Brian DeRan Panda Bear Tonight marks the official opening of Thalia Hall, the joint Pilsen venture between Bruce Finkelman of the Empty Bottle and Craig Golden of Evanston’s SPACE. I’ve seen the theater in various states of decrepitude at various times over the last few years, but on my last visit a few months ago its innate beauty had emerged. And I’ve heard good things about the space’s test run last week, a private show by Disappears....

At Berkeley It’s January, which means it’s time for “Stranger Than Fiction,” the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual showcase of new documentaries. In this week’s Reader, we review two movies in the program, The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound and Kiss the Water (the second feature by Eric Steel, director of The Bridge). We also review Liv and Ingmar, a documentary about Ingmar Bergman’s on- and offscreen relationship with actress Liv Ullmann, which plays at the Siskel all week....

Having studied composition in Poland in the 1990s and written extensively for chamber groups, soloists, and orchestras, Argentine sound artist Andrea Pensado has moved over time toward a more intuitive, improvisational approach that dispenses with theoretical niceties. Based in the Boston area since 2002, Pensado has played in a number of loose-limbed projects, and her give-and-take impulses—harsh electronic bloops and high-frequency squalls mix with live instruments in a free-jazz manner—are evident in the trio Los Condenados, whose 2013 album Yeppers!...

My art was developed towards an increasing participation, and the mistrust in the gallery and museum business,” the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica wrote in a letter to an art critic in 1969. This disinterest in institutional art settings, coupled with the experiential, immersive nature of much of Oiticica’s work, makes him a difficult artist to exhibit. Perhaps this is why “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist in the United States....

Most Chicago metal bands seem to find inspiration in its famously brutal and unforgiving winters, resulting in some of the darkest, most hateful music ever committed to tape. Local four-piece Mount Salem, on the other hand, play windswept, lysergic guitar boogie that has more in common with “desert rock,” a style that evolved in the arid wilderness of southern California. The group formed in summer 2012 and the following year self-released an EP called Endless that blends witchy, organ-driven psychedelia with doomy sounds from the dawn of heavy metal—it feels like something that could’ve been recorded in 1970 but was too freaky and dark to find an audience till now....

Brian Case is front man and guitarist for darkly Krautrocking local outfit Disappears, and Jeremy Lemos is the multi-instrumentalist half of noise-worshipping experimental duo White/Light (as well as a well-traveled soundman and occasional Reader contributor). For their mutual side project Acteurs, though, the two of them have mostly jettisoned the sounds of their long-running groups in favor of a tenebrous, synth-heavy mix of early industrial music, Suicide-style protopunk, and avant-garde electronic compositions from the earliest days of the synthesizer era....

Tonight, just two days short of the anniversary of their first gig— opening for Knox Fortune as part of his sold-out record-release show at Lincoln Hall—Chicago synth-based indie-pop duo Grapetooth celebrate their self-titled debut album on Polyvinyl. Grapetooth don’t play out often, but when they do, audiences clamor to see them—on their return to Lincoln Hall in July for a headlining set during Pitchfork weekend, they sold out the entire venue....

Tonight the second Old and New Dreams Festival begins, an endeavor organized by the influential, long-homeless music venue HotHouse. Last year’s three-day extravaganza took place at the Promontory, and this weekend’s events remain in Hyde Park, scooting west to the Logan Center on the campus of the University of Chicago. Tonight’s headliner is the Odean Pope Trio, a group led by the great Philadelphia saxophonist known for his lengthy membership in bands led by Max Roach....

Robert Drea Reparations activist Conrad Worrill: “What happened to African people has never been repaired.” In 2002 a group of African-Americans filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago demanding restitution from JP Morgan Chase, Aetna, CSX, and other corporations with links to slavery before the Civil War. That changed in May, when the Atlantic published “The Case for Reparations,” the provocative and deeply reported article by Ta-Neisi Coates. It showed millions of readers that the issue wasn’t rooted in an abstract philosophical argument but in specific, widespread, and ongoing discriminatory policies, particularly in housing....

Singer-songwriter, keyboardist, and composer Jarboe first drew national attention in the mid-80s for her role in Swans, and she remained the only consistent member of the band other than the group’s founder, Michael Gira, through the band’s first breakup in 1997. She later reconciled her differences with Gira long enough to contribute to Swans’ 2012 landmark, The Seer. But to think of her artistry by Swans alone does her a grave injustice; she’s the creator of 13 solo albums and numerous collaborations (including my favorites, a 2003 album with iconic metal band Neurosis, and a 2015 album with Chicago avant-garde cellist Helen Money)....

Velizar Simeonovski A giant lemur in Ampasambazimba, Madagascar, approximately 2,000 years ago, with elephant birds One terrible day about 3,700 years ago, a herd of dwarf hippos stopped to drink at the Betsiboka River in northern Madagascar. They got swept up in the current and pulled into the Anjohibe cave. The Anjohibe is underground and is very, very dark. The hippos panicked. In their rush to escape, they ran into stalactites and stalagmites and trampled each other and also the bats that were living inside the cave....

In the three years since sushi specialist Macku Chan took over the old Erwin space in Lincoln Park, he hasn’t had much luck channeling the longevity of that pioneering restaurant, a onetime breeding ground for chefs including Paul Kahan and Mindy Segal. First there was Vu Sua, a French-Vietnamese fine-dining fiasco that saw Chan serving fried cod with chocolate sauce and strawberries. Then came Macku Signature, an adjunct to his eponymous sushi joint, where he’d perform feats of insanity like rolling smoked salmon with Laughing Cow cheese....

For the last few weeks, a fellow named Bill Bergman and I have been in heated competition to see which one of us could get better terrible service from the Emanuel administration, to which we so generously pay our taxes. I was waiting for—what else?—the annual audit of the city’s 150-something tax increment financing districts. Which also covers the fiscal year that ended last December. And is also due at the end of June....

“We are unstoppable,” Lianne La Havas sings on the first track from her second album, Blood (Warner Bros.). So far she’s done nothing but prove herself right. The UK singer-songwriter and Prince protege has toured through Europe since Blood‘s release at the end of July, and now she’s about to jog through North America. Live, she backs up her impeccably smooth voice by alternately playing guitar and bass; her band deftly fleshes out the full, rich sound of her studio arrangements....

Many of the best independent record labels mirror the aesthetic of the folks who founded them—if you’re going into business because you love music, that’s natural enough. It’s certainly true of Tompkins Square Records, run by Josh Rosenthal—a devoted record collector, he got started in the music biz in 1989 and launched his own label in 2005. Though Tompkins Square is probably known best for its diverse catalog of fingerstyle guitar music—including the first album by Nashville syncretist William Tyler and a slew of records by British experimentalist James Blackshaw—its total output is incredibly broad....

There’s a spooky ghost sign on the back brick wall at Ina Mae Tavern & Packaged Goods, a faded Dixie Beer logo that figuratively booms “Welcome to the Big Easy” in the overdrawn yat of a voice actor in a New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation promo. Those oysters make the menu at Ina Mae, which is named for Jupiter’s great-grandmother. They’re broad bivalves smothered in molten cayenne-tarragon compound butter, and while you’ll never taste their terroir, they’re hot, gooey gobs of slippery goodness just the same....

When interior designer Aleks Furman’s parents began struggling with health issues, she needed to find a place they could all call home so she could help care for them. She and her sister bought a former tavern in Bridgeport, but the purchase was hardly glamorous. “This building kept dropping in price because it was terrifying,” she says. “I was desperate enough to buy it, and the owner was desperate enough to sell it....

Book reviews don’t often make the front page, but Harold Henderson’s “City On the Hot Seat”— an analysis of Northwestern sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave—made for essential reading when it hit the Reader cover on July 25, 2002. In his Reader essay (which can be read online) Henderson applauded much of Klinenberg’s “social autopsy,” but also poked holes in the author’s pat “left liberal” analysis that pointed a big finger at income inequality and the city’s increasing reliance of the privatization of services....

A couple months ago Vice’s music site, Noisey, debuted an eight-part video series about the local hip-hop scene (or, more specifically, the drill scene) called Chiraq; it’s the second major extensive, embeddable film about Chicago rap to come out this year following World Star Hip-Hop’s documentary, The Field, which tried to focus on the intersection of violence and rap in this city. The people behind Chiraq had the same lofty goal, or at least that’s how they’ve pitched the series, which places Chief Keef at the narrative’s center and moves out from there to cover a few of his pals while occasionally jamming in a “big picture” question about drill’s relationship to Chicago’s ongoing struggles with crime, poverty, and segregation....

The Red Road completed its six-episode run—will it be back? The Red Road, or “Chanku Luta,” is a (mostly) Lakota belief in a “right path”—a kind of code of conduct that’s difficult to define, let alone adhere to. Its purported to have lent its name to The Red Road, a SundanceTV drama created by writer/executive producer Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners) that aims to dramatize the twists and turns, but leaves its audience pondering the road not taken....