Sandy Ewen’s music is a constant series of negotiations. She’s constantly seeing what new sounds she can get out of her guitar, using found objects such as steel-wool scrubbing pads, dowels, bolts, cat-grooming brushes, and lengths of chalk. She’s also an inveterate collaborator who relishes chances to test her compatibility with new acquaintances or to explore possibilities within her enduring partnerships with drummer Weasel Walter, bassist Damon Smith, and guitarist Tom Carter. When she plays with others, Ewen’s style changes according to their input, but her solo work is much more consistent, focusing on gradual transformations of timbre and texture. On the side-length title track of You Win, which is her first solo LP after a slew of CDs and cassettes, she works patiently through bell-like chimes, blown-speaker bursts, elongated whines, and wobbly resonances, testing each element against a couple of others. The shorter pieces on side two develop more quickly, but each one resolves with a satisfying completeness that demonstrates her concern with outcomes as well as processes. Ewen is an architect and visual artist as well as a musician, and she has used architectural-rendering software to compose videos for each of the albums tracks–their constantly morphing shapes and images are as texturally rich as the music itself. v
A lot of theories about how Chicago hip-hop was supposed to operate have been shattered by the events of the past decade–the idea that only one local rapper in a generation could make it big, for instance, or the insistence that the city had a singular sound. While drill became the dominant underground wave, proving that young Chicago rappers and producers with few means or connections could build their own cottage industry outside the mainstream, a panoply of other artists showed how many dimensions the scene actually has: the Era devised “footworking with words,” DLow brought bopping’s euphoric sound to the Billboard Hot 100, and Supa Bwe mined the melodic aggression of screamo years before “Soundcloud rap” broke. At the same time, a loose web of producers laid the groundwork for a style that’s become emblematic of the city’s “alternative hip-hop” community. Most notable among them is Peter Wilkins, better known as Peter Cottontale, whose nuanced blend of neosoul, gospel, R&B, and post-College Dropout hip-hop has enriched some of the best material from local breakout acts such as Jamila Woods, Vic Mensa, and Chance the Rapper. These days Wilkins is best known as bandleader of the Social Experiment, which formed to tour behind Chance the Rapper on Acid Rap in 2013, and he’s played such an important role in every Chance release since then that Chance brought him onstage at the 2017 Grammys for two of his three awards. For Wilkins’s debut album, Catch, he tapped into their growing network of friends and collaborators, including rapper Tobi Lou, R&B star Jeremih, and inimitable gospel star Kirk Franklin. (Catch also contains one of the first appearances by Towkio since the Chicago rapper was publicly accused of sexual assault in January 2019.) Wilkins recently told the Tribune that Catch is bathed in gospel’s uplifting spirit but doesn’t follow genre traditions, and that’s a fair self-assessment: he imbues his songs with R&B tenderness, pop moodiness, and a hint of neosoul sensuality to create atmospheres that feel divine. v
Upstart garage punks the Bobby Lees formed after guitarist-vocalist Sam Quartin moved to Woodstock, New York, and took a suggestion from a friend to recruit her new band mates from the local School of Rock. Now in her mid-20s, Quartin is an established actress who’s played alongside the likes of Crispin Glover, Michael Pitt, and Marilyn Manson, but in the Bobby Lees she gives you the idea that she might prefer basement shows to red carpets. On the new album Skin Suit (Alive/Natural Sound), produced by Jon Spencer, the band show they’ve got the chops and the weirdness to refresh vintage rock, punk, and blues (they do a gritty take on Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man”) without the commercialism that has plagued other prominent garage bands of their generation. Quartin’s unpolished vocals often recall Richard Hell (the record closes with a rousing cover of “Blank Generation”), but the music is memorable enough in its own right to make you want to put highlights such as “Coin” and “Guttermilk” on repeat. The swaggering, minimalist “Ranch Baby” is equally funny and gross, with lead guitarist Nick Casa taking a turn at the mike to ponder a mysterious (and apparently sexy) creamy white substance. On “Last Song,” with its backdrop of sweet, 50s-flavored pop, Quartin delivers a take on “crooning” that sounds like Bobby Darin as a serial killer. Like so many other bands, the Bobby Lees had to cancel their spring tours, but with help from a little word of mouth they’ll surely be playing packed punk shows as soon as social-distancing measures allow. v
In a 2019 interview for WBEZ’s Weekend Passport, Filipinx producer-vocalist Ano Ba said they were inspired to start their own group after seeing a garage band at a favorite Logan Square bar that was made up entirely of white dudes. Ano thought it’d be cheeky to recruit other POC musicians to make garage rock under the name “White Ppl.” White Ppl didn’t end up making three-chord bashers, but Ano teamed up with Black hip-hop artist Cado San and Filipinx vocalist Elly Tier to unlock an alchemical mix that no other configuration of musicians could replicate. After their first session, they emerged in October 2018 with the kaleidoscopic jam “Ilovemybb,” which remixes the past two decades of pop: early dubstep’s haunted vocal samples, funk carioca’s lithe percussion, alt-R&B’s brooding and romantic vocal melodies, bedroom pop’s mellow keys, and harsh sax a la TV on the Radio. Since then they’ve released only two other singles–the softhearted, nostalgic “The Way U Move” and the subtly triumphant “Open Door Policy”–and all three appear on their six-track self-titled debut EP. White Ppl’s lyrics remain firmly fixed on matters of love, but the group’s sonic palette continues to expand–for “Make Me Better,” one of the new songs from the EP, they pull from modern-funk’s supple rhythms, trip-hop’s cool-in-the-pocket melodies, and symphonic pop’s strings. Though White Ppl ends too soon, it shows a glimpse of one of the most promising acts in town. v
Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Vivian McConnell comes from a musical family, and she began enmeshing herself in Chicago’s music scene in the early 2010s, around the time she moved here from Urbana. By then she and her oldest brother, Stan, were playing together in the indie-rock band Santah, and McConnell had also joined indie four-piece Grandkids; she’s since become part of several overlapping underground scenes. Lately her main artistic focus has been her solo project, where she uses the name V.V. Lightbody to honor her pianist grandmother, Virginia Lightbody, but she also provides auxiliary guitar, flute, keyboards, or vocals for a hodgepodge of other acts. She’s contributed to Slow Mass’s thundering posthardcore (2018’s On Watch), Accessory’s sleepy lo-fi ditties (2018’s Blue Tape), and Poplife’s effervescent take on adult contemporary, which they call “Bruce jazz” (the 2019 single “Bad Attitude”). Last year, McConnell debuted a collaboration called Valebol with Dos Santos percussionist Daniel Villarreal-Carrillo, and though they haven’t released any recordings yet, YouTube footage of their inaugural performance at the Empty Bottle last June has whet my appetite. On her second album as V.V. Lightbody, Make a Shrine or Burn It (Acrophase), McConnell blends light bossa nova percussion, austere indie-rock rhythms, snaking guitars, and tender folk vocals with a gentleness that belies the hard work and discipline required to pull off such intricate material. Though McConnell has called her style “nap rock,” she’s more likely to hypnotize you than put you to sleep–the oscillating keys and mellow sax on “BYOB” create an intriguing depth of sound that invites active listening. v
The first time I saw Orkesta Mendoza was at SXSW about five years ago, and the group had already perfected an enormous, vintage Latin big-band sound and intense, punk-like sensibility unparalleled in the Latin scene. Led by bandleader, singer, and guitarist Sergio Mendoza (a longtime member of Calexico and Devotchka), the Tucson indie mambo group cross and recross the southern border of the U.S. on their new album, Curandero (Glitterbeat), topping a foundation of 60s boogaloo with blends of rock, pop, and cumbia and adorning the whole thing with mariachi-infused, mambo-influenced horns. The new album follows 2016’s !Vamos a Guarachar!, and its 14 exhilarating tunes–sung in a mix of Spanish, English, and Spanglish–express the musical DNA of Nogales, Sonora, where Mendoza was born, and the adjacent Nogales, Arizona, where he was raised. On “Eres Oficial,” reminiscent of the 1960s McCoys hit “Hang on Sloopy” (a tune that topped the Mexican charts in 1965 after it was revamped as “Es Lupe” by Los Johnny Jets), singer Quetzal Guerrero makes a cameo, adding swinging vocals to the song’s carefree guitar chords and drumbeat-heavy grooves. Other stellar guests on Curandero include Devotchka’s Nick Urata, who lends his smooth voice to a funky vintage Mexican cumbia on “A Little Space,” and Spanish singer Amparo Sanchez, who appears on immigration-reform-themed “Boogaloo Arizona.” The track “Hoodoo Voodoo Queen,” reminiscent of 1940s Andrews Sisters numbers, shines with impossibly tight harmonies by Moira Smiley, Carrie Rodriguez, and Gaby Moreno, spread across languid pedal-steel twangs and punctuated by bold, honking sax. “Bora Bora” has a smoky, loungey feel, but its winks to mambo and its superbly synchronized horns keep it from feeling cheesy. “The girls are wearing the red dresses,” the band croons on the song’s brief chorus. “They’re waiting to dance and twist.” Curandero is the perfect album for anyone who’s ever felt that sort of anticipation. v
Conceptual artist Natasha Marin’s Black Imagination creates a safe haven for Black folx during a time when it is needed more than ever. As Black communities continue to be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, Black Imagination is not only a book but also a project: an invitation to acknowledge and extend beyond the limitations of our current reality by envisioning a future that centers our wishes, healing, and dreams.
Three years ago, the Black Embodiments Studio (a critical Black art writing residency run by Northwestern alumni Kemi Adeyemi) introduced me to Marin’s work. The residency encouraged its members to investigate explorations of Black aesthetics in Seattle while simultaneously rooting them within a tradition of Black radical thought. As a writer, emerging artist, and a Black girl raised in a sea of whiteness, I was (and still am) validated when I recognized that experiential exhibitions made for and by Black women could happen where I lived. They can happen and can amplify all of our voices, giving equal time to linger on each frequency, texture, and tone.
That night, I stood in line to enter the space and saw Natasha Marin. She asked, in an ancient language that only we know, How do you heal yourself? Now, I have had the pleasure of digitally connecting with Marin to discuss her curated book, her practice, and how Black folx can heal during times of uncertainty.
Mia Harrison: What is the Black Imagination?
Natasha Marin: My nine-year-old says it’s about freedom.
My typically salty teenager suggests that getting there is the hard part. She describes the Black Imagination as a metaphysical space one might have to “take a Matrix pill” to get to–except the other side you arrive at is actually inside yourself.
I would say that the Black Imagination begins beneath the skin that signifies and extends as far as we can cast ourselves across time and space. We always have to begin by unimagining though. We have to decenter the insidious delusion of whiteness to behold the totality of the Black Imagination.
How did the conceptual project come to be?
Picture it: Sicily, 1929. I jest.
Once upon a time there was a Black woman who was secretly a workaholic. That’s me. But since society sees nothing wrong with a Black woman working herself to death, it took this person of the global majority a significant amount of time to figure out how she could hack her own workaholic self-starter system to put energy back in and stave off severe adrenal fatigue. I know that’s not what you’re asking, exactly . . . but it’s still a true story.
My 2016 viral project, “Reparations,” left me emotionally bedraggled by 2018. I had opened myself up like a portal to myriad firsthand testimonies to income inequality based on race. I was called a n***** daily. My life was threatened. I was doxxed. My children were in danger. All this for using digital networking skills to kinesthetically teach “leveraging privilege”?! Never woulda thunk it. Naive to the max. Eighteen nonstop months of my soul opening like an eyeball to so much pain and apathy. My energetic well was bone dry. My body and my family felt like a neglected house. It was time for a change. I needed to replenish myself. I needed to restore myself.
How did that idea expand?
With support from other Black womxn, Amber Flame, Rachael Ferguson, and Imani Sims, I was able to host the first Black Imagination exhibit, “The States of Matter,” at the CORE Gallery in Seattle in January of 2018. Spending a month in the dark surrounded by the voices my collaborators and I collected gave me something back. Something I didn’t realize I needed like food, water, and shelter. That exhibition, where participants were blindfolded and led through a maze of voices by our blind-vocalist docent, Ayanna Hobbs, really jump-started my own imagination and so much has followed.
Black Imagination, the conceptual project, still continues. I’m collecting responses to several prompts from folks all over the world. But so far, Black Imagination has been exhibitions: “The States of Matter,” “The (g)Listening,” “Ritual Objects,” with a fourth (“Sites of Power”) scheduled to open at the Northwest African American Museum in the Spring of 2021; it has also become this beautiful book, which to me is also an exhibition of sorts, taking the form of a book, or perhaps an incantation or a book of spells.
For the most part, what exists in book form never existed in any other form. But on a few occasions, I lovingly transcribed audio I had spent almost a year listening to over and over, so certain pieces could be included in the book. Quenton Baker and Robert Lashley’s pieces are examples–I can still hear their voices in my head when I reread their words today.
How did the contributors get involved in the work?
I have recently had the opportunity to witness again what a robust and resilient global network I have built on social media. This has everything to do with the personalization of my outreach to folks who “the mainstream” often deem peripheral–young people, LGBTQIA+ folx, incarcerated women, people with disabilities, neurodivergent folx, all Black and glorious. Using a handy-dandy web form, I invited folks to upload audio or text responses to three prompts: What is your origin story? How do you heal yourself? Describe or imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued.
How do you heal yourself?
Spending time as deep in the cut of my Black Imagination is very rejuvenating. Tomi Adeyemi, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemisin have been excellent literary guides. I pick up books by these genius Black women and I scream aloud in my head: Goodbye, cruel world! And mentally leap into their books with abandon and pure glee.
In the introduction you say that these texts heal you. How often do you refer to these excerpts? Is there one that is speaking to you right now?
This book can be a ritual object–it is designed for everyday or regular use. You can flip Black Imagination open at random and find some offering you didn’t realize you needed. Today, I opened to page 135 and I felt Sharan Strange’s voice close to me, even from Decatur, Georgia. She whispered directly into my mind a reminder that several weeks into quarantine-mode, I desperately needed: “I remember that I have the ability to heal, that I can decide on wellness and seek it, that I am already the wholeness that I seek.”
What do you envision as a Black Imagined Future during this uncharted social landscape we are currently facing?
Black Imagination addresses isolation directly as a chorus of intersectional Black testimonies to our present-day survival. Each page is a living testimony to our resilience–we are never alone within the boundless Black Imagination. After my most recent trip to Tanzania, I only want one thing from my life. I want to inspire as many Indigenous African diasporic people (Black Folx) as possible to consider taking ourselves joyfully back to Africa to really build out our dreams while rooted in community.
Where do you plan to take Black Imaginations next?
There are Black people everywhere on Earth . . . and I am hopelessly devoted to amplifying our joy, our wellness, and our voices. I would never want to limit myself or cauterize my own incredibly juicy imagination. Let’s do everything. Everywhere. We are wholly boundless, after all.
TL;DR? My friend and award-winning dramaturg, Jay O’Leary, and I are adapting Black Imagination for the stage because, why not? I’m living my best life! v
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Do the controversial lockdowns, the preferred strategy to fight the coronavirus pandemic, actually work?
This is a critical question, because virtually the entire American population has been sent into hiding at a mega-trillion cost to the economy, based on the scientific (we are told) evidence that it is the best and, perhaps, the only way to fight the pandemic.
But such evidence is hard to find because an entire nation of some 330 million people has never been shut down, leaving a big void in scientific literature.
So, Wilfred Reilly, an assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, set out to answer the question: “Did lockdown states experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states?” He concluded:
The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths measures was utterly insignificant.
Considering the millions of jobs lost, the devastating impact of shutting down
Wilfred Reilly
society and, and, most importantly, the thousands of deaths cause by the coronavirus, Reilly’s research is bound to be viciously attacked.
Reilly understands that and invites researchers to access his research and run their own by requesting it here. In other words, he’s inviting anyone to conduct their own peer review.
He’ll be challenged on the basis that in trying to compare the effectives of the shutdown in states that imposed it and those that didn’t he will be comparing apples to oranges because states are so different demographically.
Using regression analysis, Reilly took into account those differences by including the demographic variables of “population, population density, median income, median age, diversity (measured as the percentage of minorities in a population), and the state’s Covid-19 response strategy (0 = lockdown, 1 = social distancing).
The result: “There is no relationship between lockdowns and lower Covid-19 deaths.”
So, how did we get to the point where lockdowns became the only accepted strategy? Reilly writes:
The original response to Covid-19 was driven by an understandable fear of an unknown disease. The epidemiologist Neil Ferguson projected that 2.2 million people could die in the US alone, and few world leaders were willing to risk being the one who would allow such grim reaping to occur.
However, as time has passed, new data have emerged. A top-quality team from Stanford University has pointed out that the infection rate for Covid-19 must logically be far higher than the official tested rate, and the fatality rate for the virus could thus be much closer to 0.1 per cent than the 2 to 4 per cent that was initially expected. And empirical analyses of national and regional response strategies, including this one, do not necessarily find that costly lockdowns work better against the virus than social distancing.
CMJ used to be my Release Radar of sorts. It would come as a CD, in the mail, monthly. Now I get my new music delivered weekly (every Friday), via another form of mail, email. Actually, it’s even easier than that, all I have to do is open up an app, every Friday morning, and it’s right there waiting for me.
This week I’ve noticed how tired I’ve grown of the constant collaborations (see above). This is an ongoing trend that has plagued the last decade. While this can work well on occasion, for the most part, there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
For instance, Weezer has been involved in several of them lately. Their latest with Awolnation is a brick, but I did happen to like their song with The Avalanches. It’s mostly Rivers Cuomo’s voice on these tracks that I have become wary of. It can leave a lot to be desired, seeming one dimensional, and pouty. Too bad they didn’t release this version of “Where Is My Mind,” as a new single. He sounds pretty bitching here with the ‘Nation.
The best song of the week goes to Car Seat Headrest. I’ve been waiting for something to grab me like “There Must Be More Than Blood,” and it’s finally arrived.
This is their 4th single from Making A Door Less Open, due out in May. I love that album title, and I love this song. Now let’s get fucking excited!
The Killers get funky on “Fire And Bone,” and it’s a great change of pace. When I first heard “Somebody Told Me,” almost 20 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined they would still be relevent, making quality music. They sounded so one-dimensional (there’s that word again) while Flowers seemed like a wannabe. Boy, was I wrong. I have to thank my brother Andy for really showing me them again after I’d long written them off.
Singer-songwriter Jake Bugg gives us the beautifully fingerpicked “Saviours Of The City,” sounding a tad like The Decemberists, which I don’t mind in small doses.
Brendan Benson returns again with “Dear Life,” and it sounds power pop-rocking.
JR JR adds another sweet gem to our radar, “This Side Of Paradise.”
Word has it that they will release a double album called Invocations / Conversations, on May 31st, through their recently announced record label Love Is EZ Records, in partnership with Secretly Distribution. The colored vinyl looks beautiful!
Have I told you lately…how much I love Murs? He tears up “How Great!”
Atmosphere gets a verse on this Jabee cut, “Checkmate,” and BJ The Chicago Kid continues to drop quality rhymes on this AMA track, “Too Late For That.”
Who got the jazz, we got the jazz! This week’s slice is a classical cover of “Georgia On My Mind,” from Jack Jezzro and David Davidson. It’s a relaxing piece of joy for you to meditate on. TGIF!
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