Last month singer, rapper, and songwriter Jean Deaux dropped the EP Krash, one of the best local releases in a season overwhelmed with great new Chicago music. Her minimal R&B beats, downy melodies, and serene singing ought to help you feel cozy throughout the long, cold winter ahead. Ever since the release of Krash, Gossip Wolf has been keeping an eye out for a local Deaux show, and this week one finally popped up: on Friday, November 16, she performs at the Virgin Hotel’s rooftop bar, Cerise....

The new comedy Sex Tape plays like a series of advertisements: for the iPad, the personal-assistant app Siri, YouPorn.com, and Jason Segel’s dietician. Segel—whose dramatic weight loss has been much noted in the press—and Cameron Diaz play a married couple, Jay and Annie, who try to reinvigorate their flagging sex life by making a home movie on Jay’s iPad in which they attempt every position in The Joy of Sex. Jay carelessly saves the video to a sharable drive, and because he regularly gives away his old iPads to friends and colleagues, they can all access the file....

Josefina Asconapé was born in Buenos Aires and began her career performing jazz standards and chansons in Paris. Now based in Chicago, she’s developed a style that fits neatly into the local indie-pop scene, with touches of country and folk thrown into the mix. On “Run, Cowboy, Run,” from this year’s Starry Dome (Mirasol), Asconapé dabbles in enjoyably low-key western myth-making, with an inevitable shoot-out that results in humiliation but no death; her sweet vocals contrast charmingly with the music’s ominously spacious Morricone flourishes....

Local duo Laughing Eye Weeping Eye play buzzing, ancient-sounding tunes whose stately harmonies and compelling drones remind this wolf of Dead Can Dance and Nico. It can’t hurt that singer and harmonium pumper Rebecca Schoenecker is also a tarot reader—she can definitely cast musical spells, especially with help from the band’s other half, Patrick Holbrook, whose arsenal of stringed instruments includes Turkish spike fiddle and ukelin. The video for “Earth,” from their new cassette, Once Was You, features daggers, robes, and eerily beautiful forest scenery....

“Mockingbirds sing sweetly and can mimic dozens of other birds,” Marja Mills writes in The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee. “They are tough, too, however, and don’t take kindly to other birds infringing on their territory. There’s something strong but also vulnerable about mockingbirds; those qualities applied to the one in the tree as well as the ones living in the modest brick house next door to the similar one I was renting....

One totally reasonable reaction to damaged industrial music is to turn it off. No matter how impressively it might creep and writhe and explode, the sheer hostility and balefulness of the blown-out everything can be hard to take in heavy doses. New York duo Uniform, who happily tip their hat to Big Black, navigate that slippery slope via the work of producer/guitarist Ben Greenberg. On January’s Wake in Fright (Sacred Bones) he’s prone to relentlessly pulverizing a track into rubble (“The Light at the End (Cause)”), but he can just as easily finesse a twisted rock ’n’ roll lick from the noise (“Habit”) or build a track off a meaty power-chord riff that in another life could’ve been the foundation of a Dead Boys track (“The Killing of America”)....

Lowriders are much more than just decked-out automobiles. The distinctive elements of the custom vehicles—their sidewalk-scraping stature, powerful hydraulic lift systems, decorative paint jobs, and well-appointed interiors—are all rooted in Mexican-American pride. The subculture, which emerged in southern California in the middle of the last century, was born out of a desire to stray from the predominant Anglo car culture and create something uniquely Chicano. In the 1970s, Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles was a veritable auto show every Saturday night as lowriders cruised the strip....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 3, 2017. Analyzing how the “Laquan effect” has changed Chicago Gun violence has increased dramatically in Chicago since the November 2015 release of a police dashcam video showing former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting unarmed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald to death with 16 shots. The video angered the majority of Chicagoans, including the at-risk west-side children and teens taught boxing by former gang member Derek Brown....

Theater Oobleck’s Martha Bayne sounds overwhelmed when we talk by phone. Over the August 4 weekend Oobleck will be producing Closed Casket, which she describes as a “music project being put on by a theater company that involves a visual art form no one understands.” She adds that the event is huge and logistically complicated. Also arcane, eccentric, and moody—a three-day celebration of angst. “The moral” of Closed Casket, she says, “is despair and folly....

Courtesy of David Beltran/Starfoxxx Starfoxxx at the Empty Bottle Local-music stalwart David Beltran wears a lot of hats. He cofounded FeelTrip, a collective and record label that once operated out of a cavernous loft in the South Loop—Beltran and his cohorts threw DIY shows featuring the Orwells, Sepalcure, and Dirty Beaches, and the space also included a studio that Yawn and Twin Peaks used to record sessions. Beltran’s also a talented visual artist, and I’m a fan of his Chicago band calendar and his “Feeltrip Lovers” T-shirt, which I wrote about in the 2013 edition of the Reader‘s Best of Chicago....

David Radler remembers the phone call from Donald Trump sometime around the year 2000. Trump said he was out on the street sizing up the old Sun-Times building, which stood on the north bank of the river on the east side of Wabash. Not that Trump had any interest in the Sun-Times building itself, but as he told Radler, it occupied the best site in the city. “I want to do a deal,” said Trump....

Leor Galil, Reader staff writer ILoveMakonnen featuring Drake, “Tuesday” I’ve been listening to Drake’s remix of the breakout hit from oddball Atlanta singer-rapper ILoveMakonnen since it came out in August, and I haven’t gotten sick of it yet. It still slays me when Drake breaks out a fragile, suave falsetto and sings: “Always workin’ OT overtime and outta town.” J. Johari Palacio, thought catalyst at Perpetual Rebel Portishead, Portishead Being the Los Angeles-based “Wu-Tang Stan” that I was back in the mid-to-late 90s (thanks to KXLU’s We Came From Beyond, hosted by Mike Nardone), I was knee-deep into RZA’s first album, Bobby Digital in Stereo....

It’s really easy to make a movie that five people understand,” director Steven Soderbergh recently told the New York Times. “It’s really hard to make something that a lot of people understand, and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.” Soderbergh can speak with authority on the subject: over nearly three decades, his films have ranged from eclectic indie projects (Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Bubble) to box office hits (Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike)....

Q: I’m a 34-year-old straight woman. I’m monogamous and have an avoidant attachment style. I’ve been seeing a guy I really like. He’s just my type, the kind of person I’ve been looking for my whole life. Thing is, he’s in an open relationship with someone he’s been with for most of his adult life. He was sneaky—he didn’t reveal he was in an open relationship until the second date, but by then I was infatuated and felt like I wasn’t in control of my actions....

In May, my Reader colleague Leor Galil took a long look at the surfeit of summer music festivals in Chicago. As he subsequently tweeted, folks here are often so eager for a reason to get outdoors when the weather’s warm that it seems like they’ll accept almost anything: “People want to be outside at an event, does it really matter what you put in front of them?” Circuit des Yeux Sat 7/21, 4-4:45 PM, Blue Stage...

When I wrote my B Side feature about bopping, the playful and infectious dance born on Chicago’s west side, Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber told me the one thing that would likely make the dance movement a big hit on a national level is a song. Increasingly it’s looking like that tune could be Dlow’s “The Dlow Shuffle,” which is a musical manual that teaches you how to pull off the dude’s nimble moves....

Danny Lyon doesn’t want to talk about the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. The legendary documentary photographer won’t say much about riding alongside Cal, Funny Sonny, Johnny, and the rest of the leather-clad gang in the 1960s, on an old Triumph cobbled together in a Hyde Park garage out of parts kept in coffee cans. He won’t go into great detail about the photos he took with his trusty Nikon: Benny, leaning back in the saddle, a silhouette lit up from streetlights and neon signs at Grand and Division; Big Barbara, with eyes you could get lost in, staring into a jukebox; or Andy, drinking Hamm’s longnecks off a pool table at the Stoplight bar in Cicero....

Thursday, August 31 Chicago Cultural Center GAR Rotunda 11 AM till 4:30 PM A Jazz Village featuring Chicago’s jazz community Claudia Cassidy Theater 11 AM The Evolution of Afro-Cuban Jazz: A Talk with Ignacio Berroa 12:15 PM Thaddeus Tukes Quintet 1:45 PM Tim Stine Trio 3:15 PM Dave Rempis Quintet performing Jackie McLean’s Action Randolph Square Noon Curtis Prince Band featuring Ari Brown 1:30 PM West End Jazz Band 3 PM Southport Records celebrates 40 years of Sparrow...

It’s not just the title. Down to the name of its central character—Rosemary Ward—Manny Tamayo’s one-act drama is evocative of the Ashley Judd, not-quite-horror thrillers that were ubiquitous in movie theaters in the late 90s, the type that later found everlasting life on cable networks like TNT. Widow to a notorious defense attorney for crime bosses, Ward (Allison Cain) faces down a gang of crooked cops who invade her Lincoln Park brownstone set on looting the cash fortune they believe her husband earned off their backs....

One night in February 2016, a group of friends and roommates in Melbourne, Australia, decided to have some fun and play a little music. By the next day they’d recorded and released an EP, Giddy Up, under the name Amyl & the Sniffers—“Amyl” comes from the name of front woman Amy Louise Taylor, and from there the joke is pretty self-explanatory. This scuzzy four-piece is inspired by garage and early punk (specifically the gritty, explosive variety that bubbled up in Australia in the 70s and 80s), the rowdy, straightforward rock of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo, and outlaw country, among other things....