Chicago Reader

The audio installations at Sonic Pavilion present different sounds to listeners as they move about under the lattice of speakers overhanging the Pritzker Pavilion lawn. This photo was taken at the 2025 festival. If you pass through Jay Pritzker Pavilion on Saturday or Sunday afternoon or Monday after work, you might hear sound art that incorporates field recordings from the annual Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia.

Kay Martinovich adapts and directs Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik’s comedic allegory (based on the short story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez) about what happens in a small town when an old man with wings (Richard Cotovsky) falls from the sky into their little corner of paradise. The couple on whose property he’s fallen immediately begin to scheme up angles to make the odd occurrence pay off.

Perhaps in your perambulations around town this summer, you saw some posters labeled LOST PILOT above a black-and-white photo of Amelia Earhart. Obviously this isn’t breaking news: The famous aviator disappeared on July 2, 1937, on her attempt to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

Here’s the pre-curtain scenario: Pregnant Nessa faints on an airplane which is then diverted to Texas, where she is taken to an emergency room and informed her fetus is dead. When the play begins, she finds herself in an uncertain location in the company of Val, a mysterious woman who won’t answer any of her questions about resuming her trip home.

In the project 60 wrd/min art critic, writer Lori Waxman explores how art writing can serve an expanded field of artists—including those incarcerated, trying to gain visas, working to establish themselves professionally, or just wanting feedback for a secret hobby. For this iteration, Waxman reviews work by Brooklyn-based artist Celine Lam.

This article was produced by the BGA’s Illinois Answers Project and Chinatown Spotlight. Read the Chicago Reader’s previous reporting about the Heung Seng Corporation here. Janice Zhen gestured in exasperation to a large hole above her toilet with exposed pipes and wet wood where her ceiling and wall should have been. It had been leaking since late last year. As spring turned to summer, bugs started flying out of the hole and settling on her children, ages 3 and 7.

Susie Mccollum I first met Susie McCollum at a recording studio, where she was assisting an audio engineer behind a massive mixing board, making minuscule tweaks to a rock ’n’ roll record. I didn’t realize she also made her own music, so you can imagine my surprise a couple weeks later when I was casually scrolling Instagram and came across a reel of McCollum singing a beautiful rendition of Carole King’s lovelorn ballad “So Far Away” a cappella in an empty room with unreal acoustics.

Revocation Revocation have been blasting out fiendishly intricate technical death metal for more than a quarter century. Led by guitarist and lead vocalist David Davidson, the Boston band was formed in 2000 by high school friends as Cryptic Warning, and then in 2006 disbanded and immediately re-formed as Revocation. Since 2015, Davidson has been the sole remaining founding member, and Revocation haven’t just gone through lineup changes but also stylistic evolution.

Russian Circles A new Russian Circles album is always something to look forward to. The instrumental metal trio’s most recent album, 2022’s Gnosis, was a hard act to follow, but their upcoming ninth full-length, Nine (Sargent House), surges forward ferociously.

Orange County duo the Garden make punk rock like they were raised on the Internet. Wyatt Shears plays bass and guitar, his twin brother, Fletcher, plays drums, and they both contribute vocals and program electronics. Their stripped-down, energetic music is plenty eclectic, but they come across like digital natives less because of what they play and more because of how they play.