Last week, beloved Lincoln Park vinyl shop Dave’s Records announced some sad news: after 20 years, it’s closing for good. Store owner Dave Crain tells Gossip Wolf the last day will be in December, but he hasn’t confirmed an exact date. Crain opened Dave’s Records in 2002 in a former 2nd Hand Tunes location, and about a year and a half ago the whole building was sold. The new owners have told Crain they intend to knock down and replace the building, so even though he renewed the shop’s lease last year, he knows that the writing is on the wall. “Selling it didn’t seem like an option to me,” Crain says. “Starting at a new location, I thought about—but I’ve seen people move, and it takes a while till people figure out that you didn’t just close up. And then there was option three, which is the option I’m taking—which is to go out in a blaze of glory and get the records in the hands of all our fans.”
Crain has been thinking about shuttering the shop for a few months, and he decided to formally announce it on election day. The closing sale kicked off with 50 percent discounts on singles and used LPs, plus a “buy one, get one half off” deal on new LPs. “I’ve been surprised at how quickly it’s turned into a madhouse,” Crain says. “It’s been, like, four days now, and it seems like four Record Store Days in a row.” The shop won’t participate in the actual Record Store Day on Black Friday, though it will stock a handful of RSD titles. Crain says he’ll use the shop’s social media accounts to post updates about further sales and formal closing-day plans.
Bassist-vocalist Katie Ernst and saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi are perhaps best known to Gossip Wolf readers from jazz trio Twin Talk, who masterfully stretch the genre’s boundaries with their graceful, breathy interplay between instruments and voice. But the couple also have an indie-folk duo, Edith Judith, named after their three-legged dog and founded in their apartment during COVID lockdown in spring 2020. Laurenzi added guitar, synthesizers, clarinet, and flute to his usual horns, and he and Ernst brought in Los Angeles-based drummer and producer Ben Lumsdaine to help finish the tracks. “These are love songs and question songs, hopeful songs and sad songs,” says Ernst. “They’re poems of uncertainty.”
On October 14, New York indie label Ruination Record Company released Edith Judith’s first album, Bones and Structure, on LP and cassette. To this wolf, each succinctly crafted, immensely satisfying song feels like quietly reading a postcard from a tumultuous moment in time. On Thursday, November 17, Edith Judith celebrate the album’s release with a show at the Hungry Brain, where they’ll grow into a full band, adding Lumsdaine and Chicago musicians Leslie Beukelman and Michael Hilger. The Matthew Davis Ensemble opens.
All the songs on Bones and Structure are originals written by the duo.
On Sunday, November 20, Chicago new-music group Ensemble dal Niente presents a scintillating program inside the lower-level “catacombs” space at Epiphany Center for the Arts (201 S. Ashland). Two dal Niente members, percussionist Kyle Flens and soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, will perform a program of solo and duo pieces that play with the acoustics of the space, including world premieres by Colombian composer Melissa Vargas and dal Niente flutist Emma Hospelhorn. Trans, by Chinese American composer Lei Liang, will enlist the audience to accompany Flens with “a chorus of small rocks,” and Luis Fernando Amaya’s Guerrilla de Dientes Entre los Árboles will bring aboard second percussionist John Corkill to join Flens in playing amplified combs, bottles, planks, and other objects.
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Jazz bassist and vocalist Katie Ernst rises like the tide
