The best things about Chicago music | Leor Galil
Much of what I loved about Chicago’s music scene in 2014 can’t be summed up with a list of LPs (or Datpiff downloads or Soundcloud pages). So I picked five things that say the most about my year and why it was great.
Chicago’s Bandcamp game Screw Spotify. When it comes to streaming music, I’m a Bandcamp fan. Surfing the “Chicago” tag this past year led me to the lo-fi magic of Hot Bagels and the unearthly soundtrack (by Ben Babbitt of Pillars & Tongues) for the third act of local indie game Kentucky Route Zero. I lost big chunks of lots of days falling down Bandcamp rabbit holes, and I’m richer for it.
Fifth House Ensemble, Excelsior (Cedille) Few groups work as diligently as Fifth House Ensemble to logically incorporate complementary multimedia elements into their performances—Fifth House’s recent collaborations have included works with comic artist Ezra Claytan Daniels and video maker Buki Bodunrin. That openness to diverse approaches comes through in their repertoire choices too: On this album they bring a luminescent, airy touch to recent works by the likes of Alex Shapiro, Jesse Limbacher, and Mason Bates (a Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). The highlight is Caleb Burhans’s Excelsior, which features gorgeous singing from New York-based soprano Martha Cluver; weightless and lyrical, it’s a musical response to Captain Joseph Kittinger’s 1960 parachute jump from 102,800 feet.
Behemoth at House of Blues on Fri 4/25 Poland’s kings of blackened death metal have such precise control over their live show that it reads exactly as they intend it to: as an expression of elegant, focused rage at the oppression of hypocritical piety. They evoke a Miltonian or gnostic version of Satan—the liberator, the guiding spirit, the bringer of dawn—and never more powerfully than during this set’s final moments, when the three front-line members returned to the stage wearing glossy black full-head masks, with noble, impassive faces and beautiful tapering horns, and stood atop three separate altars in a blaze of white light.
Kyle Bruckmann’s Wrack, . . . Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire (Singlespeed) Oboist and English horn player Kyle Bruckmann left Chicago in 2003 and currently lives in the Bay Area, where he plays classical and experimental electronic music. But before he left he founded Wrack, a group of Chicago-based jazz musicians, and he’s kept it running with return visits and tours. The marvelous compositions on . . . Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire are inspired by descriptions of incidental music in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and they use a brashly diverse array of sounds and approaches—including Charles Ives-inspired orchestration, Art Ensemble of Chicago-style exploration of tiny sounds, muscular improvisation, and filthy strip-club beats.
Chicago rock singles | Luca Cimarusti
Chicago’s grimy rock ‘n’ roll underground kept pumping out the hits this year, and I listened to these five killer EPs more than any others. If I had to think of something bad to say about any of these records, it’d be that they’re all too short.
