From singing stars like Mavis Staples at Symphony Center to the annual Frequency Festival, this list for early 2023 in Chicago and the suburbs was impossible to narrow to a Top 10.
There’s a wonderful double-exposure photograph of Nikola Tesla, at the very end of the 19th century, seated in his laboratory reading a book as electricity arcs wildly about him. It reminds me of my first experience of the What Is Music? festival in Melbourne, at the very end of the 20th, where, among 30 or so others standing back to moderate the blasting wall of sound from whichever experimentalists were testing the limits of the PA, a young woman chose to sit on a wooden chair close to the stage and read a paperback.
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The experimental guitarist’s latest piece thrives on tension between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix.