. The glass is bent, concave, so everything looks farther away....

In her latest hour-long special, One of the Greats, Chelsea Peretti took aim at the sexist idea that female comedians lean too heavily on menstruation for material. If men got their periods, she said, they’d never shut up about it, especially onstage. But when a woman dares mention her reproductive organs, in conversation and especially in comedy, it touches off a collective male groan. That certainly won’t be the case at the East Room’s Planned Parenthood Stand Up Benefit, featuring a powerhouse lineup of local ladies: Reena Calm, Ali Clayton, Kristin Clifford, and Natalie Jose....

Jesu After last month’s amazing Godflesh show, I’ve been diving headfirst into revisiting the rest of Justin Broadrick‘s catalog. One of my favorites has always been the first Jesu LP, released on Hydrahead ten years ago, and having a reason to spin it again has been great. The entire record is dark, brooding, beautiful, and heavy as all hell. Punishing guitars paired with ethereal synths and deadpan, personal vocals makes for something that sounds like SunnO))) crossing paths with My Bloody Valentine....