Watching Ayako Kato dance, it’s as though she’s suspended in time. Slow and deliberate, the Japanese-born Chicagoan is meticulous in Blue Fish, her world premiere about “balance,” “equilibrium,” and “humanity’s relationship to nature.” The piece dates as far back as 2013, when Kato began developing it in response to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster that in 2011 forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes. The surrounding region has been virtually uninhabited ever since....

Car Con Carne/Kickstarter James VanOsdol in car, with barbecue I can think of only one time that I’ve ever been on radio or TV (a small sample, admittedly) when there was really first-class food in the green room. That was at WGN Radio a few months back, and the other guest was Barry Sorkin of Smoque who arrived with the full catering setup full of brisket, so it’s not really a fair comparison....

Big Sadie bigsadie.com @bigsadiemusic Runner-Up Lawrence Peters Outfit

heyitsmatthew.com Runners-Up Tony Fitzpatrick Theaster Gates

In May the Ramblers topped Stanford 3 to 1 in their home gym to capture their first NCAA title—just the fifth won by a school outside of California. “It was kind of a storybook ending,” says coach Shane Davis. He seems to have a good thing going. Men’s volleyball has only been a varsity sport at Loyola for 16 years, and as he notes, “I’ve either played with or coached every player to come through the program....

2828 W. Medill 773-276-9603 eastroomchicago.com Runner-Up Punch House

Third Thursday of every month, 8 PM, 1349 N. Wells, 312-943-5397, facebook.com/upstairs.downstairs.54 The notorious Bijou, a gay porn house and sex club around since 1970, is now home to Upstairs/Downstairs, a delightfully eclectic, enlightening, raucous, bizarre, and sexually explicit variety showcase that’s been playing the Old Town institution since February. Each month cocurators and producers Ricky von Anhalt and Miriam Webster take a truly liberal approach to the format, programming stand-up, improv, dance, music, poetry, performance art, video, 16-mm films, site-specific installations—pretty much anything, so long as it has a left-of-center sensibility....

Chicago Mixtape, an interactive website designed to spread excellent Chicago music everywhere, celebrates its third birthday this weekend. The concept behind Chicago Mixtape, which is run by local musician Casey Meehan, is simple: you submit your e-mail address on the website, and at the beginning of each week you get a fresh playlist of diverse Chicago-based music sent directly to you. This week’s mix is their 158th, and focuses on the artists that are going to be playing their massive fund-raiser birthday party at Empty Bottle this Saturday, February 22....

Baritone saxophonist and Chicago native Jonah Parzen-Johnson uses his new album, I Try to Remember Where I Come From (Clean Feed), as a statement of thanks for his artistic roots. He grew up on the south side and became an adherent of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), studying under the great reedist Mwata Bowden, who imparted the organization’s communal sensibility to the young musician. The music Parzen-Johnston now creates in Brooklyn, where he moved in 2006, bears little resemblance to the output of AACM members, but its spirit of creativity and freedom certainly stems from his experiences here....

Improvised solo saxophone performance isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect a 26-year-old newcomer to the scene to jump into with both feet. But Gerrit Hatcher makes a convincing case that he’s ready on his new cassette, Good Weight (Amalgam), a succinct offering that keeps the focus on basic ideas. The album begins with a pair of dedications to two often overlooked heavies of the free-jazz era—fellow tenor saxophonists Frank Lowe and Frank Wright—on which Hatcher reveals a flair for motific improvisation, uncorking a richly marbled tone spiked with leaps into his instrument’s extreme upper register....

Britt (right) stars with Toreenee Wolf in Unsound. Tonight at 8:30 PM and tomorrow at 6:15 PM, Darious Britt will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center to introduce Unsound, the new movie that he wrote, directed, starred in, and financed himself. Unsound is a labor of love in more ways than one, as the story is based on Britt’s real-life experience of caring for his mother, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder....

Once upon a time, hyperlocal news was seen as the bright new future of journalism. One of the brightest of the hyperlocal sites was EveryBlock, founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty with a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant. Unlike its main rival, AOL’s Patch, it wasn’t staffed by overworked and underpaid young reporters. Instead all its news came from message boards and links to public records. All at once, you could get the latest crime statistics, look for an outdoor yoga class in the park, or find out that your favorite neighborhood restaurant was about to close—and look at the business permit for the establishment slated to take its place....

Eryn Allen Kane erynallenkanemusic.com @ErynAllenKane Runner-Up Davey Dynamite

Hamilton PrivateBank Theatre www.broadwayinchicago.com/show/hamilton-an-american-musical Runner-Up Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Images carry more weight than ever these days, and their viral proliferation can crowd out other realities. A relentless news cycle of taped-off crime scenes, memorial shrines, and survivors mourning gun victims can, by sheer accretion, become the media shorthand for a community at risk. Chicago’s south and west sides have been plagued by this as high murder rates have come to define their neighborhoods to outsiders. But this year’s 24th annual Black Harvest Film Festival, which runs through August at Gene Siskel Film Center, includes three Chicago-based documentaries that buck the media narrative, focusing on vibrant, determined, civic-minded personalities....

Experimental musician Mike Kuhn first caught my ear as the drummer for 1994!, a gutter-emo band from Pennsylvania I’m convinced would be a little more popular if its name wasn’t so hard to Google. Kuhn also makes a lot of noise as Nah, and recently he teamed up with a rapper named Givv to release a pay-what-you-want EP of experimental hip-hop tunes. The most accessible of the bunch is “Breath, Rest, Dig, Rule,” which is today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Every year as December rolls in, a familiar feeling of dread descends upon me. It’s got nothing to do with the holidays. Compiling year-end album lists fills me with anxiety—it’s an exercise in arbitrary ranking much of the time, but what bothers me more is the knowledge that I’ve missed out on so much stuff over the past year. Usually I start cramming, listening to albums that I’ve been putting off for months....

Piper Ferguson White Lung Before the nostalgia bomb of this weekend’s Riot Fest goes off, there’s still a few musical activities happening around town during the first half of the week. Tonight, Reggie’s celebrates its seven-year anniversary with a show headlined by huge metal acts KEN Mode and the Atlas Moth. Tomorrow night, local production team The-Drum gets things spacey and bassy at the Hideout. And on Wednesday, noise-rap group Clipping....