Jess Viscius is going to break your heart, gently and slowly. In August, Fire Talk Records released Everything – her dreamy, fuzzy, captivating debut album as Bnny. It shows off the intense musicality and vulnerability the Chicago singer-songwriter has demonstrated since her first EP Sucker in 2017. That same year, tragedy struck when Viscius unexpectedly lost her partner, fellow Chicago musician Trey Gruber, who had been struggling with substance abuse issues; writing Everything became an outlet for Viscius to process her grief around his death.
It is a delicate creature, this album. It softly writhes, baring its naked belly for you to scratch then pulls away so that you can’t get too close. It is bristling with hurt, but sweetly surrendering too. Its delicacy and articulation of grief took several years to finely sculpt while Viscius mourned Gruber and tried to make sense of the dueling powers of love and loss. That is not to say that the album is morose or melancholy. Rather, it exists somewhere between dusk and dawn, hovering blurrily between the enormity of a new day and the possibility that the light will remain and memories won’t scar the senses.
The all-encompassing nature of “everything” offers so much potential for interpretation, but Viscius knows exactly what it means to her.
“I remember I was listening to the final track on our album titled ‘Voice Memo’ that I wrote with Trey. It’s the only recording I have of us singing together and I remember thinking… ‘Is this really everything?’ And that word kept coming back… is this everything I have?” she explains. “Everything feels like all my memories in one place. The word itself is at once all-encompassing and, in some ways, finite, which resonated with me, my own experience with grief and making this album.”
According to his friend and journalist Charlie Johnson in this Chicago Tribune editorial, Gruber was only one week out of a detox facility when he fatally overdosed on heroin spiked with fentanyl in 2017. The frontman of Parent was just 26. Viscius and Gruber’s mother, Desiree, released a collection of Gruber’s work, Herculean House of Cards, in 2019. The songs are lo-fi, charming, funny and quirky while also revealing a musician who really loved the art of songwriting (“Do You Feel Fine” epitomizes the strangely melodic garage-folk feel of the album).
Without wanting to point out the obvious, Gruber was a different musician to Viscius, and Bnny. Everything is poignant in its multi-tonal, ever-changing hues – in some places, sky blue and soft, and elsewhere deepening into a star-speckled indigo night. It is not a commiseration, but a chronicle of love and a paean to life.
It is not a solo affair, either; Viscius is joined by her twin sister Alexa on bass. “She picked up bass when I started the band so she could play with us. She’s an amazing photographer and designer as well,” Viscius says. Tim Makowski plays lead guitar. “I really don’t remember how he joined the band… I just remember him just being there one day in the beginning and he’s been here ever since. He’s one of the funniest people I know,” she continues. “Matt Pelkey is our drummer, he joined about two years ago. He’s also an amazing writer. Adam Schubert is the newest member. He plays guitar and keys. He’s an incredible multi-instrumentalist and has his own solo project called Ulna.”
Viscius can trace her inspirational spark back to hearing an ABBA CD that her friend’s older sister was blasting at home and being moved to ecstatically dance, all her senses ignited and attuned to this novel sound. In terms of her career in music though, her humble beginnings came a decade later.
“In my early twenties I started casually teaching myself guitar and then became more immersed in the Chicago music scene,” she recalls. “That’s when I became interested in writing my own music, at first, as some kind of challenge to myself, like, can I play guitar? Can I write a song?”
There’s no doubt she can write a song; Everything proves it from beginning to end. It was not a painless process, and that is evident in the lyrics and the sound, but it is beautiful, and there are silver linings tracing all the ragged edges. There’s never a sense of being lost in someone else’s grief. Viscius may send you out to sea in a little rowboat, but she is always there ready to draw you towards the shore when the waves begin to rage.
On “Not Even You,” Viscius fools herself into believing her beloved is present despite the reality of their absence. She catches sight of her partner, mistakes memories for reality, allows desire to trump truth. When she swallows her heart, repeating “what we dreamed…” anyone who has lost someone they loved (all of us?) will understand. “Blind” is gently catchy, a slow-but-determined wander through busy streets lost in one’s own reflections and revelations, the elastic, deep bass strum keeping time with boots on the pavement.
“The first half of the record… was easy and fun. I was just starting to play music, learning how to be in a band, everything was new and exciting. The second half was written during a period of time when I felt like I was in hell; everything was difficult,” she says. “You can’t change the past, you can only learn from it.”
That sentiment is at the core of “August,” a gorgeously sepia-toned ride through sun-drenched folk, supported by woozy rhythmic guitar. “I’ll change, I’ll change, I’ll change,” Viscius chants with increased determination. There’s a lovely nostalgic quality to Viscius’ dreamy voice – not unlike Mazzy Star or Lana Del Rey in its romantic, hyper-feminine quality. “In ‘August’ I’m promising myself that I’ll change,” she explains. “It’s a promise I’m still working towards.”
Bnny heads out on tour in October with beloved “trashpop” Chicago rockers Dehd – performing the songs on Everything as though opening a time capsule, allowing her to simultaneously remember, and let go.
“I think of [this album] as preserving this period in my life that I can always access,” Viscius says. “The songs live on, and with them, so does Trey.”
DEHD/BUNNY TOUR DATES: Fri. 10/1 – Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club Sat. 10/2 – Oberlin, OH @ Oberlin College Sun. 10/3 – Detroit, MI @ El Club Mon. 10/5 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups Thu. 10/7 – Brooklyn, NY @ Market Hotel – SOLD OUT Fri. 10/8 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s Sat. 10/9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Made Tue. 10/12 – Boston, MA @ Northeastern University
Chicago post-punk quartet Ganser transcend genre with their five-song remix EP Look at the Sun, which dropped on Felte Records May 6. Using tracks from their 2020 LP Just Look at That Sky, artists Bartees Strange, Sad13 (Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz), GLOK (Andy Bell of Ride), Algiers, and Adam Faulkner (Girl Band) showcases indie rock’s range while building on the chaos and disillusionment of the source material.
Ganser is Alicia Gaines (vocals, bass), Nadia Garofalo (vocals, keyboards), Brian Cundiff (drums), and Charlie Landsman (guitar): moody rock n’ rollers indebted to bands ranging from Sonic Youth to Durutti Column. Their name comes from a mental health condition where a person apes the signs of a physical or mental illness without “really” being sick. Unsurprisingly, the group is at their strongest exploring that gray area between seeming and being unwell. Gaines describes them as an “inward facing” band.
In the ultimate unplanned irony, Just Look at That Sky—a meditation on times of uncertainty—went live on July 31 of last year. The cover is a matte goldenrod with a circle cutout revealing a black and white photo of a woman’s face. She’s wearing circular glasses that feel both high-fashion and nautical—almost goggle-like. In the reflection are two towering buildings. All the promotional material show the record against what reads like an ’80s vacation photo of ocean expanse.
It feels both serene and uncanny, both for the endlessness of the waves and how the image sits rendered in time. Against the water, the yellow reads like a geometric diving helmet pumping oxygen to the woman as she… swims toward somewhere unfamiliar? says goodbye as she plunges into water? observes at a gentle, bobbing remove? It’s worth noting Gaines—who handles the band’s artwork—is an award-winning graphic designer.
Yes, an emerging act delivered something that promised to be an existential puzzler when racial and economic tensions exacerbated by the pandemic were especially palpable. This strongly lured some while repelling others, making the album a sleeper hit that wasn’t much championed until end-of-year lists arrived. The music itself is familiar without feeling derivative—a heady cloud of the most swaggering punk bands and indie acts from the past 40 years. What did cigarette ads used to say about filters? “All of the flavor gets through.”
With two women sharing vocals in the band—one of whom is Black—it’s easy to be tempted to use identity as the primary lens for examining Ganser’s music. We’re in a cultural moment where so much art from marginalized creators is evaluated based on how affirming it is to people who reflect the creators’ identities—or how instructive it is for everyone else. But Just Look at That Sky isn’t about the unique experience of identity; it’s ’90s-heavy art rock about collectively feeling uneasy—not how any one individual arrives at that emotion so much as what it’s like being there. As Mia Hughes noted in Clash magazine: “It’s perhaps a political record, but only as far as our lives are political.”
Ganser is a mix of art school alumni, service workers, and freelancers. Some are Jewish, some are queer. They’re all millennials who’ve survived two recessions, and since the pandemic they’ve suffered personal and professional losses because of COVID-19. When it comes to capturing unease, each member has a lot of reference material, to say the least.
“Half of art is being able to tell a good joke,” explains Gaines. “The joke’s not always funny, but it’s about framing or contextualizing it so it lands. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. Post-punk is getting narrowed down to a very small little box of dudes shouting and trying to, like, out Nick Cave each other. I consider us art rock because, to me, art rock’s aim is to be amusing to the people that compose it. It forces listeners to think about how we got to the punchline.”
On Look at the Sun, the punchline doesn’t change so much as get rearranged. Looking at the sun is honing in on one piece of the sky. It can mean basking in the day’s glow as much as burning your retinas, and that tension is what this EP captures. The most compelling tracks are “Bad Form (Sad13 Remix)” and “Self Service (Adam Faulkner/Girl Band Remix),” which lend a haunting dreamlike quality to songs about feeling surrounded by people who ask for too much while giving little in return.
But the standout is “Told You So (Algiers Remix).” The song opens with an eager drum rhythm appropriate for a seventies car chase. In comes a distorted clip of art historian John Berger reading from his approach-defining classic Ways of Seeing: “To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which cannot be discarded.” Then abolitionist Angela Davis says: “Revolutionary hope resides precisely among those women who have been abandoned by history and who are now standing up and making their demands heard.”
The beat jolts forward, and in rushes Gaines’s voice—once languid and resigned, now reverberating with a dismissive, dance-y confidence. The song has an energy like DJ Keoki’s “Speed Racer” (minus all the sex jokes, plus mega cool-girl mystique). While Ganser is not a “political” band—that is, they don’t typically address politics head on through their music—the new introduction reframes lyrics like “Onwards and upwards/Almost gone/It’s nothing like dying/Nothing like me.” The words sound less self-pitying and more self-righteous, necessarily confrontational in a way that’s exciting and free.
If you follow Ganser on Twitter, you know that’s who they are at their core, but it doesn’t always translate to their music. That Algiers emphasizes this isn’t as much a revelation as a “HELL YES, THANK YOU!” Until the pandemic, Ganser was slated to tour with them. Hearing this track, it’s easy to imagine the raucous magic they would’ve brought to a shared stage.
“Before the world stopped, we were running around a million miles a minute,” explains Gaines. “We didn’t have time to wonder, like, ‘Why aren’t we getting booked for more support tours? I guess we have to keep trying. Or we suck.’ Once the album campaign started, we were getting in print magazines in the UK, but nobody would answer our emails back home.
“After a while, it was really jarring, but then it became pretty clear what was going on. We can’t help if people are intimidated by women expressing ugly emotions or intimidated by a Black person playing an instrument. I don’t know, I can’t read their minds. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing. We hide puns and jokes on our record. There’s a lot of layers. I guess people can just catch up.”
Chicago’s certainly there. Ganser might be the city’s best kept secret. The post-punk quartet recently won a donor-nominated Sustain Chicago Music grant. They’re headlining a nearly-sold out three day stint at the Empty Bottle, one of Chicago’s most taste-defining indie venues. In the Reader’s “Best of Chicago 2020,” they were voted audiences’ second favorite punk band (Rise Against took first, which I have MANY questions about). And in September, Ganser will make their Riot Fest debut. Not bad for a group whose sophomore release arrived in the middle of a public health crisis.
While the band is still coming into their own, their future should prove interesting. Is the rest of the world ready for such a promising powerhouse?
For Mia Joy, journeying into the insular, mystic world captured on her debut LP Spirit Tamer has been her life’s work. A meditation on the connection to self, creating and debunking personal myth, enduring changes post-heartache, and believing in the promise of discovering anew, Joy’s nearly three-year undertaking writing and recording the project is detailed across its 10 tracks. Swept up in dreamy guitar, Joy uses her instruments—including her haunting voice—to start a conversation; confronting those she’s met along the way. Not to mention, herself.
Now that the album’s out, she trusts she’s exactly where she should be. “I naturally got here, I think, because of my very niche, specific interests,” she says over the phone the week after Spirit Tamer’s May 7 release via Fire Talk Records. “Luckily for me, they kind of lined up. It all kind of fell into place as I became a user of all the colors I’m made up of and the tools at my disposal.”
“And,” she pauses, “I just got really lucky that people choose to listen to me.”
Joy, born Mia Joy Rocha, figured she’d be some type of creative when she grew up. An appreciation of music has always been strong in her family, particularly on her paternal side—starting with her grandmother, who had a love of Selena and bar bands, according to a recent Chicago Reader profile. Some of Joy’s earliest memories include singing for her as a child. Joy’s dad is a veteran blues guitarist in the city and her older brother also followed the musician’s path.
“I always sang – as soon as I could talk, I would sing,” she recalls. “My dad would make me sing with him. He always had a studio in the basement and I would sit on his lap and we would sing together. There was a lot of Boomer dad rock: Steely Dan, Jimi Hendrix, Santana. We’re also Chicanas, so he would sometimes show me other traditional Mexican songs his mother showed him.”
“My mom, a poet, loves Sadé and Enya and Bossa Nova,” Joy continues. “She introduced all the R&B ‘90s greats. I’m a melting pot of both of them,” she laughs, “but obviously I went in a lot of different directions as well.”
Though she sang in her church choir with her Sunday School class and spent three years as part of the Chicago Children’s Choir starting in fourth grade, Joy didn’t pursue a formal musical education—instead opting for painting and pottery while advancing her knowledge of indie sub-genres and avant-garde artists at the library or alone in her room. Bands like Cocteau Twins, Grouper, and Deerhunter, and pioneers Brian Eno and Björk served as entry points to another realm of musical possibilities.
“As a millennial, there was a lot of really legendary indie music coming out of that era,” she adds, remembering aloud. “2009 to 2012 was such an epic time for our generation, and I think that was also the precipice of me not being just a super fan or super music nerd and instead picking up the tools I had around me to replicate the music I was listening to in my own style.”
As she got older, her interest in storytelling also grew. Inspired in middle school by her English teacher, whom she remembers as “nurturing” and incredibly supportive of her writing, Joy found other parts of herself among the pages of Greek mythologies and the heroes and heroines connected to the cosmic.
An open interest in astrology has become trendier while garnering more mainstream acceptance, but when Joy was first introduced to the study she kept it under wraps; fearing it would further ostracize her “nerdy, little middle school” self from her peers. Practicing in secret until fairly recently (unless you happen to be part of her inner circle), she uses it to explore the spectrum of human experience and connect with others beyond superficial interests. Though she dabbled in music criticism and considered a career path on the editorial side of the industry, songwriting called her back.
The earliest iteration of Mia Joy as a musical expression can be found on her Soundcloud page, started in 2013, where songs “Soliloquy” and “L*U*C*I*D” serve as archives of the artist’s lo-fi roots and other skeletal recordings foreshadow tracks like Spirit Tamer’s stunning “Saturn.” The connections between music, astrology, and storytelling inform her to this day.
“Music is foremost a coping mechanism and a way I kind of regulate how I live and how I feel, and that is the way in which I approach music,” Joy details. “Astrology is in the foreground in the ways I try to understand the world as well and connect with others and myself. It’s naturally made its presence known, especially in the way I write stories and songs.”
“Saturn” is particularly treasured. Apart from being one of Joy’s earliest songs, the first she intentionally wrote along with a melody, it’s taken on new significance in light of her own birth chart.
“The funny thing is I wrote it when I was 20 or 21 years old,” Joy admits. “It’s written in the voice of Saturn, asking you all the ways it’s helped you or hurt you and how you’ve grown through disappointment and abandonment and sorrow. All of those restricting kind-of life lessons. Then it does this callback to me answering and my specific relationship to Saturn. Now it takes on a different meaning because I’m actually going through my Saturn Return, and my album came out during my Saturn Return.”
Simply put, Saturn Return is when the planet returns to the same place it occupied in the sky at the moment of a person’s birth. For astrologers, it’s an important occurrence that ushers in a period of intense change; leading us out of the last remnants of childhood and into lessons of maturity, responsibility, and discipline (characteristics of Saturn). Basically, it could explain why the end of your twenties can be incredibly turbulent and ultimately, life-changing—and why everyone’s relieved when they enter their thirties.
“It feels like the album is reaping the benefits of all the sorrow and disappointment, and it’s proof I’ve learned how to be self-reliant and resilient and own those things in my life,” she says. “It’s very symbolic, and I always cared so much about that song and wanted to do it justice by having a more elaborate, higher production-value version of it. I was waiting for the opportunity to make an album to throw it on there. It’s one of my favorite songs. It reflects my music taste and the direction I want to go in.”
Such intimate consideration is part of Joy’s practice. It’s part of why Spirit Tamer was such a labor of love. As she peeled back the layers, exploring the intersections of her life and extensions of her experiences became central to finishing the album as she envisioned.
“It’s been such a private relationship for 10-plus years,” she adds. “It’s really bizarre to be talking to you about it now, publicly. My parents are pretty religious so I had to hide it from them for years. I’m still hiding it from them, so I’m kind of horrified,” Joy laughs nervously, “but I don’t know why I’m almost 30 years old and still hiding things from my mom. Spirituality is prevalent in our family for sure, and I really appreciate that open-mindedness, but I think I just went really far to the left with the witchy stuff.”
Photo courtesy of Fire Talk Records
Despite often describing herself as a private person who is usually shy and quiet, committing her truths to tape has become comfortable for the artist. The idea of touring and playing live shows again, however, brings on as many nerves as it does tepid excitement.
Gigging around Chicago helped Mia Joy build a cult-like following among garage and psych rock fans after the release of her 2017, reverb-drenched EP Gemini Moon, but her interest in more ambient, abstract sounds could be heard bubbling beneath the surface. Replacing the electrified anxieties behind Gemini Moon is Spirit Tamer’s soothing, but no less stirring, state.
Rather than starting things off with a bang, her unassuming stage presence commands its audience as tension builds across her live set. It’s unintentional, but fans have come to recognize when Mia Joy and company have found their groove. Knowing she’s not going to be the loudest in the room, playing shows hasn’t necessarily come with the same certain ease as creating behind the scenes.
“It feels like this Shakespearean tragedy,” she laughs, poking fun at her stage fright. “The thing I want to do most in life is sing songs and then I have to do it in front of a lot of people.”
She’s felt at home in the coziness of venues such as Hideout, whereas others have found her in a battle of wits with the crowd. Bantering turns to light heckling to remind patrons talking over the set that someone’s on stage trying to entertain them. Navigating the space between the urge to engage and just lose herself in her own performance has come with time over the past six years of appearing around the city.
“At different venues, sometimes you can just play a show and know people will talk over you or be annoying. Sometimes I can just have a whatever attitude and be silly with Joey [Farago, keyboardist] and make banter. Those are the good shows, where I’m just kind of in a ‘fuck it’ attitude and have fun with it. Then there are shows where I’m feeling really sensitive and I want to do my best,” Joy says.
“I do like performing once in a while,” she clarifies. “Once you get into a good flow and you and your bandmates are connecting, it is a wonderful thing. Empty Bottle is where grown men at the bar are yelling and talking, and me and Joey are heckling them on stage as we’re performing. It’s hard to hear, so I just have to be like ‘You in the yellow shirt, what are you talking about?’ I try to do it in a silly way, but yeah, I don’t like people talking over me, of course.”
A showcase of Joy’s musical curiosities in its intricate compositions and audiophiliac production, her work requires your attention to fulfill its immersive purpose. Her voice softly floats just above a gauze of layered strings and synths, exercising restraint without sacrificing its raw power. A husky whisper, with a bit of grit to boot when necessary, she lulls you into tales of forgiveness, forgotten birthdays and exes who loved Korn’s “Freak on a Leash.”
“It was really important to me that I wasn’t pigeonholed or sticking to one sound because it wouldn’t have been authentic to the direction I wanted to go in,” she says. “I listen to and care about so many textures and sounds, it made sense for it to be kind of… across the board.”
Joy reunited with friend and longtime collaborator, Pallet Sound’s Michael Mac for production on Spirit Tamer. The two have known each other since 2014, when she moved into a coach house in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Mac occupied the basement, then playing guitar with art rockers Oshwa and recording other local artists in his spare time. He’s since had a bird’s eye view of Joy’s evolution as an artist and confidant.
“My song ‘10,000 Things’ was my first demo ever that wasn’t in my bedroom – it was with Michael because we lived together. We’ve been collaborating and working together pretty much my entirety of making music,” she says.
“I feel really grateful, but I also feel so spoiled because I know at some point I’m going to have to work with someone else,” Joy half-jokes. “Michael’s a great person to work with in general, and as far as working with men who are audio engineers, he wants to make the vision that lives in your head. He’s not overstepping his bounds and doesn’t have an agenda other than patiently working with you and listening.”
Some of the songs on Spirit Tamer were ripped straight from her loop pedal, which she’s had for years. Recorded alone in her bedroom, she says she was “insistent” Mac keep some of those takes; the almost inaudible guitar plucking, dissolving in a haze of Joy’s gentle vocal play – it’s ethereal.
“That energy is really hard to recreate. You can create a perfect take in the studio, but to me, it’s not the same as having the energy in my bedroom,” she explains. “I think a lot of lo-fi artists can relate to that and it’s easier for me to be secluded and private and take vulnerable vocal takes – especially with tracks ‘Sword (I Carry)’ and the harmonies in ‘Saturn.’ They’re visceral. They pay homage to my roots.”
Most of the folks who lent a hand to the making of the album have been around since the beginning. She tapped friends Farago and Moontype drummer Emerson Hunton to contribute keys and percussion. It takes a village to bring a dream to life and, with the release of her very first full-length album, Joy feels the weight of the love of her own.
“That’s part of what makes this project so special,” she gushes. “Almost every single person that I’ve worked with is a close friend of mine. It shows the trust put into how these songs were made. The people who were involved with this record are also emotionally involved. They wanted to make it happen and wanted it to be out there because they care about me.”
The support from Chicago’s music community and in studio also helped Joy stand firm in her convictions when it came to how she wanted Spirit Tamer to be packaged and how she wanted to be represented as an artist to a wider, general public. In the summer of 2020, she signed with Brookyln-based label, Fire Talk Records. Joy is the fifth Chicago artist to sign to the label, alongside fellow powerhouse acts Dehd, Deeper, Fran, and Accessory (a project of Dehd’s Jason Balla).
After speaking with Fire Talk’s founder Trevor Peterson, she felt her autonomy was respected and that Peterson shared her mission of fostering a supportive, inclusive environment for artists.
Further proof of the groundedness she establish through the solitary reflection behind bringing Spirit Tamer to life, Joy – who opened up to Audiofemme about living with depression, experiencing tough times throughout her childhood, and the trauma of losing one of her best friends – isn’t afraid to advocate for herself in business talks.
“The album was ready and I was feeling very worried that nothing was ever gonna come from it,” she says. “I had sent it to other labels and I’m so grateful things never happened with them just because of general ethics. I didn’t want to feel tokenized as a person of color, being the only person of color on an all-white roster, ran by all white people. That was a conversation I had with Trevor. That’s something I will continue to care about, making the music industry a more intersectional place. It’s essential for me to feel comfortable in the creative community in continuing to be a musician.”
“I’ve never been on a label of this size before,” Joy continues. “I’m new to this industry. [Signing] was very exciting and I was very honored and am very grateful. From the very beginning, as a female, I was very firm in my boundaries and my vision – especially as a woman of color. With a little status behind me in the beginning, I made sure I expressed how I wanted to conduct this and what the sound was all about. Had they not been receptive to it, I would’ve just kept moving on. It’s really comforting to know we’ve established a rapport and trust. I feel very taken care of by my label and think they go really hard for me. I love that.”
The conversations extended to her public relations team, who would promote singles like “Haha” and “Freak” and “Ye Old Man,” to make sure her music wasn’t reduced to “break-up pop songs” or her continually evolving familial relationships. “The imagery and symbolism of Spirit Tamer and being the master of your own feelings and your own direction, collecting all of your lows and your highs and creating resiliency – it’s supposed to be for soothing and for solace and to contemplate yourself,” Joy muses. “Heartbreak is very strong and very universal and there are songs on there about it, but it’s also like, my dad makes me sad sometimes. There’s a song about my friend passing away that was hugely traumatic and a big part of my life.
“The song ‘Ye Old Man’ is about my dad, actually,” she reveals. “I think it’s important that people don’t think that’s just a cheesy break-up song. Me and my dad had to talk about it because he’s really proud of me and he shares my music with his buddies. I told him, you know, ‘I don’t want you to think I hate you and this is me burning you or anything.’”
Taking a breath, Joy chooses her words delicately, “It was coming from a place of realizing sometimes parents make mistakes and I had to accept him for his flaws. Sometimes they’re not just a parent and sometimes I’m not just a child. We’re learning the dynamics of how to understand and relate to each other as we get older. I think I’m still a puzzle to them. Hopefully I will make more sense to them now that I’m starting to share more of myself with the world. I know they’re proud of me.”
Remaining aware and vulnerable to the process of understanding and accepting the realities of who and what surrounds you will follow Mia Joy as her ascent persists. It’s the never-ending work she agreed to long ago and if Spirit Tamer is any evidence, her pursuits are paying off. Though live music is making its return, she doesn’t have anything booked for 2021 yet. She hopes to do some performances throughout the year and tour in 2022, but hasn’t stopped writing new material.
Don’t be surprised if her re-emergence feels like playing catch-up.
“Musicians can relate, especially if it’s a really long-term project like this was for me,” she says. “In a way it’s a cathartic relief. It’s both scary and exciting now that it’s time to think about something else. I’m in a vastly different place, listening to different things, being influenced by different things. I’m going further down the ambient rabbit hole; getting even more avant-garde and wacky and experimental.”
Grace in her tone, Joy humbly accepts her current place in the spotlight.
“I can’t say how grateful I am enough. It’s such a crazy privilege to even be able to release anything right now with the state of the music industry and society and everything at large. It’s not lost on me,” she expresses. “This feels like such a shooting star in a really dark time. I’m just a nerdy, anxious little guy over here. It feels really surreal.”
It’s fair to say Moontype wouldn’t have become what it is today, a full-fledged rock band, without the interconnectedness of Chicago’s music ecosystem. That, and the power of friendship.
The trio, made up of singer, songwriter and bass player Margaret McCarthy, guitarist Ben Cruz, and drummer Emerson Hunton, released its debut LP Bodies of Water on April 2. While the album is just a month old, its tracks date back to the group’s years at Oberlin College, where they were all students of the school’s music conservatory. Then, Moontype was the minimal, bass-driven recordings born in McCarthy’s bedroom—performed solo at intimate gatherings and DIY shows—while the would-be bandmates orbited each other’s respective friend groups.
It wasn’t until after graduation, and each member’s migration to Chicago between 2016 and 2018, that they were reacquainted and eventually joined forces musically. On Bodies of Water, songs originally imagined by one take on a robust new shape, with the gusto and confidence that can only come from knowing you’re all on the same page; that the folks at your sides have your back.
“It’s a little bit wild,” McCarthy laughed over the phone, the morning the album dropped. “Me, Ben and Emerson got together this morning just to be like ‘Yay, we did it!’”
The solidity of their bond is apparent from the shotgun blast of opening track “Anti-Divinity”—where the clang of guitar and drums take off at the same time as McCarthy’s tender vocals. Withstanding the rumbling wall of sound created by Hunton and Cruz, she’s embraced intensity this time around compared to the song’s early iteration heard on her solo effort, 2018’s self-released bass tunes, year 5.
The album also serves as a showcase for her curious, intimate, and intimately funny lyrics, depicting human connections in the throes of ever-changing surroundings and youthful restlessness. Subtle yet lucid, McCarthy spins narratives that are just as provocative as Cruz and Hunton’s instrumentation. Despite Moontype’s humble beginnings as a one-woman operation, the band standing today is wholly collaborative.
Breathing new life into each of the four tracks from bass tunes (including “About You,” “Alpha” and “Stuck on You”)in addition to eight, more recently composed numbers, that newfound rush is maintained across Bodies of Water. According to McCarthy, the three-piece’s exploration of indie rock – ranging from soft, sparse acoustics to more experimental, textured, math rock and soaring shoegaze – would’ve been impossible for her to find without her partners-in-crime. “They’re incredible musicians. They take [the music] to particular places and have influences and listen to things I don’t listen to. This really is our band, the songs become something they wouldn’t be otherwise,” she says.
“I wrote all the skeletons that are on the album. The lyrics are mine and the feels,” she jokes before continuing to celebrate the trio’s chemistry, “but it wouldn’t have been the same if this band had different members in it or if it was just me. I don’t think of [Moontype] as my project. We fell in together really quickly and easily. When Emerson joined the band, he literally just started playing along and I was like ‘Okay, thank you!’ It was so good.”
Initially expanding with just Cruz after reuniting in the Midwest, the duo invited Hunton to jam with the hopes his steady rhythms would help fortify the songs they’d been rehearsing. Playing with Hunton in the past, Cruz figured the drummer’s abilities would naturally fill the space between he and McCarthy’s back-and-forth on the strings.
Their perfect fit hasn’t gone unnoticed. In the months leading up to the album’s release, the band received high praise for lead single “Ferry” from The New York Times and NPR. Streams were bringing new fans and a bigger buzz. Noting the track’s lushness and balance of heavy and gentle, Moontype quickly became an act to keep your eye on and Bodies of Water, one of the year’s most highly anticipated releases.
With the band able to capture a noisier, more challenging sound as a whole, McCarthy credits Cruz and Hunton with inspiring her to dig into a more free-flowing, visceral expression vocally and musically – something that the projects she’d created in the past, geared more toward electro-pop, didn’t fully allow.
“I usually will write really late at night, playing kind of softly because I don’t want to bother my neighbors, and I’m singing in my room – it’s just kind of a quiet experience,” she recalls. “So many of the songs ended up becoming loud. There are plenty of bands that are way louder [than Moontype], but compared to me alone in my room, they feel loud and energetic. I think about ‘About You,’ where I was really in my feelings about this friendship when I wrote it. It was a very wordy song where I was just telling this story to myself, but when I play it with them I’m like, this is a rock song.”
Recorded at the end of 2019 at Chicago’s favored Jamdek Studios, the pandemic shutdowns and uprisings over the summer of 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor pushed activity on the album’s final touches to the backburner to refocus energies in support of the movement.
The year would’ve formally introduced Moontype beyond the city’s tightly-woven scene, with shows scheduled alongside the likes of Ohmme and others. Admittedly, fellow local acts informed the band’s evolving sound once recording sessions had begun. Fans as much as they are active participants in the scene, working at venues such as Constellation and Sleeping Village helped Moontype’s members establish a deeper understanding of the sense of community at its heart. Through that infectious camaraderie, the band found an ally in mastering engineer Greg Obis and a home on the label he co-founded with Deeper’s Kevin Fairbairn, Born Yesterday Records.
“I met Greg [Obis] working at Sleeping Village. He was mixing there and when I started working there I was the stage manager and running lights.” Obis believed in the band’s sound and, after mixing one of their live sets at beloved venue Hideout and seeing the crowd’s reaction, proposed they release with Born Yesterday.
“The three of us are all in other bands, too,” McCarthy adds, alluding to country outfit The Deals (which includes her, Cruz and Hunton among the “Deal family band”), “and everyone’s bandmates were coming to the shows. We wouldn’t be where we are now without all of those friends.”
The camaraderie and the community has “been so essential to really every part of my life here in Chicago. For this band, it’s definitely important,” McCarthy explains.
After an additional year of sitting on their finished material, the decision to finish the LP was unanimous, and the hype and kind words from the music press are everything a young band dreams of (minus the pandemic, which ultimately prevented Moontype from being able to do much with the recognition they’d received). As time passed, the album’s themes of longing took on new meanings to different listeners; revealing lockdown feelings of “separate but together” in song and lending a relatable, though unintentional, perspective on long-distance pandemic friendships.
“I tend to really attach songs that I write to the time when I wrote them and the people I was thinking about when I wrote them, so for me personally those songs are still very much attached to that,” she describes. “For someone who doesn’t have those associations, some – if not all – of these songs about friendships and feeling distant could feel really relevant.”
As for many songwriters hoping their lyrics will follow their listeners and change as they do, leaving room for others’ interpretation is part of the appeal for McCarthy. It’s helped keep the tracks on Bodies of Water fresh, while speaking to their universal appeal and the band’s promising sense of longevity.
“It’s been so long and I’ve listened to these songs so many times before. Now it’s just people hearing them for the first time. It feels really good, and I’m so grateful to all of the news outlets, but it is strange,” she confesses. “It’s a nice form of external validation; it just feels a little bit not real because it’s only online, it’s only on social media. We haven’t actually played a show in over a year, so it feels a little bit removed, you know what I mean?”
While live music’s survival has been challenged, Moontype – like many other artists – are looking forward to the possibilities of touring by the end of the year. Their first performance after Bodies of Water’s release was streamed live from Constellation on Saturday, April 3, and more virtual gigs are in the works. Though McCarthy stands as the trio’s chief songwriter, there’s heightened fervor in her voice when mentioning songs Cruz and Hunton have each composed for possible future release. New music, in general, reignites a spark in the conversation.
“We’ve been practicing only the songs on the record pretty much for the last couple months, and we’re so excited to start working on new songs,” she says. “Honestly, this spring is feeling like a really hopeful and exciting time. Spring in Chicago always feels exciting because everyone’s been inside all winter, but this year obviously – it’s a sign people are starting to get vaccinated; things are looking up pandemic-wise.”
With so many independent artists looking to make up for lost time, Moontype continues to take things in stride.
“I can’t imagine moving into a crowded space right now,” McCarthy adds, regarding the impending return of concerts in the city as COVID-19 restrictions loosen and summer approaches. “I feel like the first couple times might be a bit awkward, but it’ll only feel good to be playing for people again. I can’t wait for our first show with an actual audience. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll be ready.”
It’s regrettably easy to get sucked in to the cycle of surface-level validation we get from scrolling through social media – but Eleanor Rose Lee, aka Fever Queen, has a simple solution: “The world’s gone shallow/Find the ones who care.” It’s the opening line of her latest single “Taste of What It Is,” premiering today via Audiofemme. “We live in a time where people are almost praised for being self-absorbed,” Lee points out, adding that the pandemic, in some ways, made everyone realign those priorities. “It becomes very clear what’s no longer serving you and what relationships are deep and meaningful and what are just kinda vapid ones.”
On “Taste of What It Is,” intimacy, vulnerability, and honesty act as antidotes to cure a culture obsessed with self-image. “I wanna know your feelings/Don’t swim upon the surface,” Lee implores in a languid, bewitching tone. She validates the fear that comes along with opening up, but low, pulsing synths give a feeling of sinking into something comforting, the percussion sparse and relaxed. There’s nothing harsher here than a few washes of guitar reverb after the second chorus, most of the sounds a syrupy echo through an icy cavern. Lee’s primary goal was to evoke the feeling of sharing a deep secret with someone, and the metaphor of plunging into freezing water is particularly apt; in both situations, it’s necessary to brace yourself against the frigid shock before jumping in, before you change your mind.
It’s no surprise that the Great Lakes region’s intense winters were a primary inspiration behind the song’s subject matter and sonic palette. Lee grew up in Northwest Indiana, and has called Chicago home off and on for most of her adulthood, though she recently moved to a quaint lakeside town along Lake Michigan. “I feel like the seasons really effect my writing,” she says. “I definitely kept calling this my ‘deep winter single’ before I had a name for it. It’s now spring, but I feel like it’s a good song to thaw out, back into real life, as people re-enter society.”
Indeed, as a newly-vaccinated public sector reunites in re-opened restaurants and bars, we’re likely to skip the small talk, opting instead for candid catch-ups. Fever Queen envisions these moments beautifully in the song’s lyrics: “Like a wave that’s frozen/Thoughts suspended in the air/A language thawing/Words will spill out somewhere.” She’s nervous – we all are – so she “breathes in the salty mist” for a “taste of what it is,” her shimmering vocal overdubs calling back to her like sirens.
Lee says that the song, too, is a taste of what her sophomore album will be like; this is the first song she’s released since putting out her September 2020 debut The World of Fever Queen (via First To Knock, the same label releasing the single). “With the first album, I do feel it’s like a lot of different moods, kinda like a quilt – just a bunch of stuff going on,” admits Lee. “The next record is definitely more of a cohesive vibe, and this song just feels relevant and I definitely think it’s more of a similar vibe.”
The World of Fever Queen toys with off-kilter pop, doo-wop covers, surprising lo-fi rock moments, and even name-drops Phoebe Bridgers on the excoriating “You, You.” But one thing both the record and the latest single have in common are the distinct quality of Lee’s touch – she has a home recording set-up and for the most part, Fever Queen is a one-woman effort, as Lee writes, records, performs and produces with very little input from outsiders. By day, she’s a hair stylist, but once she learned the basics of recording (from a film score producer who lived across the hall from her during a brief stint in Los Angeles), she “started recording and actually building on songs, and at that point I was like, okay I’m never gonna leave my house again – this is so fun!”
Now, she’s living in a “time warp” of a lakeside town, driving back to Chicago two days a week to do hair, and is about halfway toward the completion of the sophomore album on which “Taste of What It Is” will appear. She’s in no rush to get back to the stage though. “I didn’t get to do a release show [for The World of Fever Queen] obviously, which would’ve been fun, but I feel like it also took a lot of the stress away for practicing and leading up to that,” she says. “I think with the next record I’ll just have to go extra big release show wise.”
Follow Fever Queen via Instagram for ongoing updates.
Members of the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers’ Chicago chapter protesting outside Spotify offices at 225 W. Illinois Street, Chicago, IL on Monday, March 15, 2021.
“We got music. We got rhythm. Don’t exploit us with your algorithm!”
That was just one of the slogans chanted by dozens of musicians and supporters outside of Spotify’s Chicago offices on Monday, March 15. Organized by the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, Justice at Spotify was an hour-long demonstration calling for the streaming giant to pay artists a penny-per-stream, among other demands and material interests, to help build more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive music communities.
Naturally, the group of protestors did what they do best—make noise. With a drumline, tambourines, horns and more, the crowd wasn’t deterred from its mission by the day’s fierce winds and snow. Throughout the day, the events repeated across the globe in cities like San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Stockholm, Madrid, Melbourne, Frankfurt, and others.
The music and live entertainment industries have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Performance venues across the United States have been shuttered for a year now, causing a ripple effect of putting touring musicians, sound engineers and lighting technicians, event photographers, DJs and more out of work. Even with Congress passing the $15 billion Save Our Stages Act as part of the December 2020 COVID-19 relief bill and continuing efforts helmed by NIVA (National Independent Venue Association) and CIVL (Chicago Independent Venue League), concert halls will be the last to fully re-open once we’ve returned to a shred of “normalcy.” While some venues have recently re-opened for bar service in Chicago, this remains the truth despite optimism toward summer festivals from city government.
According to Billboard, the Small Business Administration hasn’t even started accepting applications for the grants yet—meaning funds won’t arrive before May. And though the SBA recently announced venues would be able to apply starting April 8, open doors don’t necessarily equal packed shows making enough to keep the lights on.
For artists, a year without touring—the way most actually make money—further exposed the way they’d been misled and taken advantage of by platforms that wouldn’t exist without them. Last Spring, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (and soon after that summer, the Chicago chapter) was born out of necessity, fighting for transparency and fair compensation for those who often work multiple gigs to supplement their music earnings and don’t often qualify for unemployment benefits despite the hours dedicated to their craft.
“Companies like Spotify have savior complexes. They will say they’re trying to save the livelihoods of musicians everywhere and that they invented this amazing new way for musicians to make money when they really are not compensating the workers who create that content they offer,” Andrew Clinkman, member of UMAW’s Chicago chapter and its streaming subcommittee, and anchor for last Monday’s event, explained.
Clinkman plays in bands Marker and Spirits Having Fun, and worked as a guitar teacher pre-COVID. Luckily, he’s been able to continue to do so virtually.
Musicians, he argues, aren’t viewed as workers contributing to the value of Spotify’s platform. Similar to the organizing around securing protections for drivers and delivery persons for services like Lyft and Instacart, currently considered contract workers, Clinkman says there’s a clear division of labor that Spotify is either “refusing to acknowledge or completely oblivious to.”
He believes in the former.
“We’re literally asking for pennies,” he continues. “They love to hide behind the opacity of the algorithms; how everything is determined technologically. The money is there. We all know it. Get it together.”
UMAW launched its campaign focused on Spotify’s exploitation in October last year. According to the union’s calculations, each stream is worth, on average, $0.0038. Spotify, which surpassed revenue targets in Q4 according to Variety, is currently valued over $60 billion–with 155 million paid subscribers and 345 million total users.
When announcing the year-end results, CEO and founder Daniel Ek said, “Despite global uncertainty, it was a great year for Spotify.”
Apart from streaming pay, UMAW is asking that Ek and Spotify adopt a user-centric model that recompenses artists directly (akin to Soundcloud’s new “fan-powered” royalties pay system based on overall listening time instead of streams), transparency regarding closed-door contracts, reveal then end existing payola or pay for play, credit all labor in recordings, and “end legal battles intended to further impoverish artists.”
The platform uses a “pro-rata” model, which pools all revenue and distributes it to artists according to what UMAW calls “a complex scheme;” ensuring that acts with the most resources behind them—the household names at the biggest labels—accumulate a greater percentage of streams. No one’s expecting to get checks of the size the top 1% of artists—Ariana Grande, Drake, Billie Eilish, Cardi B—receive. But that 1% often receives 90% of the streaming revenue thanks to the existing model, even if you never listened to them.
In the days following UMAW’s Justice at Spotify action, the streaming platform unveiled a new effort, apparently months in the making, called Loud & Clear. In a series of tweets, CEO/founder Ek explained the new “royalty transparency” site was launched to “shed light on the complicated economics of music streaming.”
Notably, the company’s flashy graphics boast it’s paid over $23 billion in royalties to rights holders including over $5 billion in 2020 (up from $3.3 billion in 2017). It also notes that 1.2 million artists have over 1,000 listeners—it doesn’t, however, say how many artists total have a presence on the platform—and that 15%, or 184,500, of their catalogs generated recording and publishing royalties of at least $1,000. Buried beneath the positive spin and industry jargon, the company doesn’t directly acknowledge any of the specifics highlighted by UMAW or list long-term plans of action.
In response, the union released a statement which reads, in part, “We are pleased that Spotify has recognized the legitimacy of UMAW and the artists around the world who took action this week to demand better payment and treatment from the streaming giant. However, Spotify has failed to meet any of our demands.”
In a Twitter thread, UMAW continued:
“The company consistently deflects blame onto others for systems it has itself built, and from which it has created its nearly $70 billion valuation. We asked for transparency, but this website answers none of our questions about the sources of Spotify’s income in addition to subscriptions and ads, payola schemes for playlist and algorithm prioritization, or the terms of their contracts with major labels.”
Ahead of these developments, Greg Obis, co-owner of Born Yesterday Records, mastering engineer at Chicago Mastering Service, and guitarist in punk band Stuck, further described the trickle-down effects of Spotify’s measly royalty payments. As Obis points out, it’s the independent artists shouldering much of the costs.
“I’d been aware of this very brutal payment structure that exists in the streaming world,” Obis said on a conference call with Clinkman. “Seeing it from the audio engineering standpoint and the record label standpoint has been really formative. This is where the ‘AW’ (allied workers) of the UMAW comes in because… it’s the musicians who are paying the recording engineers, and need to go on tour and hire these people. The music industry is a whole ecosystem.”
With these artists carrying the weight, the idea of recouping expenses feels impossible. If people are seeking out new music and listening, the artist deserves their fair share of that spin. With the battle over the $15 minimum wage at the forefront of the country’s consciousness, debating what a “living wage” is and who qualifies to be paid one, UMAW co-founder Damon Krukowski put it like this in a recent piece for the New York Times Magazine Music Issue’s 5 Notes From a Quiet Year: “In order to earn the equivalent of a $15-per-hour job, you’d need 657,895 streams of your music per month—for each person in your band.”
“The first band my partner Naomi Yang and I were in, Galaxie 500, sees about three-quarters of a million monthly streams on Spotify,” Krukowski continues, “which earns the three members about $1,000 each. That’s for material we outright own.”
In many cases, “rights holders” are more than just the artists. That $1,000 is whittled down by the time any of it reaches the artist’s bank account. Detractors and skeptics of groups and actions like UMAW’s have questioned its expectations; pointing to long-standing abuses of power by major labels and management firms throughout history and suggesting not just anyone should be able to “make a living” off music; asking what “justifies” it. Cultural commentators like Bill Maher have attempted linking coverage of inequities in music streaming to tired talking points conflating merit, talent, and a world where “everybody gets a trophy,” all the while distorting the context and overall goals of the artists involved. Obviously, those invested in the collective consciousness have considered that.
On the phone, Obis points to a regularly regurgitated talking point many creatives, particularly musicians, hear when first realizing the romance of the “struggling artist” myth is anything but. “I think in this country we’ve so internalized, in different music communities, that making money for playing music is wrong or bad,” he says matter-of-factly. “I get into arguments with friends of mine all the time, and not like I’m a fervent capitalist or something, but it’s very wrong-minded for people to say you have to just be in it for the love or you have to always be an amateur. Eventually I realized it’s using the punk ethos for a perverse reason to never expect anything better for themselves.”
“It’s meager asks that we’re making from Spotify,” Obis concludes. “It’s very possible, it’s very reasonable to want to make ends meet by doing what you’re good at and what you love doing.”
Manae Hammond addresses the crowd at the Justice at Spotify protest on Monday, March 15, 2021.
At Monday’s rally, local artists Sophia Nadia of psychedelic rock outfit Cold Beaches and Indigo Finamore from alternative R&B duo Oux echoed similar experiences.
“Is it normal to be homeless if you’re a musician working 60-70 hours a week sometimes?” Nadia proposed to the crowd, to roaring “No’s.”
“Is it normal to have to fight for the bare minimum to be compensated a cent a stream? I think it’s absolutely embarrassing that we have to stand here today to prove a point,” she persisted. “Spotify’s hiding behind their corporation to try to take advantage of us so they can profit off our hard work, while filling the pockets of musicians who are already millionaires, and I think it has to be stopped.”
When Finamore got on the megaphone, they said that after their band was added to Spotify’s “Best Non-Binary Artists of 2020” playlist, streams of their single “Queer Like Me” passed 25,000. They eventually received a royalty check for $45. A penny-per-stream system would’ve paid the band $250, which could cover costs such as a few extra hours of studio time (some of the city’s most noted studios start session rates at $65/hr), or merchandise printing and shipping costs, for example.
“I mean, how are you supposed to put a dollar value on a song?” Anna Holmquist of the group Ester and host of the Bad Songwriter podcast asked on a phone call the Friday before the protest.
“What makes one song better than another? There are some that are ‘bad,’ but people love songs in different ways,” Holmquist points out. “A song or album that was there for me, that’s worth a lot. So the fact that you’re streaming that song and crying to it and that artist is getting .003 cents for your experience, that sucks.”
Holmquist, a member of UMAW’s accountability subcommittee and national steering committee, senses Spotify has artists in a bind – especially smaller acts like theirs. Without the platform’s discovery capabilities, they argue, it’s as if independent artists don’t exist to promoters or booking agents. Spotify’s ubiquitousness and cornering of the market allow its detrimental practices to succeed, and the Taylor Swift move of removing one’s music from the platform could do more harm than good – especially as the future of live music remains uncertain.
“Not being on [Spotify] just cuts out another revenue stream,” Holmquist sighs. “If you’re not going to be on any of the streaming services, then you’re choosing not to make money, which – with the amount of money you make from being a small DIY musician – feels rough. If you’re putting money into albums – albums that cost money to make, that cost money to promote – then you better try to get as much money back as you can.”
As important to the union’s success is reinvestment in what it means to be a music community. Once COVID-19 vaccine distribution increases and scenes actively rebuild, both Clinkman and Holmquist see it as part of UMAW’s job to facilitate access to appointments (as different opportunities may be available to vaccinated musicians) and other protective measures, connect with other localized groups working toward safer, equal music spaces and opportunities, resources on navigating DIY recording and touring, and address the unnecessary sense of competition propelled by Spotify and others.
It’s part of the industry’s “trap,” Holmquist expressed, to make indie artists feel there’s only x-amount of slots for their type of sound despite claims of “giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art” by the likes of Spotify. UMAW insists on lifting each other up.
“We demand moving to something that is reflective of the diversity of artists on the platform and encourages artists to do their own thing,” Clinkman rebuts. “There’s something anti-competitive, in a positive way, about demanding things in that way. UMAW is a symbol of being able to band together and understand this is all affecting us in the same ways. If we’re all pulling in the same direction and working together, we can make it better for each other.”
Monday’s final artist on the megaphone was Manae Hammond, also of Oux and breakout band Hospital Bracelet, who spoke on behalf of the DIY Chi Mutual Aid Fund. Co-founded alongside Zoey Victoria and Sarah Thomas, the group gave micro-grants to artists-at-risk in the midst of the pandemic last year. Hammond said the mutual aid’s efforts are in “lockstep” with UMAW’s mission; what she described as helping musicians and artists through “building dual power” and organized action.
The global shutdown in 2020 put a spotlight on many things taken for granted—one of them being the power the arts, particularly music, have in giving us hope in dark times. Music has always provided an escape from the chaos and acts as a shared language for discussing some of life’s most difficult, complex topics. For some cities, it’s the largest part of their identity and why they’ve become storied destinations. In a year that saw us sheltering in place, unable to travel or ignore what was unfolding in the streets and in Washington, music (as well as literature, film, television, etc.) proved to be vital to our survival. We need all facets of the music industry to work for the artists committed to this understanding, not against them.
“This is just the beginning,” Clinkman told the crowd before it dispersed Monday afternoon. “We’re going to escalate. We’ll be back. They’re going to hear us.”
Follow Union of Musicians and Allied Workers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.
Spring is just around the corner – but this is Chicago. Anything can happen. It has snowed in April here (cue Prince). Luckily, neither the lingering chill in the air nor the ongoing pandemic can stop the city’s creative pulse. There are dozens of releases from exciting, rising musicians set to bloom later with the season – until then, these songs (some of which you might’ve missed in the last year) have been keeping us warm and dancing while the rest of winter melts away.
Demetruest – “Blouse Undone”
In under two minutes, singer/rapper Demetruest (a.k.a Demetruis Spidle) delivers a tightly-woven rap allegory over a fierce loop of abstract beats on “Blouse Undone.” Tracking the end of day, when hardworking folks can undo a button or two and find some after-hours relief amid life’s challenges, their lyrical repetition echoes the monotony of the every day while leaving space to celebrate surviving it. Each of the songs on their EP Direction tells a story of identity, but this one’s catchiness sticks with you.
Rat Tally – “Shrug”
With this cold and fuzzy break-up tune, Rat Tally – the musical moniker of Addy Harris – reconciles the need for closure, with the help of her guitar (solo as well as swallowed by muffled layers of distortion). Her take on grunged-up pop bubbles beneath journal-like lyrics, underscored by just a hint of precociousness and wink-delivering stand out one liners like “I wanna throw a fit, fuck, then forget it.” Harris’ vocal quiver will no doubt draw comparisons to the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and others in her indie rock company, but nowhere in my book is that a bad thing.
Pixel Grip – “Pursuit”
The goth disco is open. A dark, seductive middle-finger to making “good” choices, synthesizers grind against the hypnotic thump grounding Pixel Grip’s exciting single, “Pursuit.” Described as being about “surrendering your desires to be someone who is bad for you,” singer Rita Lukea captures an almost-desperate longing vocally, as a sinister bassline heightens the track’s overall sense of urgency.
Serena Isioma – “Meadows in Japan”
“Meadows in Japan” encourages you to get lost in a fantasy before crash-landing back to reality, while warm melodies invite you into singer/rapper Serena Isioma’s sun-kissed idea of romance. A tempo change disrupts its easy simplicity and takes you to the other side – an “I love you, but I love me more” reflection that isn’t out of character on an EP titled The Leo Sun Sets. As the beat progresses, it unravels much like Isioma’s lyrical affections, culminating in a voicemail – which would be infuriating if it didn’t sound so good.
KeiyaA – “Negus Poem 1&2” Forever, Ya Girl
On her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, KeiyaA weaves observation and meditation into R&B poetry across 16 tracks – but nowhere is the synthesis more complete than on “Negus Poem 1&2.” The track captures the feel of live jazz improvisation, bucking conventional form with the exception of its chorus-turned-chant and fading into a spoken word excerpt, a sonic template repeated in interludes across the album. KeiyaA makes it clear why she’s making music and who she’s making it for: just listen.
Tenci – “Joy”
Tenci’s soft, warbly twang tells the story of “Joy” – the title could refer to a person or personified emotion, but either way, it’s devastatingly fleeting. A song that feels both hopeful and grief-stricken, the soft strumming of the guitar becomes hypnotic as singer-songwriter Jess Shoman outlines a lullaby of sorts. Set amongst other stellar tracks on My Heart is an Open Field, a bit weathered by time and heartache, “Joy” feels like the beginning of something a bit bigger.
Sol Patches – “Couleur”(feat. Dani Ochoa-Bravo)
Three years after 2018’s Blue Transitions, Sol Patches dropped Vivid Image in February. While the release itself was a surprise, its quality is not. A journey in itself, “Couleur” confronts realities of the Black, Trans experience in America. As Ochoa-Bravo leads you to Sol Patches’ no-holds-barred verse, expressing as much anger as resolution, Sol reminds you why they’ve been so missed.
Mia Joy – “Haha”
One of the most anticipated releases of the year, “Haha” was released in January as the first single from Mia Joy’s debut LP Spirit Tamer, due May 2021. Singer Mia Rocha’s amplified whisper floats above a gentle cascade of synths and strings; enveloping the listener in a beautiful – if not a bit melancholy – ambience. Ushering in change, be it physical, mental, spiritual or otherwise, can be chaotic at times. Let Mia Joy guide you with a more meditative hand.
HLDAY MAGIK – “LUV IS MDTATN (love is meditation)”
A collection of understated, lo-fi pop tracks, singer Pamela Maurer – known as Baby Money – introduced new project Hlday Magik in February with the Music 4 Ur Ears EP. Across seven songs, Maurer explores various vocal textures and the boundaries of her bedroom production aesthetic, but the must-hear is “LUV IS MDTATN.” Without overwhelming her hushed coo, minimal instrumentation serves as the glue holding the vulnerable confessional together. It’s simply lovely.
Jackie Hayes – “Eye 2 Eye”
A bass-driven rocker, Jackie Hayes found inspiration in new wave on latest single “Eye 2 Eye.” A little grimy – with the potential for a big, noisy payoff in a future live setting – the song details the frustration that comes with self-growth, reinvention, and expectation (or lack thereof). Luckily, Hayes left some space to take out said frustrations on the dance floor.
Carlile – “Restart”
A house music-inspired cardio circuit of a song, Carlile sends her brand of pop into overdrive. A maximalist club track, “Restart” showcases the artist’s developing style and increasingly biting turn of phrase. Racing against time and dwindling patience, Carlile demands a breakthrough. Let it go.
Brittney Carter – “Prove ‘Em Wrong” As I Am
One of the best LPs of 2020, Brittney Carter’s relentlessly focused As I Am is a force. On “Prove ‘Em Wrong,” she makes sure you’ve been listening. Delivering every syllable smoothly, Carter raps with enviable self-assurance regardless of the story she’s telling. Rhythms unrushed (even sparse on other tracks), she makes sure to give every word the attention it deserves – respecting her music as a natural extension of herself.
Tink – “CAP”
Tink has had enough and she’s got a list of grievances for the fuckboys on “CAP,” appearing on 2020 EP A Gift and a Curse. She’s concise within the three-minute track, her flow poised despite “cleaning up the mess” she sings of. With a catalog of songs calling for women to stand in their worth, respect and desire, “CAP” and its earwormy hook (“too many lies, too many hoes, too many bitches”) is another one for the Tink canon.
Ashlee Bankz – “Big Boss Livin’”
Ashlee Bankz released a handful of tracks in 2020, but none were quite like “Big Boss Livin’.” In a year that needed any excuse for celebration, Bankz – undeniably dexterous vocally – directed that energy toward herself with this rapid-fire ode to moving up. There’s no filler here, no room for apology or humility. It feels good to flex; let Bankz take this minute and a half to remind you.
https://soundcloud.com/ashleebankz/big-boss-livin
Astrachan – “Ladakh”
A delightful familiarity rings from Astrachan’s “Ladakh.” Its folksy, Laurel Canyon-feel dances with bits of psychedelia to lull the listener into songwriter Ben Astrachan’s memory. Building a pretty dreamy atmosphere, heightened by clever flairs of clarinet and flute, the artist’s namesake band is as charming as it is promising; be on the look out for a self-titled release due May 2021.
In the past decade, it has felt as though the concreteness once known as “fact” is shifting. What were once black and white truths have now turned grey, good and evil have grown nuanced, genre and labels are infinite, and there’s a general acceptance of fluidity in the nature of being human. Floatie, a Chicago-based band comprised of tight-knit group of friends Sam Bern (they/them) Luc Schutz (he/him), Joe Olson (he/him) and Will Wisniewski (he/him), explore these ideas sonically and lyrically on their new record Voyage Out, slated for release March 26 via Exploding in Sound.
“We’ve been looking very seriously into binaries, and it turns out they aren’t real. Human beings are always drawing conclusions about the things we don’t fully understand,” the band says over email. “It is a perfectly natural defense against a strange and incomprehensible world, but we believe abstract questions require abstract answers, so we turn to the language of music, to the vibrations of the spheres, and all we have learned so far is that we know nothing.”
The lyrics on the record can at times feel like listening in on a refreshingly authentic contemplation amongst loved ones. The group have been playing music together for over a decade, causing them to grow a fan base and community of musical peers in the Chicago indie scene, but surprisingly, Voyage Out is Floatie’s first release. “Nothing crumbles that is built on a foundation of love. Playing music with each other makes us happier than little piggies in a watermelon patch,” they say. “There’s a level of trust and understanding and openness that makes writing music with each other really easy. It does make for some distracting band practices though – if we don’t see each other for a while we end up just chatting the whole time.”
Throughout the record, Floatie morphs conventional indie music into something mesmerizing and swirling. At times the instrumentation can sound like a voice all its own, as though a debate between guitar, vocals, and percussion is taking place. Both chaotic and organized, simplistic yet dynamic, Voyage Out sheds genre and rejects definition. The precision the band engages with doesn’t limit their creativity as much as it challenges them to explore something new, a restriction the group seems to thrive under. Voyage Out was recorded by Seth Engel, a local Chicagoan who has been working with up-and-coming bands for the past twelve years, such as Ratboys and Moontype – bands that Floatie played shows with prior to the pandemic. Engel is known less for the sounds he introduces on the record and more for the way he forms an artistic space, with warmth and security in order to yield genuine and open results.
“Working with Seth is like working with an angel in heaven. He’s always there in your corner, saying all the right things at the right time. He’s proven himself as a more than capable producer both with his own material he puts out as Options, and every other record he is involved with,” says the band. “He is also a dear friend and a fan of the music, so we knew we could trust his decisions when it came to translating the music into the recorded domain. Working with Seth is a blessing and a delight and a gift and we love him.”
The album’s second single “Shiny,” premiering today via Audiofemme, speaks of fate (“Some luck/It’s happenstance/Or consequence/I guess that’s the way it goes”) juxtaposed with choice (“I will try/Even if my brain says so”). Lyrically, it’s a narrative of rediscovering oneself in the wake of change caused by a relationship, and how partnership and the self interact. Floatie claims the song is about “forcing your own luck by committing to your decisions” – a sentiment which scoffs at fate while acknowledging that not all circumstances and outcomes are in our hands. The twisting and turning which takes place sonically reflects this concept; as the flow of the song recedes and advances, so does the confidence of its speaker.
“The guitar may seem a bit out of fashion these days, but that doesn’t take away from its power as an instrument for channeling divinity,” the band says. “Usually Sam will bring a riff or two – or sometimes many riffs – for the rest of us to play with and modify until we have something that we all feel a connection to. The meaning coincides with the riffs, the vocal melody ensues and lastly the lyrics are finalized, marking the end of a quest for a song that (hopefully) isn’t a stinker.”
“This is surely a tried and true method for us, but we’re looking forward to experimenting with other processes for the next batch of songs,” they add. They’re also looking forward to playing more shows, as evidenced by the line, “I’ll take all the spice in front of me/I’ll go to another show” from “Shiny.”
“The first live music event post-lockdown will be overflowing with spice, and we will all appreciate the live experience in a new and special way, and that is really exciting,” says Floatie. “The shift from counting on our fellow music community members to fill our creative cups has been an adjustment. What the lyrics are referencing are the things that we do in order to feel driven to challenge ourselves and sit down and write something. Without the stimulation and life of the outside world, I guess it becomes more of a personal responsibility and less of an active experience.”
As we come into a time where commonplace formulas for music, identity, and community are being challenged, Floatie pushes the boundaries of our familiar comforts. This isn’t an indie band that sticks to standard form and discusses conventional truths and dynamics – instead, Floatie experiments with something new on Voyage Out. Through hypnotic melodies and decisive rhythm, the band allows creativity to steer their path, a commitment which only yields new and exciting music from a band to keep on our radars.
A week-long bootcamp for The Voice was Piwa’s window to the music industry – and its cruelty.
At age 17, the singer-songwriter, then known as Tapiwa, was in California with her mom for rounds of auditions after a successful submission tape for the Snapchat edition of the NBC singing competition garnered recognition from judges Miley Cyrus and Adam Levine.
As part of a group told after a round of cuts that they were moving on to the national show, she and the other participants went home to prepare to leave their real lives behind for Hollywood. A few days later, after Piwa had coordinated her schedule with her high school to fit with the show’s timeline, the phone rang.
“I got a call from someone saying ‘Unfortunately, you’re unable to go to the next round at this time.’ I was just like, oh my gosh. It was so heartbreaking. Like you told me, you told me!” she recalls. “But it’s all good. The Voice, with all the auditions and meetings, taught me how the business side really works. It’s very much not an easy game. It’s gonna hurt sometimes, you’re not always gonna get that win.”
Luckily, Piwa didn’t take the missed opportunity to heart. “Them telling me that moment wasn’t my time on that show doesn’t mean I’m not a good singer or exclude me from opportunities after that,” she reconciles. “It’s about learning that things will come.”
While she didn’t make the final cut for the live show, the experience was a catalyst for her creativity upon her return home to Plano, Texas. Taking control, she built her presence on YouTube – crafting unique covers of songs from artists including Arctic Monkeys, Drake, and Hozier. Looking to pursue a degree applicable to her musical pursuits, her path then brought her to Columbia College Chicago.
Now 20, with several singles under her belt as the reinvigorated Piwa, she’s riding high on a wave of renewed artistic momentum.
After a year of delay due to the pandemic, she’s returned with “Bass Down.” Released Friday, February 26, the new single is a seductive, slinky call for an inconsistent lover to keep up, with an undercurrent of reggae flavoring its rhythms. But the antagonist “lover,” according to the artist, is her own anxiety and fears threatening her work. “It’s basically saying, ‘Step up.’ You’re here to show what you can do; what’s up,” she describes.
Show up, she did. Showcasing both her powerful low ends and playful higher register, her vocal experimentation is arguably her biggest evolution compared to previous tracks “Love Letters,” “Hundreds” and “Wave.”
“I really feel like [‘Bass Down’] is that song for me,” Piwa continues. “I’m here now. I took a whole year to just fucking work. I want to put myself out there for people to hear.”
As far as how it was written, she says the verse came in a freestyle as she sang over the instrumental she received one night from producer Sam Pontililo. To his surprise, she emailed him a quick vocal recording in the early hours of the following morning. It all came together with ease, she remembers, and was unlike any process the typically meticulous Piwa had been part of. “It was so nice to have that moment where it just flows,” she laughs, extending the roundness of the “o” sound. “It was really exciting.”
Most inspired lyrically by her own journey, her songs serve as confident reminders of the power of perseverance and preservation. “Love Letters,” the first song she ever produced, details the ways we try to rationalize arguments, red flags and our post-break up peace in intimate relationships, while “Hundreds” doubles-down on affirmations and self-actualization. The atmosphere created by “Wave,” a minimalist, afro-futuristic slow-burner of a R&B track, feels as if you’re being entranced to be kept in her witch’s bottle.
At just three months old, Piwa emigrated from Zimbabwe to the United States with her parents and older sister. Settling in the Bronx for eight years before moving to Texas, she got involved in the performing arts in middle school and caught the bug quickly. Though she sang in the church choir, she was in and out of school singing groups and orchestra, due to not being able to afford her school’s rental fee for instruments. Her phone, as for most young people, became the center of her world. Different apps served as resources for her do-it-yourself approach, providing the tools she needed to expand her musical education.
“When I was younger, I just wanted to be able to record videos for myself. I started seeing I could be capable of doing more. I had all these big sounds and ideas in my head – I wanted to be able to make those ideas come to life,” the singer says of those early phone app experiments. “It wasn’t pressure; it’s that pull that just grabs you and makes you really want to make music.”
Then, there was GarageBand. Tinkering with the free version of the app during her spare time, she learned how to build a song from the base beat and up. She’s since graduated to analog instruments, but has a soft spot for songs created entirely digitally. “Love Letters,” she cites – referring to the song as her “baby” – was made solely using her cellphone.
“It really got me into wanting to do that for myself, and learn and educate myself,” Piwa says excitedly. “Then it was like, I can actually learn with the chance I have of going to college. I can do this and put real time into trying to do what I actually feel like I’m supposed to do.”
While her family persisted with their own visions for her life (being a doctor, mainly) despite being supportive of her talent show appearances and smaller, local performances for the public, she eventually made headway. Her mom, especially, became her number one fan, helping embolden that soulful, clever voice that brims with assuredness.
“We’ve had our battles,” she confesses. “She really came through. My mom was like ‘If you want to do this, you do it. Put yourself into it and show them. Tell them, you’ve done this before.'”
As for many up-and-coming artists, Piwa’s work never stops. After the pandemic shut down music venues, recording studios, festivals and more lifelines for travelling musicians and industry workers, Piwa – like countless others – lost what could have been breakthrough gigs at South by Southwest in Austin and at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. But she hopes the buzz around “Bass Down” will entice more listeners to visit past projects and keep an eye on her and her still-in-the-works EP, while opening doors to new opportunities in 2021.
“[The pandemic shutdown] opened up a lot of time for everyone to just sit there in their own space and their own company, and it changed a lot for me as far as what I’d hoped for 2020 and what I envisioned would be happening now,” she says. “I know I want my music to be my force. I want to show my force through my music. That’s the main point I grasped out of the fear and sadness of 2020. Now, as I go through this forever process, I feel like I’ve got a good grasp on my game plan.”
Anyone who has seen the Spice Girls’ 1997 film Spice World will remember their incredible tour bus. The group’s multi-level home-on-wheels was decked out with fire poles and a swing, and personalized nooks for each member that, while varied to match their “Spice” persona, all managed to coordinate to create one of the coolest shared spaces ever put on screen.
Waltzer, helmed by singer/guitarist and lyricist Sophie Sputnik (a.k.a Sophie Pomeranz), and its debut album Time Traveler are kind of like the Spice Bus (if you will): a coordination of Sputnik’s selves over the past 10 years, and friends she’s made along the way, travelling across the country to get to the big show on time… and alive.
When Audiofemme connects with Sputnik over the phone, she laughs at the comparison. “I think Spice Girls are a huge reason why I do what I do, too,” she says. “I was obsessed with Spice World.”
After six years as half of Florida blues-grunge duo Killmama, her howling voice emanating from behind a drum kit, Sputnik found herself at a crossroads. She’d been writing her own songs – tracks including “Lantern” and “Ugly Misfits” – but didn’t know what to do with them; they felt different and her vision stretched beyond the limitations of a two-piece. Billie Holiday and Roy Orbison became mainstays in her record rotation and she dove deep into girl groups of the 1960s, enamored with singer Ronnie Spector after hearing Oakland, California-based outfit Shannon and the Clams’ rockabilly-flavored reimagination of the sound at a show in South Florida.
Clearly, Sputnik was itching to move on from the constriction of a scene dominated by garage rock infleunces, and she and her then-bandmate weren’t . “You can only do the ‘Ty Segall’ thing for so long,” she says, half-jokingly, noting that relentless touring had driven a wedge between herself and her bandmate. “I knew that we’d kind of hit a wall and I needed to figure out what was next.”
With the hope of finding inspiration in new surroundings, she moved to Wisconsin with her previously long-distance girlfriend Amanda, who had planned to relocate there for a new job. While one final Killmama tour followed, performing took a backseat, but Sputnik kept writing, penning stories of love, fear, obsession and loneliness, and the disorienting effects that come with each.
That feeling of personal unease, of teetering on the edge of destruction, dances across Time Traveler. It’s a moody rock ‘n’ roll album pulling from the best of country’s emotional storytelling and complimentary twang, capturing the tension between desire and distraction, the slow spiral of depression, the head-spinning crashes brought on by drinking too much and getting too high, and the catharsis of saying the hard things out loud.
Sputnik sings of life and death intimately – unfettered by selling anything resembling pop music’s idealistic reframing of even the saddest of themes. Well, with the exception of “I Don’t Want to Die,” a catchy Wanda Jackson-meets-The Ronettes warbler masquerading as a love song. While it introduces Sputnik’s more theatrical side, the lyrical narrative is confessional; Sputnik has faced death head on.
“I’ve lost a couple of friends to overdoses, suicide and things like that. I had cancer as a kid and have kind of been speaking about mortality for a really long time,” Sputnik says. “It felt really good to admit the truth of it: I don’t want to die. I’m not done yet, because sometimes I have felt like I wanted to, but I love being on this crazy planet. It’s fucked up, but it was important for me to realize how grateful I was; that I didn’t want to leave it.”
Honesty has shaped much of Sputnik’s core, and you get the sense that writing those things down in song as opposed to internalizing them ultimately stripped away any need for her to be someone or something else. “It felt really fucking good to say ‘I feel ugly,’” Sputnik admits, her relief practically audible over the call. “It felt good, like none of that even mattered, and then that translated to ‘Time Traveler’ [the song]. All these songs were just things I needed to say so I could hear it back and believe it.”
She chuckles. “That’s also scary.”
That energy derived from feeling unworthy, ugly, lost and then found is woven through the eight-song album’s finale – a one-two punch of the titular track and “Destroyer,” an organ-grounded, haunting ballad about taking the risk in stepping into what’s unknown, with a guitar solo that will make you miss seeing and hearing live music (more than you already have been).
It took patience to get there. First, a move to Chicago; Sputnik was offered a job at a chance meeting while waiting tables in Wisconsin, Amanda agreed to relocate, and the couple did so in 2017. While Sputnik’s day gig and “living like a normal person” weren’t the right fit, “Everything I did in Chicago gave me clues of what to do next,” she says. She bought a loop pedal from producer/musician Charlie Kim (professionally known as Tuffy Campbell) via re-sale app LetGo; that interaction proved to be a key that unlocked Chicago’s D.I.Y. music scene for her and eventually helped solidify her commitment toward making Waltzer a realized, full-band project.
“I wasn’t sure how I was gonna play my stuff live and he introduced me to a few people to jam with,” she explains. At the time, Sputnik was considering joining a band as a drummer. “After writing with Charlie a bit, he told me I should check out [Treehouse Records]. I immediately called them and Barrett [Guzaldo, owner/engineer] told me to stop by.” She had a few songs, but needed a producer. Guzaldo suggested she contact Rookie guitarist Chris Devlin and, as she puts it, “the rest is history!”
To this day, her band remains a revolving door for anyone whose energy feels right and is up for the challenge (mainly of listening to Sputnik’s fantastical introductions of them, as heard in the band’s recent Audiotree session). The current group spotlights the talents of Sarah Weddle on drums, bassist Kelly Hannemann, Harry Haines on the keys, and guitar player Michael Everett.
Rooting in active creative communities and providing space for all types of artists to belong as a means of giving back comes through her complimentary passion, Waltzer TV. A hybrid musical showcase and sketch show, the hour-long YouTube episodes have included performances from the likes of Y La Bamba, Reno Cruz and more.
Between sets, Sputnik transforms into a myriad of costumed characters in episodes – even a loose interpretation of her uncle. In Florida, she dabbled in improv as a kid and loved musical theatre in high school. A similar style comes across in the band’s music videos. The web series was partially born out of necessity due to the onset of the COVID pandemic (Waltzer had been scheduled to make a SXSW debut in 2020, having played only a handful of local shows). But it’s also an outlet for Sputnik’s multifaceted performance – spoken and sung, comical as well as serious.
On Thursday, February 25, Waltzer TV will serve as the format for the band’s proper (re)introduction. Written and directed by local filmmaker Robert Salazar, Time Traveler: An Album Release Movie will be streamed via Noonchorus. Admission is “pay what you want” and viewers can tip the band during the broadcast. Please note: there is also an accompanying pizza, “The Ugly Misfit,” available thanks to a collaboration with Sicilian-style pizza spot, Pizza Friendly Pizza.
Shot at beloved Chicago venues the Hideout and Empty Bottle, the movie’s guests include Ratboys, Kara Jackson, “Lonesome” Andrew Sa, WOES and Helen Gilley, with an appearance by noted performer, actor and future legend-about-town, Alex Grelle. “It’s not heavy. It’s really silly. There’s a puppet,” Sputnik jokes. “I think people are gonna feel happy watching it. Then all of it will be over in a hour and we can go back to our chaos.”
Joking aside, Sputnik consistently uses her platform to pay it forward and celebrate others’ joys and successes, and she hopes to be a model of perseverance and creation in spite of depression. “Even if your depression is trying to isolate you, tell you you’re not worth trying, ignore it. Just show up to fucking everything, even if it ends up being a waste of time,” she recommends.
“I feel like it’s not necessarily ‘cool’ for a woman to talk about their own struggles with self-worth when they’re trying to empower other women,” adds Sputnik, “but I really want to inspire other women to speak up and go for it – just put it out there.”
An oft-wigged and glittered, latex and leather-wrapped Midwestern daughter, Emily Blue is a pop star, period.
One of the first Chicago artists I’ve ever seen appear on stage flanked by dancers who not only made their choreography and transitions appear effortless, but seamlessly executed a tear-away costume change mid-song amid clouds of red and pink-hued smoke and pulsing lights—Blue seems born to become a household name, evident as the entire crowd shouted the lyrics to songs like “Cellophane” and “Falling in Love” back at her. The paltry $10 admission belied the show’s stellar production value, which included a stacked bill featuring Thair, SuperKnova, Carlile, and other artists who’ve been carving a larger space for pop music in Chicago over the past few years.
Across her two previously released solo projects—2016’s Another Angry Woman and 2018’s *69— and two LPs as part of indie band Tara Terra, Emily Blue has pulled back layers of herself and her exaggerated character to explore pop music’s most enduring trends through her own modernist lens. In 2019, she was named the city’s favorite pop artist in the Chicago Reader’s “Best Of” poll. Due this summer, her upcoming album The Afterlove—preceded by single “7 Minutes,” which hit streaming platforms February 12—feels like the most distilled integration of her music and message yet.
While her work to this point has swung between seemingly polarizing extremes—Another Angry Woman rawly examined sexualized violence, rape culture and womanhood derived from her own experiences as a survivor of assault, while *69 was a breathy, steamy reclamation of sexual agency and liberated desire—The Afterlove finds itself in another world: a planet without binaries (gay/straight, boy/girl, body/spirit), without fear; one you can only travel to by rainbow.
It’s exciting yet bittersweet for the singer, as The Afterlove marks an ending as much as it does a beginning. On Thanksgiving Day in 2020, Blue’s friend and frequent collaborator, producer/musician Max Perenchio (founding member of Chicago bands The Gold Web, Bad City and Real Lunch) passed away due to injuries sustained in a car accident in Los Angeles. Ryan Brady, Atlantic Records VP of marketing, was with Perenchio and was also killed. With the myriad safety procedures put in place to combat the spread of the virus, there’ve been no funerals. No memorials to gather with loved ones and celebrate the lives of those lost or process the collective grief.
“If I didn’t do this, nobody would hear the last few songs Max and I made,” Blue says on a phone call from her hometown of Champaign-Urbana, where she’s been hunkering down since COVID-19’s initial threat in 2020. “That’s a huge motivating factor for me, to be honest, getting through the pandemic. Having him be part of this album, and even continuing it with songs he isn’t a part of but wanting to make something with that inspiration—that’s important.”
“I really view Emily Blue as having started with Max,” she continues. “He and I dug really deep into pop. That was always a dream of mine. I just never had the tools and the person to team up with, you know what I mean? We’d pull so many all nighters.”
The pair would pour over hyper-pop works by Charli XCX and the late revolutionary SOPHIE; Madonna and Prince; the big balladry of rock band Heart’s 1980s offerings. They shared an affinity for glitch and hair metal guitar, as well as the fantasy of the pre-(and possibly one day, post) social media world. It was Perenchio who came up with the name for the space they wanted to create: the afterlove.
Before the loss of Perenchio, Blue—born Emily Otnes—was finally gaining traction she’d been building upon for years: steady bookings for her See the Future Tour across the United States, placement on Spotify playlists expanding her audience, fan mail from Mexico, the U.K. and Israel. Referring to herself as a “productivity machine” at the beginning of 2020, she launched her Artists for Global Giving initiative at the start of the pandemic, which challenged musicians in lockdown to write, record and mix tracks in 24 hours. Proceeds from the mixtape, which includes the talents of NNAMDÏ, Troigo, and Flora to name a few, went to various COVID-19 relief funds.
Then in March, she was diagnosed with the virus. Forced to slow down, she found the required rest a blessing in disguise, in some ways. “I was running on a body I didn’t take care of. My mental health was bad,” she explains. “I really took some time to work on myself. The balance in shifting my priorities toward love and relationships that matter most to me—it put so much into perspective.”
The time for reflection included revisiting songs she’d been holding onto. Finding a sense of groundedness through her physical and mental healing, Blue—who admits to once viewing pop as the most explicitly “people-pleasing” genre, lacking in authenticity and point of view—focused on what resonated with her the most. “I was like, oh okay, I love the 1980s. I love classic rock. I want to sing about romance and bisexuality. That’s where I’m at right now,” she says.
Dropping singles “Aperture” and “Trump”—which dances toward death metal—and a bass-driven rendition of Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s smash “Rain on Me” (featuring Thair) throughout the year, Blue inched closer to honing her sound and aesthetic, all the while teasing what she feels is her “best music to date.” On forthcoming singles from The Afterlove, Blue sounds like a musical lovechild of Paula Abdul and late ‘80s pop-rock outfit Roxette or even Vixen, experimenting with different facets of her vocal texture and inflection. In the grandeur—and kitsch—of the era, from fashion and décor to larger-than-life personalities and pumped-up production giving way to new musical frontiers, Blue found a palette for her re-emergence.
Now, on the heels of the music video for “7 Minutes”—an ode to the kissing game that subverts the idea of what it means to be “in the closet” (literally and figuratively)—and already mapping dates for future singles, Blue finds herself at the helm, and on the precipice of something special.
Though Tara Terra remains active, and the singer-songwriter recently dipped her toe into roots rock alongside pal Mariel Fechik in under-the-radar country duo Moon Mouth, Emily Blue is her career’s ambition fully in motion. From dance classes at a young age and bouncing between acts formed with friends as a teen, to Greyhound-bussing herself from Urbana to Chicago and back every weekend to make music, she’s now at a point that she’s prepared for her whole life.
“A lot of pop music, but especially pop made by queer artists, is about providing that space where people can dance and celebrate life and find joy and togetherness rather than always focusing on the trauma of our lives,” she observes. “It’s a fine balance—it’s about love and loss and queerness and identity, but these songs have just poured out of me. I don’t even question it. It’s been empowering.”
In the early 2000s, serendipitous road trips to venues in church basements and abandoned warehouses were still considered priceless and precious moments. Kids with their ears tuned to the underground traveled far and wide off the beaten trail, and Chicago-based Joan of Arc reigned as a prolific genre defining staple, alongside related acts like Cap’n Jazz, American Football, Owls, and Owen, all tied together by one common thread: brothers Mike and Tim Kinsella, and their cousin Nate.
I’d been sneaking out on school nights to unmapped venues since the age of twelve to see the Kinsellas play in various formations, and distinctly remember an Owen show at Poughkeepsie’s Club Crannel in which a group of teenagers from the crowd began heckling Mike. “What ever happened to Cap n’ Jazz?” they shouted, followed by a repetitive and aggressive mantra: “We want Joan of Arc!” The lines have always blurred between these projects – but Joan of Arc stood out as the seminal art band of the bunch.
On December 4, Joan of Arc released their final album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby, via Joyful Noise Recordings. Over the past two decades the band has had a revolving cast of members, but the simplicity of the record’s title gets to the point: here are four friends, closing the final chapter on a prolific catalogue that spans more than twenty releases.
The album was collaboratively written and recorded by Melina Ausikaitis, Bobby Burg, Theo Katsaounis, and Tim Kinsella, with the support of frequent collaborators Jeremy Boyle, Jenny Pulse, Nate Kinsella, and Todd Mattei. The process of making the record started as a series of epic jam sessions that would eventually be pared down to create individual tracks. These jams were a hybrid mix of electronics and classic composition that marries analog synth with noise, weaving together sonic motifs within an indie rock framework.
“We basically had everything being recorded through one analog mixer, and had only two tracks going at the same time. It’s funny that we’re still a bit confused about who made what sound on the record,” Burg explains. “It was a process of chiseling out the parts. The sessions would range from 45 minutes to three hours. There are multiple songs on the album made out of the same jam.” The album’s spontaneity and experimentation across ten tracks makes it a more than fitting swan song.
Where there’s an end, there’s a beginning, and a fruitful and colorful history in between. Joan of Arc played their first live show in June 1996 at Autonomous Zone in Chicago, forming after the break-up of frontman Tim Kinsella’s high school punk band Cap’n Jazz in the summer of 1995. The band’s debut full-length, A Portable Model Of, was released on Jade Tree in June 1997. The record lives between art-rock, traditional folk, and math rock, ornamented with experimental sounds. Lyrically, tracks like “Anne Aviary” echo twisted nostalgia belted in an angst-ridden post rock yowl, juxtaposed with a reoccurring synthetic bird chirping flicker, held against a deep resonating lawn mower-like vibration. As a whole, the album established the Joan of Arc habit of using outside collaborators to support the core group’s songwriting – and launched an influential, if not polarizing, career.
With a fluctuating fanbase, the band went on to constantly reinvent themselves. Their anarchist approach resulted in albums that critics were unable to compartmentalize, predict, or even understand. The sound scape architecture, instrumentation, odd sounds, and sampling effects on the records created an improvisational template with an emphasis on the “studio as instrument.” The band would continually revisit this format on successive albums like 1998’sHow Memory Works, Live in Chicago, 1999, 2001’s How Can Anything So Little Be Any More?, 2009’s Flowers, and so on.
Joan of Arc draws upon unique and unexpected influences; minimalist composers, early ’90s hip hop, and house music. You can hear it on “Feels Like the Very Second Time,” from 2015’s JOA99, its sparse analog beat gradually building within a formulaic house music framework. The beat moves off center towards the closing of the track, and bleeds into fuzz, descending into the ambient, mysterious “Hairspray for Babies.”
“When Tim got super into house, it definitely affected our live sound on a technical level,” Burg recalls. “Suddenly we thought it was critical to have actual subs in the club for our performances. Hip hop shows had a big impact on us, and how we wanted our music to sound at full volume and heavy frequency levels. You know – that heaviness you just feel in your chest.”
2018 brought the album 1984 and with it, the introduction of Melina Ausikaitis as lead vocalist. 1984 was almost entirely written by the newest member of the band, a visual artist who had played with the group for roughly five years. Aside from being a solo artist, Ausikaitis sang backup on the band’s previous LP, He’s Got The Whole Land This Land Is Your Land in His Hands. 1984 was characterized by her distinctive voice, while Kinsella, Katsaounis, Burg, and Jeremy Boyle accompanied the emotional soundscape with alternating melodies, drone hums, field recording samples, and empty space.
On Tim Melina Theo Bobby, Kinsella and Ausikaitis swap vocal duties track to track. The spacious and intimate songwriting feels conversational, with an effortless nonchalance. The record weaves and dips like the dynamic arc of a well scripted movie.
The fittingly-titled “Destiny Revision” opens with a soft, sentimental crooning accompanied by analog electronic instrumentation, leaning into the original sound Joan of Arc embodied in the mid-90s. But as the record progresses, it taps into the avant-garde, sample-driven experimental soundscapes that the band has embraced for the past decade. Ausikaitis’s earnest, lush vocal floats over a rough, vibrant almost synaesthetic jam on “Rising Horizon” – you can taste the tone, and visualize the brilliant color palette of the record. The moody tracks breathe life into the senses, and sonically soothes like an adult lullaby.
“Karma Repair Kit” feels like traveling back in time and re-experiencing the first album that got you through angst-ridden puberty (“I so envy/Your restraint/Scuttling up trees/And knee-high kicking across cold creeks/And your cheeks slashed with burnt cork war paint/We each agree our dreams define us”), then you snap out of it, realize you’re grown, and sink into the relief of adult autonomy.
“Destiny Revision” is essentially about winging it when your life fails to play out as you’d imagined, and the video features analog photos taken by Burg in various cities while on tour, prominently featuring the legendary Berghain in Berlin, where Joan of Arc played their last show. “I’ve been spending lockdown scanning and labeling negatives. I have it loosely organized starting around 2013, up until we flew home from Berlin,” he explains. “That last gig felt like the ultimate show. I remember the mirror ball on the side of the stage during our really fun sound check, and the fireplace next to the merch booth, and the crowd was just amazing.”
Ausikaitis adds, “We were so tight by then, playing together felt like nothing. That kind of effortless gel where you don’t have to concentrate so much, and you can actually look around at each other and feel present.”
Sung by Ausikaitis, “Something Kind” stands apart as a particularly provocative punk rock feminist anthem. It was written “at the height of the #metoo movement, when everything started coming out in the news, all of the inappropriate things gentlemen were doing to their female employees,” she explains.
Initially focused on a male friend who was being threatened with false accusations, at some point, the narrative shifted. “It became a song about just getting fucked by guys, and thinking about how men didn’t know what my experience had been like. I’m not sure exactly when it flipped from me being mad at this woman on a man’s behalf, or me being angry at the universal lack of empathy for the female experience,” she says. “I was really nervous to say the last line: ‘In the dawn of something kind/I’m the one taking you from behind/You get the tits and periods/And you’re the one who gets pregnant,’ because I’m a pretty modest person. I don’t generally write provocative lyrics, and Bobby didn’t know what was coming. It was actually hilarious because Bobby’s surprised reaction was in the recording, and we kept playing it on repeat.”
With regards to this being the final body of work from Joan of Arc, Ausikaitis says, “We were just recording. We didn’t go into it with the idea of it being our last. Since the songs weren’t made with that intention, I didn’t have to write my goodbye anthem. Now that it’s become this thing, it feels super sentimental. It has certain triumphant parts that are really kind of heartbreaking, and can definitely define itself as the final album.”
Burg responds, “Only the future can define that. You should think of every record as your last, because you never know if you’re going to make another one. For this to be the last record, we’d actually just have to wait, and not make another record.” He draws a parallel between the album and the movie Fargo, a film that led the audience to believe it was based on a true story due to a title card, but in reality was press tour spin. Joan of Arc have earned a reputation for being highly eccentric – is the band taking us for a spin? Like Burg implies, only time will tell.
As self-described “musicians with day jobs,” the lack of fiscal greed and societal pressures have allowed Joan of Arc to pursue music in its most organic expressive form. They create freely without the burden of people pleasing, and have dodged lucrative offers to do early-album-based nostalgia tours. We can look forward to hearing more of the band members’ exciting side projects: Ausikaitis and Burg’s brilliant, bizarre and intuitive pop jams as Aitis Band; and Good Fuck, Tim Kinsella and wife Jenny Pulse’s erotic exploration of experimental literary techniques and adventurous electronic beats. Tim Melina Theo Bobby signifies the end of an era, but it also carries on the legacy of a raw, provocative band that evolved (and sometimes intentionally devolved) a limitless sound – and nurtured a passionate underground music community in the process.
Visit Joan of Arc via their website for ongoing updates.
“The best way to break a habit is to call it what it is,” says Chicago-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen. Over the last several months, she’s taken some time to examine her own holding patterns – especially those that have held her back – as she settles into city life, having recently relocated from Iowa City. And she has the receipts, in the form of a six-song EP, Creature of Habit, out December 11. Whether it’s falling into relationships of convenience, mindless snacking, or ordering takeout as though the world isn’t on a swift decline, Moen uses her witty, relatable lyricism to unravel the most tangled parts of her persona and braid them into something more beautiful.
So far, Moen has released the EP’s languid, minimalist title track, the twangy “Eating Chips,” and a contemplative folk ballad, “It’ll Get Tired Too.” Premiering today via Audiofemme is her latest single from Creature of Habit, “Studio Apartment,” a bluesy play-by-play of the “bad day, bored night, good timing” that leads to meeting someone at the bar and taking them home. “Oh wow, you seem just my type/Push me away if you loved me/Sure, we can head over to mine/Finish that thought in the morning, or the afternoon,” she sings, in a tone as casual as the affair she describes: “I’d like to think I know better than I do, but I do this all the time too.” She’s seemingly resigned to what’s about to happen, until she lets it all burst operatically forth in the first chorus: “No worries, I won’t fall for you/If we go back to my studio apartment/No view of the bridge or my dreams.”
It’s easier to coast when it’s so exhausting – and possibly disastrous – to want or work for something more. Potential creates complications; better to keep things simple, enclosed within four walls. While the song seems like a specific, personal glimpse into a moment of Moen’s life, we’ve all lived that same moment, felt that same feeling, down to the shit-show details in which Moen, having locked herself out, searches for a spare key while her love interest sways drunkenly in the hall.
That holds true across the entire EP – her intimate confessions make the songs easy to connect with, particularly for young women, whose ambitions and desires are often frowned on should we dare speak them aloud. But lying to yourself, Moen says, in an effort to convince yourself that everything is fine, dooms you to stay in your rut. “You can also be upset. I’m just realizing that now,” she says. “You do have to laugh at things, like, oh shit, I left my keys inside, wow that was dumb. But it’s also okay to not be okay and be mad. I feel like I, especially as a woman, never really had the space for those emotions.” And when you don’t have that emotional space, the four walls of your studio apartment can feel like they’re starting to close in on you.
For the most part, though, Moen hasn’t stayed in one place long enough to let that happen, living a nomadic life instead. She studied French and Spanish at the University of Iowa in the hopes of teaching abroad or working in international business, but also began singing covers at open mic nights. “It’d be me and my guitar, singing Johnny Cash and stuff,” Moen remembers. “Eventually, my friends were like, why don’t you write your own songs? And I was like, I can’t do that. And then one day I was just like, actually I can. You just stop telling yourself you can’t do it, and then you do it. I let go and I just started writing lyrics.” Moen finished her program, but the minute she graduated she set about learning to book shows and toured as much as possible, headlining Lincoln Hall in Chicago and supporting artists like Lake Street Dive, Margaret Glaspy, and Buck Meek.
She released three albums in as many years – her self-titled debut in 2016, followed by sophomore effort That’s All I Wanted in 2017 and A Million Miles Away in 2018. Constantly on the road to promote them, Moen crashed with random folks while touring, or friends and family if she needed an extended stay between gigs. She had another LP ready to go – a big, glossy, studio affair – and had even dropped a few singles from it (“Headgear” and “Ex’s House Party“); she was scheduled to head to SXSW and launch another tour from there in March when the pandemic took hold, dashing those plans.
For a musician like Moen, whose identity and career trajectory was wrapped up in playing live, the blow could have been devastating. But Moen took it as a sign that it was time to pause and maybe put down some roots. “Impostor syndrome is real, and the one time I’ve never felt impostor syndrome is when I’m on stage,” she says. “Quarantine has been a bit of a beautiful awakening of owning it more, [saying] you are still doing what you do, and you are more than just a show machine. It’s been kind of a necessary chapter in my life – really hard, but also, there are some things I’m thankful for, like learning more about my own brain and just being a person.”
After a brief stay in an attic room with spotty Wi-fi, Moen temporarily moved into her aunt’s basement. The two are close in age – Moen says it felt like staying with an older sister – and because her aunt is a therapist, the singer took the opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of her own mind. “She would never therapize me when I was staying with her. She’s very good about that,” she says. “But whenever I was feeling low or like, just curious about therapy, I would ask her questions. I think mental health is an important and fascinating subject, and I was living with a therapist, so I was like, well, this is a perfect person to talk to about this sort of stuff.”
Moen was also inspired by hanging out with her aunt’s three young sons, and says tender EP cut “It’ll Get Tired Too” was inspired by the way even their most ardent feelings seemed to come and go. “Their emotions are pretty straight forward – they can’t really hide their emotions yet,” Moen points out. “As a touring musician I haven’t been around kids a lot. Being with three kids during quarantine was intense, but I really got back in tune with how awesome kids are.” Moen also took long walks in the woods, examining some complex emotions of her own and staring down her most dysfunctional tendencies. Though they weren’t necessarily affecting her life in a negative way just yet, she knew that letting those habits take root could spell trouble.
“That’s what the EP is about. The song ‘Creature of Habit’ is definitely about realizing you can’t just be single, you’re always dating someone. Realizing I am so focused on finding someone else to be with [because] I’m trying to not be with myself,” she explains. “Late at night I like to drink, and I use it as an excuse to text and flirt, maybe hop on the apps. There’s nothing wrong with the apps, but it’s like, why do I have to have a couple glasses of wine before I do that, you know? I’m realizing that was a pattern.”
While “Studio Apartment” narrates a one-night stand, it’s not just about the guy she’s settled for that night, or the beer that’s just alright, or the too-cramped living quarters – it’s the life she’s settled for, the mediocrity we all settle for as we stumble toward our dreams. “A habit of mine – and I was also thinking about habits of other people too – we need quick fixes because maybe we’re scared of the real thing,” Moen says.
But Creature of Habit is also notable for the new practices Moen picked up while she was making it. She started exploring synths and keyboards; better suited for bedroom recording than guitars and amps, Moen felt more freedom to “make weird and horrible noises, alone in my headphones.” Avery Mossman, a friend who plays some additional synths on the EP, gave her some quick tutorials, and she was off to the races, noodling around and layering sounds. “I just didn’t have the mics and stuff that I felt comfortable using to track guitars and vocals at home, but with the keys and synth I borrowed, I could just plug it into my interface. I also never had an interface before quarantine!” she says. “It kind of reawakened [my creativity]. It made me feel the way I felt when I first started playing guitar.”
Ultimately, it gave the EP more electronic flourishes than her previous releases. Playing around with ProTools also taught Moen enough about engineering to be able to explain what she wanted to achieve with production and mixing when she was able to get studio time. And because she had to sing quietly so as not to wake her little cousins, Moen embraced her lower register, singing in the melodramatic style she imagined the male country stars she’d admired in the past might. When she posted an early version of “Creature of Habit” to Instagram, her friends asked why she didn’t sing that way more often.
“Sometimes I feel like as a singer, the higher I can go and the stronger I can belt that high part of my register, the more impressive it is, but actually, I think people honing that low part of their voice – particularly female voices – is cool,” she says. “I finally did that with this EP. But ‘Studio Apartment’ was definitely the one where I was like, nah, I’m still gonna belt it up there though.”
Follow Elizabeth Moen on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.
When Indian-American singer-songwriter Subhi went to LA to record a new song in March, she’d just begun hearing news about COVID-19. Tasked with improvising a song in the studio, she began offloading her feelings about the rising pandemic. The result is “Wake Me Up,” a meditative, vocoder-enhanced single about coming to terms with a rapidly changing world.
“We were in these dark times where everyone was quarantined and we were going to have to wear masks,” she remembers. “I knew that would close things up for a bit, so that was a song about what was happening around us.”
Even though the chorus — “wake me up, wake me up, wake me now/pull me out from the dark” — may sound like a plea to escape the situation, she also considers it to be a hopeful message, anticipating the process of emerging from the COVID era. “‘Wake Me Up’ is really about how these are dark times, but I also am realizing that I will wake up,” she explains.
This mixture of darkness and hope characterizes the in-progress EP on which “Wake Me Up” will eventually appear. “They aren’t feel-good, happy songs, but they are songs with a silver lining,” she says. “I’d like to believe my goal is to create meaningful songs, but songs that also have hope and shed some light on good stuff happening in the future.”
Subhi’s 2017 debut, Shaitaan Dii, is very different from her recent work, incorporating elements of Indian folk music, American pop, and jazz. It was recorded in collaboration with a jazz band, and on it, you can hear an unlikely combination of scatting and Hindi.
During this phase of her career, Subhi was leading an all-male band, and she remembers dealing with a band member who was bullying her and bossing her around. “He would try to shut me down and discredit me and discredit my songs,” she remembers. “It took me two years to figure out what was going on. [Then] I got the courage to stand up and be like, ‘This is my band, and this is the way I want to do it, and everyone needs to respect everyone.'”
After that, she went through a period where she was reluctant to collaborate with anyone out of fear that the same thing would happen again. Though her combative band member was no longer in her way, she was getting in her own way — which inspired “In My Way,” a slow, synthy single about the effects of hanging on to past hurts. Once she came to that realization, she picked herself back up and collaborated with a variety of producers and other artists, which ultimately became corrective experiences that opened her up again.
She also considers “Wake Me Up,” which was recorded with producer Taylor Sparks, a testament to this transformation. In addition to waking up from the dark times of COVID, the song is about “waking me up as an artist,” she explains. “And really, these collaborations did pull me out of the dark, so it’s really symbolic of what was happening in the outer world and what was happening with me internally.”
Subhi’s path to becoming a musician has been long and winding. After growing up in India and attending high school in the U.S., she went to college for finance and minored in music, then began working on Wall Street by day and covering Indian entertainment as a TV news reporter by night. Through the latter job, she met Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, who was looking for a music intern, and ended up getting the position.
“After that whole project, I realized, ‘Oh, my god, this is what I could see myself doing my whole life — music is it,” she remembers. “So, I usually say it took me three careers to realize music is my true passion.” Her husband lived in Chicago, so for a while, she split her time between there and Mumbai, working on music for Bollywood films. Soon, she realized she wanted to be a full-time artist, so she planted herself in Chicago and forged ties with its jazz scene.
In the past, she’s experienced internal conflict between her Indian and American identities, especially with regard to her music. One of the upcoming songs on her EP, “Better,” is about reconciling these differences and choosing both sides of herself. “I was dealing with this whole conflict of ‘which one do I choose?'” she says. “And now, I’m more settled, it’s kind of resolved — I’m two sides of this coin.” She’s continued to sing in both English and Hindi, and even though her new EP is primarily inspired by American pop, she considers it Indian-influenced simply because it’s inspired by her life.
“Every song on my EP is very personal to me,” she says. “There’s a story behind every song, and everything written in the EP is an observation for my own personal life. Everything is something I have personally experienced. There are a lot of different themes in the EP, and I hope people resonate with it and can take something from it. The EP in general is not happy-go-lucky, but I’d like to believe it’s meaningful, and it’s an EP with hope, where there is a silver living to everything that I’ve written about.”
If you haven’t heard Kiiara’s name, you’ve almost definitely heard her impossibly catchy 2015 single “Gold,” where she sings confidently about nonchalantly exiting parties and leaving her ex in the dust. Since then, she’s released a remix of the song featuring Lil Wayne, the EP low kii savage, and several more singles and remixes, in addition to collaborating with Linkin Park on the song “Heavy.” On October 9, she’s releasing her much-anticipated debut album lil kiiwi, which includes “Gold” and 12 other songs she’s recorded in the five years since.
Previously shy about letting fans into her life, Kiiara’s goal with lil kiiwi — a title based on a nickname of hers — was to do just that. “Early in my career, I never really let people in,” she explains. “I wasn’t super transparent. I didn’t do a lot of interviews. I didn’t really feel comfortable answering questions because I didn’t know myself well. So this album is like, come into my world. Here we go.'”
True to her word, the album is as emotionally vulnerable as it is infectiously rhythmic, with lots of vocal warping and EDM effects. On the upbeat “Sick,” she condemns an ex who was too quick to move on, “Feels” describes dealing with “too much emotion,” and “Don’t Get Confused” tells off men who assume she’s interested in them. In one of the rawest songs, “Never Let You,” she gets honest about questioning her career path with lyrics like “should’ve never picked up that guitar.”
“Sometimes, I’m like, do I even know what I’m doing? Is this even a good song?” she explains. “I’ll call my friends, and I feel like a lot of my friends too will go through this phase: ‘I’m just gonna quit.’ And I’m like, what are you talking about? And we have to remind each other, ‘Look what you’ve done. Take a step back and look. You’re so zoomed in and looking at it up close, you’re not realizing how far you’ve come.'”
Self-doubt is something that’s plagued Kiiara throughout her career, not just with regard to her music but also with regard to her body image. “I was just trying to hide, and that’s why I didn’t do a lot of interviews,” she says. “Even when I performed, I just hated my face. It was not done purposefully — ‘I want to look like this or be mysterious’ — it was just that I was scared. Doing Lollapalooza was my sixth show in my entire career, so I was like, ‘I want to wear baggy clothing.'”
The 25-year-old Chicago-based artist describes having battled an eating disorder, sometimes not eating for days before music video shoots so she’d achieve the appearance she wanted. Seeing a nutritionist and a personal trainer helped her lead a healthy lifestyle and focus on health instead of weight. “I was like, ‘Oh, I need the energy, I need nutrition.’ No wonder I was so angry or moody early in my career — I wasn’t eating properly,” she remembers. She’s also gained confidence in herself as an artist by taking voice lessons early in her career.
A lot of the songs on her new album were written and recorded on the spot right in the studio. She collaborated with a number of producers and songwriters, including Ali Tamposi (who’s written for Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and One Direction) and Livvi Franc (Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Rihanna). “I’ve kind of stepped out and worked with a lot of people out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I would go in and I’d get there and be like, ‘This is what I’m going through, this is what happened, this is what was going on in my life,’ and then we’d just write about it.”
Even as her album comes out, she’s continuing to return to the studio and record new music, and she also has plenty of songs already recorded that she hasn’t yet released. “The past five years, I was in the studio all the time,” she says. “Some of the songs, I don’t even have on me — someone will send me them and I’ll be like, ‘I forgot about this.'”
Today, she’s approaching her work with increased confidence and self-forgiveness, with regard to both her music and her self-image. She recently realized how much progress she’d made when she appeared on camera despite feeling bloated. “[I thought] that’s how it is right now, and we’re going to deal with that,” she says. “I know I’m not perfect. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect. I have to accept myself at all times.”
Follow Kiiara on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.
Amidst a pandemic largely impacting people of color, during a summer that’s seen some of the most racially-charged unrest in recent memory — surprise! — a lot’s been happening in the American city with the third largest Black population.
Unlike cities such as New York or Los Angeles — or even Chicago’s Great Lakes sibling, Minneapolis — the Windy City has not reduced its police budget. In fact, while crime rates have declined over the last two decades, Chicago is currently spending more on policing per person than at any time in the last half century. For a hot second, Mayor Lori Lightfoot even enlisted private security to take on police responsibilities — because that’s the logical response to a conversation about state abuses of power, right? More cops with less oversight!
This was the gist of the criticism that got musician Sen Morimoto booted from a public concert series provided by the city at the end of July. Throughout the summer, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) has been streaming a free music series called Millennium Park at Home that showcases local musicians. At the end of July, Morimoto was slated to perform, but when he refused to remove comments about the mayor’s response to protests from his set, he was kicked off the bill. Co-performer Tasha withdrew her set in solidarity, and DCASE canceled the show. This spurned many local conversations around artists, platforms, and censorship.
At the start of August, Chicago lost Carlton Weekly — better known as the rapper FBG Duck. He was murdered in the Magnificent Mile, an affluent shopping area and tourist trap not dissimilar to Times Square. Duck was an innovator of drill rap, a sound that’s native to Chicago and pairs nihilistic, often violent lyrics with bass-heavy trap beats.
Because of this, Lightfoot told a press conference that Duck “fancies himself a rapper but is also a member of a gang. … There’s been an ongoing conflict between his gang and another.” By the mayor’s implication, this is what you get for being a gangster rapper (never mind that those close to Duck said he’d been putting that life behind him and speaking out against gun violence). Many heard the mayor’s remarks as a deflection of the bigger issues. Not only do they diminish Duck’s cultural work while suggesting his death was somehow deserved, but they also resist engaging what’s on the forefront of many Chicagoans’ minds: the conditions that encourage gun violence and how the state creates them.
Small irony then that, almost a week to the day later, riots broke out in the Magnificent Mile. Outsiders of Chicago have to understand the city is deeply racially and economically divided. When people say “Chicago,” a lot of times they mean downtown and North Side. “South Side” is often code for a Chicago to be distanced from. It’s the part that gets less money, less schools, and less accessible public transit. It’s the part with more Black people.
The divide really crystallizes in the Loop (a track that circles downtown where all the subways converge), and specifically the Magnificent Mile. So when police shot someone on the South Side on August 9 (luckily, the victim survived), angry Chicagoans headed to the Mag Mile for a standoff between cops and protestors that lasted about a week. It peaked with a very publicized showdown on August 15, though the flagrant inaccuracies in police accounts of that day have been less publicized.
If you read rioting and looting, not as solutions or even demands as much as expressions of anger against symbols of power — people reclaiming space and agency when both are limited — they seem… maybe… logical? At the very least, understandable. But the mayor doesn’t see it that way. Lightfoot’s response was to revisit her favorite punishment: shutting off all access to downtown, including raising the drawbridges. This, too, upholds a racist division of the city.
With so much happening, it’s hard being a Chicago columnist right now (I know, I know, whip out the world’s smallest violin, right?). Time isn’t on my side for articulating our city and how it’s affecting our cultural exports, like music. As a transplant, I also am always in a state of learning. A thing I know for sure right now: even if you’re not in or from Chicago, you can still use Bandcamp Friday to support change here.
Below are four auditory treats from people using proceeds to benefit Black Chicagoans:
Last month, Sen Morimoto and Tasha released their cancelled DCASE sets together, then uploaded an album of live songs, including previously unreleased tracks. It’s introspective, delicate, bright, and soulful. The tracks build on one another in a way that makes the album sound effortless; the team-up, inevitable. All proceeds go to the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, which brings art and humanities classes to Stateville Maximum Security Prison.
Languid R&B artist Kaina releases a live Lollapalooza set from this year on YouTube at 12 CST on Friday, September 4. The audio will also be available to purchase on Bandcamp. Half the proceeds will be split among the band while the other half will benefit the Pilsen Food Pantry, which primarily feeds Black and Latinx families on the South Side.
The Why? Footclan is a local collective of hip-hop artists. Earlier in the summer, they put together this eclectic mix of hip hop, soul, and R&B from musicians across their community to benefit the Chicago Community Bond Fund. While the Bond Fund has been tirelessly supporting protesters, it’s been a longtime leader of Chicago’s fight to end cash bail. Contributors to the album include Amira Jazeera, Rich Jones, Kara Jackson, and NNAMDÏ.
The PRF invited tracks from almost 40 contributors for this comp benefiting My Block My Hood My City, a civic-minded community group by and for South Side residents, and the Brave Space Alliance, Chicago’s first (and only) Black trans-led LGBTQ center. The center also serves the South Side. The comp encompasses everything from hardcore to pop punk to more experimental alt-pop. Some of the bands involved are Bone & Bell, Whales, and Western Standards.
It feels appropriate for an album loud with nostalgia to kick off with a track about memory called “1990.” The opening licks of Half Gringa’s sophomore release, Force to Reckon, took me back to the early 2010s, when I lived in the South and would careen around bends along the Appalachian Mountains with Defiance, Ohio, Mirah, and Rilo Kiley spilling out my windows. If I could distill that sound into a time capsule — along with the freedom of those drives or the way my heart felt things so much more intensely then because many experiences were still new — it would be this record.
Singer Izzy Olive croons in that intimate, confessional style that came to maturity in the aughts for alt rock women — but without the vocal flourishes or gushing reverb more apparent in newer artists, like Angel Olsen. Force to Reckon is punctuated with a mix of folksy violin and pop riffs that have declined this last decade. In some ways, it sounds suspended in time.
The standout track is the second song, “Binary Star.” It’s a rich journey of yearning and rejection that comes in waves, but many lines take on their own meaning. When Olive repeats with a pained longing, “Nothing feels like almost touching,” I recall the ache of having not hugged a friend since February. Now we see each other at six-foot distances outside, if we see each other at all, and even brushing elbows with strangers on the train feels worthy of fantasy for how foreign, even forbidden, it’s become.
Olive sounds like she’s waxing about a past lover, but certain phrases transcend the specifics of the story. In another part, she says, “Everyone leaves for California, New York, Chile, Berlin.” If you’re from the Midwest, as I am, Chicago seemed mythical growing up — the BIG “big city” of the region where grit and aspiration are tested. But that also makes it a pit stop, not a final destination. In comedy, you hone your act at someplace like Second City, then take it to Los Angeles (actors and musicians, do this, too). If you’re a writer or artist, you rub elbows with poets, maybe get an MFA, then head to New York.
Olive came from a small town in southern Illinois to study poetry at University of Chicago. Adopting the moniker Half Gringa as “in tribute to her Venezuelan family and her bicultural experience growing up in the United States” (according to Bandcamp), she’s stayed in Chicago to make music. So when she follows a list of common relocations for former Chicagoans with, “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere,” it sounds bold. Bolder than telling a lover she’ll wait for them despite all indicators she shouldn’t. Then she says, “The bar’s warm and I’m easy to converse with and denial runs its long hands/Through my fine hair with a final, fatal smile.” Knowing Chicago is just a chapter for most transplants, you hear the defiance mixed with self doubt in that line as being about here, specifically. This city is a gamble – there are opportunities elsewhere. Maybe she’s kidding herself, but she’s choosing opportunities closer to home, relishing them rather than feeling resigned.
To say “I’m not going anywhere” also evokes a willing immobility because of Coronavirus. By chance, so much of the record speaks to being stuck at home — time in isolation to reflect on our pasts, contemplate our futures, and fixate on both the personal and structural conditions that brought us where we are now. On “Transitive Property,” Olive sings, “I don’t understand this country/I don’t understand my own grief/How could you have seen what I see?/I’m in disbelief and bereaved.” I’m unsure what she’s specifically responding to, but when I hear it, I hear my own anguish about the murders of people such as Breonna Taylor or Riah Milton. Or my outrage that, in the United States, healthcare is tied to employment, so over 30 million people don’t have either right now. It’s a cathartic song for discomfort and lack of resolution. I take comfort hearing someone else is hurting and upset by our country, too.
Force to Reckon tries to make sense of so many things specific and abstract that bring us ache and confusion. Every song searches — tunes that probe childhood trauma, grieving at a distance, and other prescient themes — but never reaches a tidy conclusion. Like so much right now, the album is open ended. Unlike most, it’s beautifully so.
Follow Half Gringa on Facebook for ongoing updates.
Meghan Galbraith, lead singer of Chicago queercore band 8 Inch Betsy, passed away in 2015.
After queer Chicago punk band 8 Inch Betsy wrapped up a 30-day U.S. tour in 2010, many things appeared uncertain for the members. Their original drummer Stephanie Levi had left the band, and the transition from life on the road to everyday life left the remaining members Meghan Galbraith (guitar, vocals) and Eli Burke (bass) feeling downtrodden. Galbraith was up every night working as a bartender, then would wake up to “alone days of nothing after just coming off the high of tour and traveling all over the country,” as Burke puts it. This situation spawned the band’s latest album, The Mean Days, a meditation on life’s difficult experiences.
As Galbraith and Burke worked on the album, recording it with drummer Melissa Thomas, Galbraith became ill, so the two of them put their music on pause. Burke moved to Tucson to focus on making and studying art; he’s currently a PhD student in Art and Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona. As Galbraith’s health declined, she asked Burke to release the album, which was mainly written by her, on her behalf.
Then, somewhat unexpectedly, Galbraith passed away at age 35 in 2015, leaving her bandmate heartbroken and eager to commemorate her in music. Burke released a physical version of the album in late 2015 but, preoccupied with grieving his friend’s death and undergoing a gender transition, has not been able to release it digitally until this year, on August 13.
“I felt a really deep sense of urgency to get it out there and release it in a way that was going to do it justice. I just want her music to be heard,” says Burke. “[Initially] we didn’t release it digitally [so] not a lot of people had access… That’s why I’m doing this now to get it digitally out there.”
The Mean Days might as well be a reference to the grunge heyday of ’90s; the band cites Hole and PJ Harvey as influences, but you’ll also hear hints of pop punk bands like Blink 182, Yellowcard, and MXPX. The songs open with strong guitar riffs and progress to catchy, emotive choruses, exploring relationships, transitional periods, and growing pains. On the title track, Galbraith sings of “slipping further through the cracks” as “the days turn to mean,” while “Water” tells a poetic story of renewal: “Yesterday I crawled out of the sea/Salt in my eyes and sand on my feet… wash me out inside.”
Burke describes The Mean Days as more mature than 8 Inch Betsy’s first album, 2008’s This Time Last Time Every Time. “Not only is it more mature in terms of we were all getting older, I think we were growing together and having musical experiences together. For me, it has more personal meaning because I know what the songs are about. I still love that first album — it has a real rawness to it that I really like — and so does this one.”
Even though Galbraith wrote the lyrics, songs like “Uh Oh” and “So Dark” touched Burke deeply when he first heard them. “She didn’t tell me this, but a lot of the lyrics are things I was going through, and I don’t know if she wrote them for me, but I just really resonated with the lyrics.” “True North” appeared to be drawn from conversations they’d had about leaving Chicago, and “I Will Never Go Home” references the band’s experiences on tour.
Currently busy with his PhD program, Burke is unsure where the band is headed in the absence of its lead singer. For now, his main goal is to continue Galbraith’s legacy, which also includes a not-yet-released solo album.
As part of an all-queer band, Galbraith and Burke found belonging in the punk scene, although most of their music is not explicitly political. “A lot of our songs are not overtly queer, but when I listen back to them, I think, ‘Wow, these are really queer songs,'” says Burke, who believes much of the band’s impact on the queer community came simply from connecting with queer fans.
“I think being queer, we were just able to connect with people who didn’t see themselves reflected in music during that time,” he explains. “I think we’re always looking outside for reflections of ourselves in the world, so I think when you can find that, it’s special and you want to hang onto that. I’m grateful a lot of the fans we have, I still talk to, so I think just having the support of the queer community meant a lot to us. I think it’s OK not to be overtly political and connect with people socially. That’s something that’s important.”
Indeed, that kind of connection and support is something that outlasts the life of an artist gone too soon.
Follow 8 Inch Betsy on Facebook for ongoing updates.
Dance Loud’s The Moment has been more than ten years in the making. It’s what happens when an electronic duo whose career has been as energetic and careening as their namesake, has to pause — literally. Chicago-based artists Kristin Sanchez and Desereé Fawn Zimmerman were touring in 2017 when a semi rear ended their vehicle, landing the onstage collaborators and offstage couple in a month-long hospital stay. They’d spent a decade activating dance floors across the country with house beats layered with live music. But if life ended tomorrow, what would they leave behind? As they recovered, releasing an LP became their top priority.
On a phone call with Sanchez and Zimmerman, the women effuse positivity and laughter. It’s an interesting contrast to The Moment, which simmers with a melancholy optimism. The tracks feel meditative: field recordings of cyclical sounds like crickets, electronic drum rhythms that pump like heart beats, existential questions such as “are we as one?” repeated and stretched with echoes. Each song forces a range of emotions — anger and disappointment as much as excitement and longing — making The Moment a potent debut from two rising dance musicians.
Sanchez has been a house DJ since she was 18, and Zimmerman is a classically trained musician. They’re both multi-instrumentalists with audio degrees. Here’s what the pair had to say about the life and love that went into The Moment.
AF: There’s a lot of optimism and hope in how you talk and market yourselves, which seems at odds with the album’s darker qualities. Do you feel pressure to put a positive face forward? And if so, where does that come from?
KS: One thing we’ve learned [over time] is that you just have to figure out a way to be up. You have to program your brain to stop always thinking someone’s lying to you. You can’t be angry or hate all the time.
DZ: It doesn’t matter how good of a person you are. In someone’s story, you’ll eventually be the villain. I’m coming to terms with that. There’s always a reason people do the things they do and still sleep at night. Some of our brains get wired a certain way because of the culture we live in, but it doesn’t make them “bad.”
KS: For example, my mom grew up in a culture — she’s very homophobic. That’s really difficult for me, but I can’t hate my mom.
AF: I admire that you can put your mom’s attitude into context, but how do you find the energy for patience and compassion towards her? That seems like a heavy burden.
KS: I always say it took my mom about eight years to stop crying about me not being her dream child. She’s still slightly in denial [about my sexuality], but I was born in 1984. In high school, I would sneak out and hit the gay club scene [in Chicago]. I would do this nightly because I just had to escape. I stopped going to school. I’d only come home during the day because that’s when my parents weren’t there. We were in a cold war.
They took my car battery, so I went to the South Side and got my own battery. They’d hide my car, and I’d go rollerblading to find it. Then they put a club on my steering wheel. I tried to drive it with the club on while my parents chased me down the street. They were like, “Are you on drugs? Are you in trouble with the law?” But I knew my mom knew. She knew. She just wouldn’t say it. And finally I was like, “Mom, I’m GAY!” Once I said that, they took off the club and just let me go.
DZ: I’m from a small town, and I had to move to Chicago because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to be myself in this town. I was going to be outcast and treated poorly if I had come out of the closet there. When I was finally in a relationship and I told my mom, she was like, “Oh, just don’t tell anyone.” I don’t think she understood that that’s much more hurtful. There were points when I wanted commit suicide because I knew I couldn’t change it. I thought, I have to learn to love myself or I’m going to commit suicide.
We’ve both come to terms with our parents. I think deep down, our parents still wish we were straight, but now I’m to the point where I’m like, I love myself, and I believe I’m a good person. If you think me being gay makes me a bad person, that’s a burden you’re carrying. I’m not.
AF: That’s a great attitude. It seems like you’re both spiritual people, and that really comes through on the record. Can you expand on where that comes from?
DZ: Well, my mom’s side was Pentecostal, my dad’s side was Mormon. I got in trouble in high school and got sent to Baptist private school. I’ve had a fair share of religion and realized it wasn’t for me. But I’m very spiritual person. I believe in balancing with the earth and not taking more than you need, so I think that that’s an underlying tone [to our music].
There’s a quote by [Nikola] Tesla: “If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” Just being in audio, we have a really good understanding of how deep this rock can really be. There are octaves unknown. You can’t [hear them] with our human bodies. Imagine this whole universe has so many more octaves we have to learn about.
KS: A good example of this is sympathetic frequencies. Take two tuning forks that are tuned to the same number. If you strike one tuning fork, the second fork will start to resonate. But if you tune the forks slightly differently, you start to create a beat and a wobble. I think as humans, when we find people on our frequency range, we start to resonate from each other. We’re vibrational creatures, and even our thoughts carry frequency. People who are sensitive to frequency are empaths. You know, they just feel the vibrations of someone else.
DZ: Growing up, my parents were metalheads. I got really into jazz on my own, and I loved gospel drummers, but I realized that I just really loved high tempo [music]. It was more fun. And when I was introduced to electronic and house music — oh, wow! There’s a quote [by Eddie Amador]: “Not everyone understands house music. It’s a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing.”
AF: In what ways does being a couple help your music? And how do your disparate musical backgrounds complement one another?
KS: We have, like, silent designated duties. Living together, working together, doing everything together — we just know what one another is really good at. Desereé’s really funny, and she’s really good with tone. She’s got years of playing the guitar, and she’s great at trying new techniques. I’m really into drum machines and synthesizers and anything electrical happening with the sound. I usually take care of a lot of the production processing.
DZ: I think, if Kristin created music on her own — she’s very happy-go-lucky person. I think her music would come out very happy. And I feel the world. I have a lot of feeling. I’m a Cancer, she’s a Gemini.
KS: But I have a secret sad side no one knows about! [laughs] I kept trying to add cello to the record.
DZ: There’s definitely an underlying tone of emotion Kristin adds.
KS: But I grew up with almost no music in my life. All we had was a karaoke machine. I had a Michael Jackson CD and a Toni Braxton CD, and that was it. I got exposed to pop music later, but I didn’t try an instrument until I was older.
DZ: When I got sent to that Southern Baptist High School for being a troubled kid — like, not accepting myself and not caring if I lived or died — you couldn’t listen to music there. That was really hard for me. I went there with a guitar, and my art teacher — she was so sweet. She let me transcribe literally hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of pages of tablature so I could play the music I wanted to hear. And I realized that there was a very specific feeling to a lot of music [I was] playing. Just very melodic music with tones that make you feel. Kristin loved pop music growing up, but I wasn’t a big fan of pop music. So I kind of feel like you never fully stray from your roots, and we combine really different things in the studio. It hurts us a little because Spotify doesn’t know how to categorize us. We’re not just one genre. But I always think about it like Thelonious Monk. He put his foot down and said, “No, I’m not going to play the jazz you want me to play! In time, the world will catch up!” And it did.
Follow Dance Loud on Facebook for ongoing updates.
Can techno music be a site for climate activism? That was the big question posed by a virtual panel held on Friday, May 22, where Chicago DJs Ariel Zetina and Club Chow (Kevin Chow) as well as British musician and activist Kimwei McCarthy were happy to weigh in. The discussion was organized by Grant Tyler, a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and Mika Tosca, a climate scientist and assistant professor at SAIC.
Full disclosure: I’m an SAIC alum and occasional freelancer for their marketing department. But I’m intrigued by music’s potential and limitations for activating political imagination, and what can I say? This was the most interesting Zoom event I attended last week – and trust me, I went to many. Who’s that culture writer sneaking in to take the temperature of your e-parties and never turning on their camera? It’s me, guys. It’s me.
I know what you’re thinking: Techno’s place in climate action is a pretty big question for one panel. But Chicago seems a natural place to ask. This city has given so much to electronic music, benefiting from its proximity to Detroit techno and pioneering acid house. Hell, we gave you Wax Trax! Afrofuturism is also threaded into the fabric of Black Chicago culture, most audibly in the work of jazz musician Sun Ra, who used science fiction’s escapism and technological critiques to create speculative audio worlds.
Plus, music history is always political history. Techno is no exception. During the talk, Zetina mentioned higher profile techno artists whose work has intersected with social justice politics and especially environmental organizing. Of particular note was the EP Acid Rain by the group Underground Resistance, who were ideologically influenced by the Black Panthers and whose music developed partially as a response to the environmental and economic reality of Black Detroiters in the late ’80s. By Underground Resistance’s own words, techno is “the music for the future of the human race.” Without it: no peace, no love, no vision. But shared modes of expression don’t always point to a shared politics.
“I think there’s a tendency within techno to superimpose a … Utopian discourse,” Chow pointed out, “and [impose an idea of] radical political action on top of raves. But I would argue, most of time, none of that is actually happening.” Got me there, Chow. Happens all the time in punk, too. While he casually noted there are collectives that do meaningful work — mutual aid, building community, and so on — the music is largely apolitical. In his estimate, creating significant change through techno would require a big cultural shift — one that begins with open, frank discussions about who is participating and how, and applying pressure on show promoters to change priorities.
One point the discussion kept circling back to was how well DJ sets have adapted to the constraints of COVID-19. Since they rely on individuals over groups and often incorporate technology-based audio-visual elements, club grooves are thriving (clubs, on the other hand…). Zetina emphasized her work has her flying often, that high-ranking DJs fly in private jets even more, and that there’s a global techno/rave culture that encourages bouncing between countries for events. While not a uniquely carbon intensive culture, high carbon emissions seem part of techno’s modern DNA. Does coronavirus present an opportunity to reimagine the rave as a carbon-neutral space?
Tyler said celebrating DJs successfully connecting with audiences during quarantine ignores why people go to raves: to physically connect with one another. McCarthy responded, “Not to say that we should completely replace live music with virtual reality, but if there’s a genre that could push forward virtual reality concerts, I would imagine it to be techno.” It’s a prescient insight. Creative work rooted in digital technology has long presented world-building opportunities. Alternate realities can be escapes, but they can also pose questions about the worlds we’re trying to escape from and even offer new visions for those worlds.
Zetina used the chat to link an article about Finland holding a virtual concert to celebrate May Day. Seven-hundred thousand people tuned in, and of them, 150,000 created avatars to move through and interact with the concert space. While not techno specific, it certainly sets a precedence for audiences’ willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. And it’s not inappropriate to treat global warming with the same urgency as COVID-19.
As a researcher noted during a recent panel discussion on COVID-19 and climate change at UC-Berkley, “The public health and climate debates are inextricably linked. In our highly connected world, a disease that originated 3,000 or 6,000 miles away can be at our doorsteps in a day or less. So, the way that we mobilize against COVID-19 needs to be reflected in the way that we mobilize against that other big global affliction called climate change.”
Spoiler: the techno panel did not reach a tidy conclusion about what techno should do about climate change. In fact, it maybe posed more questions than it answered. But one sign of a fruitful discussion is identifying some key stakes and possibilities, no? It definitely did — and offered a sick playlist to boot.
If you’re interested to learn more, the hour-and-a-half discussion (and subsequent one hour DJ sets from Zetina and Chow) are available on YouTube.
When I’m sitting with an album, I’m listening for something a live performance can’t give me. I have an anxiety disorder that limits how much live music I consume, so recordings have always felt precious for the way they let me feel connected to a larger audio community. More than an escape from my unease, my ears like an energy or polish that helps me justify consuming information alone with my headphones instead of with people at a show. That’s changed since COVID-19. As quarantine stretches on, not even having the option to go out has me prioritizing music that transports me places I can’t go.
At the earliest, Chicago’s shelter-in-place orders won’t relax until June, but it’s unclear when live music will be possible here without a vaccine. Being forced to stay home hasn’t been much of an adjustment – hello, total hermit here! – but now I’m living in memories of moments like being jostled by bodies, sweat gleaming on my skin and feeling satisfied not knowing if it’s mine. With that said, here are some Chicago releases that have been getting me through lockdown. They speak to the diversity of musical styles that thrive in Chicago’s eclectic scene, which I’ll be covering in a new column for Audiofemme: Playing Chicago.
CB Radio Gorgeous EP
This band has an unparalleled stage chemistry no record will capture, but since all its members are Chicago punk veterans, no surprise CB Radio Gorgeous’s four-song debut still delivers something exciting for the at-home experience. Frenzied and fun, they’re X-Ray Spex meets Wire, and provide the perfect soundtrack for donning neon turquoise sunglasses and day-drinking Schlitz on rusted lawn chairs with friends.
PITH features Sonic Youth-style guitar, Lemuria-like vocals, and atmospheric chaos that distantly echoes the complexity of Lightning Bolt. Both spritely and dark, playful and moody, it’s what I imagine playing outside the bathroom at the Empty Bottle while I’m smirking knowingly at a Sharpie-scrawled warning on the wall. Another woman catches my gaze in the reflection and says, “Right?” and I feel like we’re now bonded by a bathroom secret only select women will even register. Then we emerge, and everything’s casual.
I love the retro vibe of this, and it’s equal parts fun and soulful. My favorite track is “Chicago Bae,” which celebrates what low-stakes, long-distance love with a Windy City sweetheart could be. The line, “Let me show you all the city the commercials never see” hits hard – a universal sentiment of anyone who’s lived in a tourist-heavy city that still feels personal to each listener’s understanding of their town. They Call Me Disco features six tracks perfect for that wait for the 49 bus on Western Avenue, sun heavy in the sky, running late to meet a friend but feeling right on time.
If Donita Sparks fronted Motörhead, you might get something that sounds like hard rock quartet Hitter. Their debut full-length introduces a sound that’s vintage but not dated, owing in large part to the gravelly voice of singer Hanna “Hazard” Johnson, who howls and wails with a rock ‘n’ roll confidence that feels liberating just to bask in. Music for shoving assholes who spill beer on your leather vest.
Floating Gardens – Ephemerals
Fans of Mort Garson’s Plantasia will be drawn in by the familiar, lofty synth of Ephemerals’ opening track, but it descends into something that combines new age vibes and nature sounds – hard to do without getting corny, but somehow, Floating Gardens strikes the right balance. From experimental electronic label Chicago Research, Ephemerals is apt and meditative reminder of the mysteries and beauties of the natural world at a time when many of us can’t access them.
Zell’s World released a fun video for his new single, “That’s What It Is.” The turn-up track marks the first offering from Zell’s forthcoming sophomore effort, Welcome 2 Zell’s World. The Chicago-bred and Cincinnati-based rapper last dropped his 5-track Want No Love EP in 2016.
“With this next project, I’d say, people should expect to hear a totally different Zell’s,” he tells AudioFemme. “I’ve angled more toward the club, the turn up [and] the gritty, mature type sound.”
While Want No Love‘s subject matter centered around relationships, Zell’s ready to get into his party bag on this next project. He says his latest single, “That’s What It Is,” is a good indicator of where his style is heading.
Zell’s World / Photo by Tef Jones
“The overall sound is something totally different from what I usually do, but I had to find a style and sound that really captured who I am and showed my personality,” he says. “Me and my team are really expecting great things to transpire from the release of this project. We’ve even had several meetings with the talk of a potential major EP deal, so we’re very optimistic.”
As for the video, Zell’s enlisted Cincinnati videographer Dre Shot This, and several friends, to shoot a high school-themed clip that caters to the song’s fun and laid back lyrics.
“It was so much fun, and lots of people showed up, which I thought was dope as hell!” Zell’s says of the video shoot. “When we shot, I just thought about being a class clown like I was in high school! That’s really where it all came from. I’m overall silly, but I wanted that edgy content to compliment the song.”
Zell’s is gearing up to release his Welcome 2 Zell’s World album before the end of this year.
“I am beyond excited,” he says. “This is a great milestone that shows growth, change, and maturity. I’m really looking forward to what people think!”
For now, check out his latest release, “That’s What It Is,” and watch the video below.
Fay Ray is not a defunct new wave band. Okay, Fay Ray IS a defunct new wave band, but it’s also a very active eight-person funk-tastic soul-pop band out of Chicago. The band’s latest double single, “Restless Sleeper /Up & Away,” is effervescent, the perfect taste of champagne fizz on a hot, humid summer day.
Lead singer Mariel Fechik’s silvery vocals remain cool and calm on “Up & Away,” creating a nice dissidence between herself and the rest of the band: Noah Gehrmann (Guitar), Erik Opland (Bass), Tom Kelly (Drums), Rob Osiol (Keys) and Joe Meland (Organs/Synth). The changeup around 2:30 offers a satisfying release of tension, the kind of beat drop made to lure wallflowers onto the dance floor.
“Restless Sleeper” is about “the experience of watching a loved one have nightmares and night terrors, and the sense of helplessness that accompanies that experience”, according to Fechik. The tone is cooler, the vibe more laid back than “Up & Away”; the song may be about restless nights, but the feel of the music is afternoon magic, hours spent wandering city streets, the ice in a glass of cold tea melting in the sun.
We spoke to Mariel about what it’s like to write in an eight-person band and how the city of Chicago shapes Fay Ray’s funk.
AF: Where did the name Fay Ray come from? My initial google search popped up a new wave band.
MF: A couple of years ago now, we went through a name change. We actually used to be Church Booty. This was a name that served us well through college, but started to get a little tired once we moved up to Chicago. After a very long process of name brainstorming, I suggested Fay Ray because I liked the way it sounded, and it stuck! It’s based off of the actress Fay Wray (known as the original scream queen) of King Kong fame. It wasn’t until after I suggested it that my mom told me my family was related to her by marriage! Unfortunately it was also after we’d settled on the name that we found out about the defunct British new wave band with the same name.
AF: Fay Ray started out as a ten-piece band. How in the world do did y’all navigate songwriting? And has the process changed since members have left?
MF: It was a lot, as you can imagine. Typically, someone would bring something in and we’d go off of that. Our previous sax player and singer did the bulk of the writing. Since they’ve left, it’s become a little more group-oriented. Often, a smaller group of us will just hang out in someone’s bedroom and work on ideas. Once we have the bare bones, we’ll often rehearse in full, working on arrangements. It’s become a really enjoyable and collaborative process that’s led to some exciting stuff.
AF: Can you give us some insight into band dynamics? Who’s the foil?
MF: We’re one big dysfunctional family! We’ve all been friends for so long, and so many of us have lived together in various formats through college and after, we’re just kind of like a big group of siblings at this point. Up until very recently, I was the only girl in the band, and I’ve always been the little sister that gets picked on (but still supported). We all annoy the hell out of each other sometimes, but we’re all very loving and supportive friends. Hmm…the foil. Probably our guitarist, Noah. He’s a goof and a ham and will frequently quote songs like Inspector Gadget or the Imperial March in the middle of his solos.
AF: What role does the city of Chicago play in your music? Does the city effect the sound and subject matter at all?
MF: Since coming to Chicago after graduation, we’ve found a really wonderful community of fellow musicians. We definitely take inspiration from a lot of our peers around the city, and of course, Chicago has such a specific sound to so much of its music. It’s almost impossible for it not to affect our sound!
AF: What are your favorite Chicago music venues to play in?
MF: Part of the beauty of having so many members is that a lot of us are involved in many other projects, as well. Our keyboardist Joe Meland works under the name Uuskhy. I sing with Emily Blue and we have a band together called Moon Mouth, and I sing in Tara Terra. Noah, Tom, and Rob are in a band called Miss April. Erik is in a cover band called The Hitmen. So lots of us have played in venues that the others haven’t. Some of the favorites are The Hideout, Schubas, Sleeping Village, Tonic Room, Lincoln Hall, and Subterranean!
AF: Do you ever listen to music together as a band? What groups are y’all listening to? Any new music we should keep an ear out for?
MF: Since there are so many of us, we bring a lot of eclectic tastes to the table. We’ve often had albums or bands that we’re collectively obsessed with. A few years ago it was Hiatus Kaiyote’s Choose Your Weapon. And then I apparently ruined it by loving it too much. We loved Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. We love NAO and Louis Cole and PJ Morton and Vulfpeck and Stevie Wonder and a million other things. We even have a “listen to this” channel in our Slack! Some great Chicago bands we’ve been loving lately are Astro Samurai and Human Bloom, both of whom have some great new music out. Melvin Knight, our former vocalist, also has an incredible project and a brand new single called “Pass the Time.”
AF: I recently visited Red Rocks Amphitheater and was blown away by the setting. If you could perform in any venue, anywhere in the world, where would you perform?
MF: To be honest, mine would actually be Red Rocks! I’ve never been and it’s definitely one of my top destinations. I would also love to play at the Whiskey A Go Go in LA. It’s iconic. Some other thoughts were Austin City Limits, Madison Square Garden, and Tiny Desk.
AF: What can an audience expect from a Fay Ray show?
MF: We always try to bring the funk. Our live shows are loud and energetic, and we always love when a crowd gives us that energy back. Some of our most fun shows have been in tiny venues where the audience is practically on top of us. We always love to throw a surprising cover or two in there, too. Lately it’s been “thank u, next” and Thundercat’s “Them Changes.” We want to get people dancing!
FAY RAY TOUR DATES:
6/15 – Griffith, IN @ Rockopelli Fest
6/23 – Chicago, IL @ Ravenswood On Tap
7/11 – Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village
With her latest video, Emily Jane Powers proves there’s more than one shade of blue when it comes to feeling sad. The Chicago-based art rocker’s clip for “Sullen Days” is an atmospheric meditation on the spectrum of emotions contained within a sullen or sad mood. The entire video was shot on an iPhone by Powers’ husband, bass player, and creative collaborator Alec Jensen (Dream Version). The couple’s DIY approach and clear creative intimacy yielded a raw visual that coincides with Powers’ honest songwriting.
To capture the phases of sadness, the pair wanted to portray Powers as a passive vessel, experiencing, but not engaging, in the moving world around her. “I think that one of the biggest themes of the video was that things were happening around me, but I was passive and still,” says Powers. “We’re trying to evoke an idea that there’s a loss of control as well, which I think goes along with the mood I’m describing.”
However, it’s not always easy to remain still while hanging out of a moving car, which is how the bulk of the video was filmed. “There were a few times when Alec was driving in circles and I was physically unable to hold on to the car,” says Powers. This explains some of her agitated facial expressions throughout the film, but Powers also describes how the “sullenness” she’s capturing doesn’t hold one distinct characteristic. “To be sullen or sad isn’t just one mood, it’s a range of moods that can change pretty rapidly, and the changes of the moods in the video illustrate that,” says Powers.
Powers’ voice swells and evolves, too. Starting in a calm, hypnotic tone and spiraling into a swirl of inundated emotion, she rattles off stream-of-consciousness lyrics that hint to the depths of her psyche. She even identifies the effect her peers can unwittingly have on her feeling when she sings of “transferred desire.”
“I am pretty hyper-aware of the transference of emotions when I’m with people,” says Powers. “If someone’s sad or I’m with someone that’s happy, I sometimes absorb that too easily. Desire could be a bunch of different things – desire to feel better, desire to belong.”
It’s easy to empathize with Powers’ weighted conscious in “Sullen Days,” a cathartic burst of artistic expression. Watch the video below, premiering exclusively on Audiofemme.
