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In an e-mail interview with Dominican music site Vents Magazine, Chicago art-rock foursome Woongi claim they wrote their forthcoming second album, Rip’s Cuts (Sooper), to “sync up” with a 1993 family film called The Skateboard Kid. Though I’ve never seen it, I’m more than willing to listen to musicians who say they’re inspired by a flick featuring a magical flying skateboard voiced by Dom DeLuise. Woongi approached Rip’s Cuts with borderline cartoonish audaciousness, using ever-shifting prismatic synths to set a different tone on each song—and they get particularly experimental on the grandiose but occasionally anxious prog-adjacent number “Tired Fortress....

In June, the Washington Post published an article about the June 4, 1989, slaughter in China’s Tiananmen Square, when armed tanks and the Chinese army opened fire on tens of thousands of protesters peacefully demanding the country’s repressive, authoritarian regime move toward a democracy. The death count ranges from hundreds to thousands—China has made statistics unavailable and scrubbed the country’s Internet of any mention of the uprising. As the Post noted, many Chinese born after 2000 don’t even know the brutally repressed revolution happened....

Plenty of ensembles in jazz and new-music circles have put their spin on the idiosyncratic compositions of the blind New York composer Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, who died in Germany in 1999. Self-taught and usually homeless, he was derisively known as the Viking of Sixth Avenue for the eccentric headdress and spear he sported. Moondog was a sui generis presence among the city’s jazz and classical communities during the 50s and 60s, hanging out with musicians at the New York Philharmonic by day and jamming with beboppers in clubs by night....

A charismatic person somehow emanates levity, intimacy, and self-assuredness, all at once. Charisma is talked about like it’s an inborn quality—but I think it’s something that’s summoned. My story this week is born, in part, from a desire to understand what charismatic people are like when they’re not being watched—and who gets hurt when image supersedes reality. In this case, two progressive arts organizations serving Black and Brown youth—Young Chicago Authors and Free Write Arts & Literacy—are reeling over allegations of sexual abuse by a former employee....

I would rank Zama, an Argentine period drama playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, alongside Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle, Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God, Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice as one of the major cinematic events of the decade. The film marks the long-awaited return of writer-director Lucrecia Martel, who hadn’t released a film since The Headless Woman in 2008....

Does a “master drawing” have to be drawn by a master? What is a “master drawing”? Furthermore, how does one qualify as a “master” draftsman? The Art Institute’s new survey show, “Master Drawings Unveiled: 25 Years of Major Acquisitions,” won’t answer any of these questions, but it does contain enough pleasurable works to interest those who appreciate the art of drawing—in particular, people who draw, whether for a living or for recreation....

Apartment 3A Talk about your sweet nothings! Written by Jeff Daniels (best known lately for his turn as TV news anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s The Newsroom), this romantic comedy wouldn’t amount to much even if director Ron OJ Parson could make it work. As things stand, though, it’s a silly absence with a spooky twist, about a woman named Annie who’s been rubbed raw by a bad breakup and a frustrating job as director of fund-raising for a public-television channel....

Melva Jarvis Noah Sandoval Finalists: John Manion, John Shields, Mark Steuer

Crew Runner-Up: Anthem

Chicago native Meg Remy began recording and performing noise collages as U.S. Girls roughly a decade ago, and through the years she’s inched her sound closer and closer to pop; her 2012 track “Work From Home” sounds like a doo-wop number that curdled during the recording process. Whatever the outcome, her songs serve as reminders of the dark underbelly that often hides beneath pop’s sheen. Now based in Toronto, Remy teamed up with area jazz band the Cosmic Range (which includes her husband, Maximillion Turnbull, aka Slim Twig, as a member) to make In a Poem Unlimited (4AD)....

This is the number the phone calls. It sounds like a terrible idea for a fundraiser, but the one-item sale at alternative film venue the Nightingale on Saturday is something of a put-on. It’s part of an odd, genre-bending art show promoting Kentucky Route Zero, a surrealistic computer game made by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, a pair of School of the Art Institute grads known collectively as Cardboard Computer....

AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast Mayor Rahm Emanuel was sworn in for his second term and resumed his campaign to be seen as a nice guy. Mayor Emanuel wore a suit to be sworn in for his second term Monday, but he sounded a lot like the V-neck sweater Rahm of his reelection campaign. But he also said the city can’t afford to pay for all of them and neither can any other level of government....

Dark Matter Coffee darkmattercoffee.com Chicago has an impressive community of independent coffee roasters and a growing number of hip coffee shops to support them. Dark Matter’s lovingly crafted caffeinated drinks speak for themselves, and the folks at its Ukrainian Village headquarters don’t need to do much besides work with beans to win our approval. But their collaborations with musicians and labels have made picking up a bag even more appealing. Dark Matter launched this impressive series in 2013 with a blend called Cherry Bomb to go with a limited cassette mixtape from excellent local microlabel Cherries Records, and since then the collaborations have gotten even bigger—and sometimes heavier....

Alamo Shoes Runner-Up: City Soles

In 2019 Bill Callahan broke a bout of writer’s block that had lasted more than five years with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, a 20-song concept record about the satisfactions of family life. Gold Record, which arrives just 14 months later, sustains its predecessor’s sparse country-rock sound. And while it wastes no effort on trying to shape its ten songs into a cohesive statement, several tracks elaborate upon Shepherd’s themes. Having embraced fatherhood on Shepherd, Callahan now revels in daddishness by dispensing advice, telling jokes, and laying down rules....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

In 2005, Los Angeles percussionist, DJ, arranger, and producer Carlos Niño began collaborating with fellow Angeleno Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and music director. That year, Atwood-Ferguson joined Niño’s expansive soul-jazz collective, Build an Ark, and helped record studio albums by two of Niño’s other projects: With Voices, the final full-length from progressive hip-hop production duo AmmonContact, and Living Room, from jazzy downtempo unit the Life Force Trio (both were released in 2006)....

For most people, a heady quaff from a hoppy IPA inspires all sorts of synaptic fireworks you struggle to express. If only there was a way to digitize those feelings and express them as some sort of danceable art form, then—finally—someone might understand you the way your smartphone understands you. Marz Community Brewing understands you. And so does digital design firm M1 interactive. Together they’ve collaborated on the brewery’s newest release, Tech Noir, “a West Coast IPA inspired by cyborgian sci-fi masterpiece, The Terminator....