Rapper Smino grew up in Saint Louis and still reps the place, even though he’s now firmly grounded in Chicago. It’s where he met several members of his crew, Zero Fatigue, including one of his closest collaborators, wunderkind producer Monte Booker. Booker produced all of Smino’s new Blk Juptr EP, and their chemistry injects a range of colors into the luminous cuts. The instrumentals chatter and hum, reverberating with intimacy and quietly blossoming as Booker arranges and rearranges his minimal palette....

Zanussi’s Family Life (1971) screened at the Chicago International Film Festival this past weekend. The great Polish writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi was in town this past weekend to introduce two of his movies at the Chicago International Film Festival: his 1971 breakthrough Family Life and his latest feature, Foreign Body. (The latter screens again on Saturday at noon.) As I wrote in May when three of his major works—The Illumination (1973), Camouflage (1977), and The Constant Factor (1980)— came through town as part of a touring series of Polish classics, Zanussi is one of the smartest people ever to make movies....

Recording engineer Jamie Carter, who owns East Pilsen studio Carterco, met Nigerien guitarist Hamadal Issoufou Moumine (better known by his nickname, Almeida), in October 2008: the African was in town to play with jazz guitarist Bill MacKay and percussionist Jamie Topper at Dan Godston’s Chicago Calling Festival, and Godston brought the three of them to Carter to document their collaboration. During the late-night session, Almeida began asking about Carter’s ability to do mobile recordings, and two days later, after returning to his home in Niamey, he invited Carter to produce a recording by his popular working band, Tal National....

In the months leading up to this past weekend’s election for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Republican commentators were already playing the Farrakhan card on Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, one of top candidates for the gig. In fact, Farrakhan had repudiated Ellison for having repudiated him. No, they forgot all about the Farrakhan connection, at least for the moment, and simply found another wedge issue to exploit—the still unhealed Clinton/Sanders divide....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That Congress is showing increasing signs of openness to legalizing marijuana? —Mick Dumke • That Sandra Bland’s family is filing a lawsuit against the Texas police officers who arrested her? —Drew Hunt • About the need for a better definition of depression? —Aimee Levitt • That Yoshi Katsumura, the chef of the great Lakeview restaurant Yoshi’s, has died?...

Chicago photographer Ray Contreras captured my favorite moment of Friday night’s downtown inauguration protest. He tweeted a video clip of a young black DJ in a reflective safety-yellow vest rolling a jury-rigged mobile sound system through the crowd, pumping a raunchy ghetto-house track. Its lyrics don’t exactly scream civil disobedience (“Aw shit / Here I come / Hit it from the back / Make me cum”), but the protesters didn’t care—they chanted “Fuck Trump!...

Part of the undercovered and frankly underappreciated Ian’s Party scene of snot-nosed melodic-punk bands that can sweat out sing-along hooks just as well as they can shotgun tallboys of Old Style behind a Dumpster, Fitness put their faith in the power of the triumphant dual-guitar battle between riff boys Mike Hayes and Ian Lee. Their new six-song EP Puppet Show (Don’t Panic)—the release of which, look at that, is being celebrated tonight—features a little bit of cock-rock glitz and glam spewed into the foursome’s abrasive, grimy brand of pop punk....

The first time I listened to Australian singer-guitarist Gabriella Cohen’s Full Closure and No Details (Captured Tracks), I was drawn in by the nonchalance of her performance, but as the songs rolled on I came to realize I was overlooking their concision and tart bite. Now that’s all I can focus on. Cohen, who was previously one-half of a garage-rock duo called the Furrs, reflects some clear influences: the strummy hypnosis of the Velvet Underground, the hazy euphoria of Phil Spector-produced girl groups, and the bacchanalia of 60s psychedelia, which manifests itself during reverb-drenched tracks such as “Beaches” and the needling “Yesterday....

Outside World formed in Chicago three summers ago, around the time singer and guitarist Ben Scott’s old band Brain Idea was on its way out. Originally conceived as a trio alongside bassist and vocalist Hazel Rigby and drummer Evan Jenkins, the band’s first couple of tapes were full of sunny, summery indie pop—the band said they were trying to channel the nostalgic vibes of Polaris—you know, the guys who played the theme song from The Adventures of Pete & Pete—but to me they always sounded like Guided by Voices and Husker Du....

The decision to end Inkwell, the weekly crossword feature I’ve been writing for just under ten years, seemed so organic that I couldn’t deny its correctness. And as I anticipate starting a full-time job as a professor of music in the fall, this is my chance to tell you why this has been special. Inkwell began as a moon-shot idea stoked by the bad vibes of menial employment. From a boxy PC on a cubicle desk, I pitched a hipster crossword to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and once that paper signed on, I used its name to convince other clients to come aboard....

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! The only storm McQueary got, though, was a shitstorm on the Internet, where she was widely condemned for a lack of sensitivity in discussing a disaster that resulted in more than 1,800 deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. In lieu of issuing a nonapology, McQueary issued a nonclarification, saying that she was merely using “metaphor and hyperbole” to make a point about the urgent need for political and economic reforms in Chicago....

In recent years it seems as though there’ve been two Gal Costas. Back in the 60s, she was the popular face of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement, bringing the songs of her compatriots Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to life with a sure-handed grasp of samba and bossa nova, infused with psychedelic experimentation. As with all of Tropicalia’s figures she eventually became a bona fide star, and when she tours around the world she tends to play music that celebrates Brazil’s (and her own) rich musical past, often favoring an old-fashioned sound that eschews rock-influenced hybrids....

I first encountered Adversarial when I wrote about a split with fellow Canadian band Antediluvian that they’d released on Nuclear War Now! in 2012. I described Antediluvian’s sound as “prehistoric, evil, and incomprehensible,” adding that it gave the overall impression of “a furiously stampeding mudslide of teeth and offal that’s not quite contained by the hastily excavated trench with which the good townspeople hoped to divert it away from the Christian children’s home....

Last week Township co-owner Mark “Max” Brumbach sold his stake in the Logan Square restaurant-slash-venue to a trio of new owners: Logan Arcade beer buyer Steveo Segel, Logan Arcade general manager Megann Lesnick, and Naked Raygun bassist Fritz Doreza, who also works at Logan Square bar and venue Quenchers Saloon. “When [Brumbach] was thinking he needed to leave I approached Steveo,” says Township co-owner Tamiz Haiderali. He says the changeover became official Friday, though it will take at least a few weeks for the bureaucratic paperwork to wrap up....

Trumpeter Peter Evans packs a ton of music into just about everything he does, and the quintet that recorded last year’s mind-­boggling Genesis (More Is More) lets him sound the full diapason of his freakish talent. Here he folds his prodigious extended techniques into his relatively straightforward playing, employing them mostly in service of protean improvisation rather than as a focal point (as he often does in his solo practice). He’s been manipulating bop structures for years, beginning with his agile Zebulon trio in the early 2010s, but this band pushes that approach to a fractured extreme....

The exhibits weren’t fully installed when I dropped in to preview the new home of the Chicago Architecture Center (formerly the Chicago Architecture Foundation) last week, but on a return visit this week everything was up and running. Spectacular views outside, especially from the second-story Skyscraper Gallery, reached via a grand wooden staircase (or an elevator ride). The center, a few steps east of Michigan Avenue on Wacker, looks north across the river, toward Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building....

I’m trying to make friends with microbes in the End Times. What am I gonna do when the shit comes down and I don’t know how to do make cheese, cider, kimchi, beer, yogurt, and bread? I’ll be prepping during a two-weekend crash course in zymology at Fermentation Fest—A Live Culture Convergence, which features more than 50 classes on the care, feeding, and eating of fermented foods. Learn how to make colonche, nawait, and pulque with agricultural ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan during a class on American Pre-Columbian Fermented Beverages....

Screamadelica Last summer I randomly pulled out Primal Scream‘s kaleidoscopic, Stones-meets-the-Orb masterpiece Screamadelica (Creation/Sire, 1991) from my CD collection and ended up playing it to death. When the weather’s warm, few things sound as good as a fusion of gospel-blues, midtempo drum breaks, and Bobby Gillespie’s slurring, druggy vocals. One of my favorite tracks on the album is “Loaded,” a mostly instrumental track built around a Lee Perry-esque horn loop, crackly gospel piano, and a killer bass line; the song is actually a remix of a Primal Scream song called “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” by Andrew Weatherall....

Late last month local rapper-producer Valee dropped 1988, a mixtape that draws strength from its brevity. Valee’s songs often last less than two minutes, and he packs every second with his sui generis personality. Last week Lucki followed suit with the full-length project Watch My Back, whose tracks are almost as short—many barely pass the two-minute mark. Lucki’s rapping can make it feel like time has slowed to a crawl, and on Watch My Back he doesn’t adjust his drowsy flow much—he’s more blunt, though, and sometimes he colors his monotone vocals with a whisper of urgency....

For his long-overdue Chicago debut, Berlin-based Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard presents Aion, a multimedia work built around a recording project he conducted in October 2005 within the radioactive zone that surrounds the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Released in 2006 as 4 Rooms (Touch), it consists of four pieces recorded in an abandoned gymnasium, church, swimming pool, and auditorium, where Kirkegaard set up microphones and captured ten minutes of unmediated ambient sound (in other words, “silence”), drawing inspiration from composer Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)....