Chicago Calling, Vol. 5
Purelink, David Grubbs, Frederik Rasten and more come to town
photo by Jon Salazar
Welcome back everyone! I’ve had this series on hiatus for the past few months due to having overcommitted myself (as usual) but now we’re back. From here on out this series will be happening monthly rather than biweekly, which will give me more time to focus on some of the other things I’ve been working on recently. It’s been a bit of a slow past couple of months as Chicago turns into a frozen shithole, but February promises to be an especially fruitful time for live music. Here’s why:
Purelink and Pan•American at Empty Bottle - 2/5, 9 PM
Chicago’s favorite boy band returns to their home turf this Wednesday, and despite committing the cardinal sin of EDM (moving from Chicago to New York) we still love the SOBs anyway. In all seriousness, one of the biggest stories of the 2020s has been the reemergence of chillout music within a landscape of ever-expanding opportunities for intricate sound design. The Purelink boys have been at the forefront of this wave of laptop dub heads, and as generally hostile as I tend to be towards anything that receives that level of hype, I must say that they deserve their flowers: their album Faith from last year might be their best yet. They’ll be playing Empty Bottle on Wednesday alongside fellow Chicago legend Pan•American, whose music has rocked my shit for years now. I’m never the right person to judge, but I feel like he doesn’t get enough credit for how ahead of the curb he was, at least amongst my generation. Show them some love.
outsidenightair, Erik Kramer and Atticus Van Holten at an undisclosed location - 2/7, 8 pm
And the ambient train keeps on rolling. This is a DIY show put together by my good friend Erik Kramer, with a rare lineup that consists exclusively of homies. With Purelink having abandoned their friends and loved ones here in Chicago years ago, outsidenightair is one of the last people standing doing that kind of textured / glitchy ambient type thing that I associate with labels like West Mineral and 3XL (as corny as genre names often are, I wish I had a less unwieldy way to describe it). Her music is both utterly transfixing and completely unpretentious, which is hard to come by in ambient circles these days. Erik’s one of the only people in town doing the kind of haunted pastoral thing that I associate with a lot of my favorite ambient music coming out right now - if you liked that Annie A album that came out last year you’ll know what I’m talking about. Speaking from experience, he’s also one of the deepest heads I know, and is working within a lineage going back to the heady experiments of the New Weird America scene but totally doing his own thing with it. Lastly, Atticus Van Holten is a true master of dusty basement-sounding ambient folk. It’s maybe a little like Jandek if he was a nice midwestern guy instead of a mysterious weirdo from Texas. Don’t miss this one.
Frequency Festival - Constellation and Bond Chapel, 2/24 - 3/1
Up until literally this morning, I was prepared to write a long spiel about أحمد [Ahmed]’s Chicago debut and how if anyone reading this misses that show they’ll be regretting it for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, the group has had to cancel their U.S. tour, and now my day is pretty much ruined. Fortunately, the great David Grubbs - a previous Unknown Rhythms interview victim and a true mensch - has agreed to take their place, and he’ll be performing performing as part of the Frequency Festival on 2/25. Like أحمد [Ahmed], I first saw David play solo at the Big Ears festival a year ago, and his spare set of sidewinding guitar excursions was a much-needed moment of calm during a very hectic week. You can get a better sense of his music and his history from reading my interview with him, but this is definitely a must-see show. Rage Thormbones, an insane trombone duo of composers Weston Olencki and Mattie Barber, is still opening the evening, and their work is proof that drone music can still be genuinely challenging and rewarding.
The festival, which is run by fellow writer / Buttrag mastermind Peter Margasak, has always provided great opportunities to bear witness to some of the most groundbreaking contemporary composition work happening around the margins. Despite أحمد [Ahmed]’s cancellation, this is still definitely the most exciting Frequency lineup I’ve seen since moving here 3-4 years ago. I’m especially looking forward to seeing Frederik Rasten, a composer and guitarist at the forefront of microtonal composition today, make his debut U.S. performance at Bond Chapel on the 22nd. He’ll be performing solo and in a duo with Alasdair Roberts, an incredibly underrated Scottish folk singer who I’ve loved ever since my Latin teacher introduced me to his work when I was in high school. Olivia Block, who has long been one of my favorite musicians working today, will be performing brand new pieces for piano, voice and electronics at Constellation on the 26th - I’ve never not been blown away by seeing her perform, so I’m sure this will be no different.
Here’s some other shows I didn’t have time to cover in detail but are nonetheless worth your interest:
Norman W. Long album release show at Elastic Arts - 2/4,8:30 PM
Kaho Matsui / blu. / Donkey Basketball at blip - 2/6, 8:30 PM
Elastro: Westerlund/Hagen, Bonnie Han Jones, Clinkman/Greene at Elastic Arts - 2/14, 8:30 PM
nice words. subscribing, finally. and thanks for shouting blip
https://blippp.org/