Passing sirens, squealing brakes, fireworks, the metal-on-metal grind of el trains, the incongruously chirpy commercials preceding your streaming videos, and every damn noise coming out of everyone else’s phone on the bus. For people everywhere—but especially for those of us living in the city—unwelcome sounds assail us like a thousand irritating cuts. Drone Activity Chicago, which is part of Red Bull Music Festival Chicago 2018, gives the listener a chance to purge those annoyances by pitching him- or herself into an all-encompassing barrage of sound....

QThis is going to sound like bragging, but my appearance is intrinsic to my kink. I’m a gay male gymnast. Most of the guys on my college team are annoyed by the kind of objectification we routinely come in for. (We actually don’t want to be auctioned off at yet another sorority fund-raiser, thanks.) But I’ve always been turned on by the thought of being a piece of meat. I’ve masturbated for years about dehumanization....

Free Fall On Friday I guessed that Gyorgy Palfi’s Free Fall (which screens once more at the Chicago International Film Festival on Thursday at 2:30 PM) would not disappoint viewers looking for something weird. I was right. I couldn’t look away from this unclassifiable Hungarian feature when I caught it over the weekend. Palfi’s imagery evokes classic surrealism, alluding to repressed anxieties about sex and death as they might manifest themselves in dreams....

Swiss-born, New York-based multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux found inspiration for Zeal & Ardor, his solo black-metal project, in the asshole of the Internet: 4chan. Gagneux had taken to asking the online message board’s anonymous users to suggest genres he could blend together, and Zeal & Ardor came about when somebody suggested mixing “black metal” with the music of . . . well, black people, except the commenter used America’s most loaded N-word instead....

Over the last three years or so, I’ve written about nearly 20 new barbecue restaurants. That’s more than the steak houses, Italian joints, ramen-ya, boutique taquerias, and all the other overplayed restaurant trends of the moment. Reiterating the common flaws inherent to most of these barbecue spots has become just as exhausting and formulaic as they are. I went into Mixon’s already skeptical. If you’ve ever judged any professional barbecue competitions, you know that the set of values that determines winning barbecue isn’t the same as lovingly smoked commercial barbecue, which comes with its own challenges with regard to consistency and longevity....

Drummer Jamire Williams spent time in New York in the aughts, working with high-level bandleaders like Robert Glasper and Herbie Hancock and pursuing an R&B-informed vision of jazz. These days he lives in Los Angeles, making music that routinely flouts expectations of what a jazz drummer should be. He was a key part of Jeff Parker’s fantastic groove-oriented 2016 album The New Breed (International Anthem), deftly interweaving acoustic and electronic beats with appealingly off-kilter propulsion, but you can really hear what he’s about on his recent solo effort ///// Effectual (Leaving), where the crisp snap of his playing hits hard....

Earlier this month, the Chicago Park District announced that it had signed an agreement with George Lucas about how things will work when—um, if—he gets permission to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on its lakefront land. Which is one reason why the Lucas Museum is going to need some friends. The announcement directed readers to the website, friendsoflucasmuseum.com, for more information. That turned out to be disappointing—there wasn’t any additional material, just a space to fill in your name and e-mail address for “future updates....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Burna Boy I became a fan of Nigerian singer-songwriter Burna Boy in September, after he dropped the single “Gbona,” which pairs his deep baritone with a jazzy instrumental. When I explored his other work, one track caught my eye: “Heaven’s Gate” from the 2018 album Outside. It features UK pop singer Lily Allen, whose light, controlled harmonies layer perfectly over Burna Boy’s brisk, bouncy singing....

Midwestern Cuisine To be a midwesterner is to be humble and proud of it. Let New Yorkers bray about how they have the biggest and best of everything. Let New Englanders brag about how goddamned old everything is. Let Californians bore us all talking about their stupid perfect weather and southerners go on about all that tragic lost-cause Gone With the Wind shit. Let Texans be Texans. We sit there modestly, quietly, midwesternly, secretly taking note of everybody else’s foibles so we can mock them later amongst ourselves....

Under the moniker “the LSD Tour” (with the cheeky tagline, “It’s worth the trip”), raspy-voiced Americana singer Lucinda Williams, hard-core troubadour Steve Earle (with his band the Dukes), and spiritual son of Bakersfield Dwight Yoakam have been trekking across the landscape of North America this summer. The package tour—which hits Chicago near the end of its run—promotes Williams’s rerecording of her seminal country-, blues-, and folk-rock-influenced 1992 album Sweet Old World (retitled This Sweet Old World) and the 30th anniversary of Earle’s classic Copperhead Road, as well as Yoakam’s new SiriusXM satellite radio station, Dwight Yoakam and the Bakersfield Beat, which features tracks from his back catalog and the music that shaped him....

Giant monster name, giant monster band. It’s been four years since Chicago transplants Gigan released their mind-melting Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery and Super Science—a title that accurately describes the album’s apocalyptic technical-death and space-rock-on-steroids sounds. With their brand-new Undulating Waves of Rainbotic Iridescence (Willowtip), they hone their whirling sonic blades until they cut through bone. Like their previous two records, Undulating Waves was recorded with Sanford Parker (in California this time), but it’s the band’s first album with new vocalist Jerry Kavouriaris, who establishes himself as a commanding figurehead at the front of this evil ship while drummer Nate Cotton and founder/core multi-instrumentalist Eric Hersemann (previously of Hate Eternal and Lord Blasphemer) sail through interstellar storms and straight into the heart of the blackened sun....

JODI DARBY Marisa Anderson If your Memorial Day weekend isn’t overstuffed with BBQs be sure to leave a little room in your schedule for concerts; there’s a strong lineup of shows this weekend, and it’s worth holding off on that third helping so you aren’t too full of grilled meats to head to at least a couple gigs on this list. “When I listen to Marisa Anderson’s solo guitar music, I think of Sun Ra’s poem about Tone Scientists,” writes Bill Meyer....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media Bruce Rauner is a great businessman—right? The race for governor took an interesting turn yesterday. Mark Brown of the Sun-Times published the most cogent and urgent argument I’ve seen yet for not voting for Bruce Rauner. And the Tribune published the name of a third candidate, welcome news to voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for Pat Quinn either. Illinois is full of people who see the need and would so strive....

A lot of the roots in American roots music stem from Africa, as Malian-born D.C. musician Cheick Hamala Diabate demonstrates whenever he goes onstage. Diabate plays the banjo and the instrument’s African ancestor, the ngoni, and performs with a sprawling group of musicians, the Griot Street Band, who play horns, guitar, and a dizzying array of percussion. The performances don’t so much join African and American sounds as they remind you that their musical traditions have been fused and re-fused for so long that for some artists, they might as well be one....

—Kathie Kane-Willis, Chicago Urban League director of policy and advocacy Late last July, on the day Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law a statewide decriminalization measure barring cops from criminally charging individuals caught with small amounts of marijuana, a 22-year-old African-American man was arrested by Chicago police officers on the city’s west side after he told them he had about $10 worth of weed on him. The officers were on patrol in the 4200 block of West Madison just before 11 PM July 29 when they spotted two men “engage in what appeared to be a hand to hand transaction,” according to their report....

I know I wasn’t the only one who was shocked when I learned of Mac Miller’s death on Twitter yesterday. My timeline was flooded with “RIP” and “I can’t believe it.” I, along with most of my peers, have been listening to Mac Miller since he released “K.I.D.S.” in 2010. We were there for Blue Slide Park, his first studio album released in 2011. We were there for his transition into a legitimate hip-hop artist that was cemented by his 2013 joint project with Vince Staples, “Stolen Youth....

AP Photo / Tony Gutierrez Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston isn’t exactly living the life of a typical undergraduate. The regulars in our Sunday morning breakfast group were talking about Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, and somebody said NFL players “live in a bubble” and believe they can get away with anything. He meant a bubble of entitlement. I think there’s a bubble, but it’s not exactly how he imagines it....

The sound of sensational Polish band Batushka melds black metal with the grand, eerie chants of the Eastern Orthodox litany. They more or less play it straight, though they’re not a religious band. Batushka’s 2015 debut, Litourgiya—which featured lyrics in Russian and received well-deserved gushing reviews upon its release—has just received a deluxe reissue from Metal Blade Records, which snapped the band up and sent them on their first North American tour this summer....

Emo-leaning contemporary posthardcore bands such as Touche Amore, La Dispute, and Pianos Become the Teeth have stuck it out long enough to bear fruit and deserve the reverence bestowed on them by younger musicians who proudly name-check them these days. I Made You Myself, a five-piece from suburban Lake County, list those acts as influences on their Facebook page alongside Billboard screamo successes Underoath and north-suburban deathcore unit Oceano, and sure enough, on a recent self-released split with Missouri’s Mocklove, the group employ lessons from all of the above—vocalist Jason De Leon growls with metallic fury as they perform with the clean precision of an anthemic rock band aiming for the charts....

As far as groove-driven heavy psych bands go, Philly’s Ecstatic Vision, right down to their grandiloquent name, ain’t necessarily cracking any mold. But then again, who says they’re trying to? A blend of drenched, swirling MC5-style riffs, Krautrock-influenced rhythms, and Beefheart-like freak vocals, the new Raw Rock Fury (Relapse) is very much a shrine to the band’s makers, existing within a slow-pulling limbo bookended by two dynamic poles: extreme wild-out psych and laid-back deep-pocket psych....