When trumpeter Dave Douglas debuted his latest quintet a couple of years ago with the wonderful album Be Still (Greenleaf), a big part of its repertoire was composed of hymns and folk songs his mother had requested to be played at her memorial service—at the time, in 2011, she knew she was losing a three-year battle with ovarian cancer. On that recording the horn man enlisted the services of the superb singer Aoife O’Donovan of the progressive bluegrass outfit Crooked Still....

Forget about rock climbers and daredevils and people who sit down on toilet seats in porta-potties—David Wain and Michael Showalter are the bravest men in the world. Example: In the film, during an inappropriately timed meltdown over her divorce from her husband, Ron, Molly Shannon’s character Gail says, “When Jonas and I separated, I thought everything was lost.” In the show we actually learn who Jonas is. We even, for just a second, see the crayons that’ll eventually be lost—all except for a single brown one—sending Gail into an emotional tailspin....

EDUARDO UNDA-SANZANA Monty Python Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Signe Baumane’s Rocks in My Pockets screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday. “People want to see representations of themselves,” said New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in an interview a few years ago, reflecting on what inspires casual viewers to go to the movies. This is hardly a controversial opinion. I’ve encountered more than enough anecdotal evidence to support that claim, and I’m sure you have too....

In 2010 Adam Schatz, a New York musician who’s been one of the driving forces behind his city’s sprawling Winter Jazzfest, launched Round Robin, a program focused on free improvisation where musicians with disparate approaches and backgrounds improvise in a steady stream of five-minute duos. The evening begins with a solo performance by one of the participants, followed by a duet with the next musician, after which a new player turns up to relieve the musician who’s already been through a pair of duos....

It’s been six years since this stalwart Swedish thrash band’s last full-length, and the new Sinful Birth (released by Sweden’s I Hate Records), the long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s Forbidden World, delivers an even more solid wall of riffage that never stops rising. There’s such a purity to their studied 1980s post-Slayer thrash that a listener could be forgiven for thinking this is a band of crusty old guys who’ve been playing for 30 years—when in fact this is only Antichrist’s second full-length....

My faith in Chicago’s improvised and experimental music scene is regularly renewed by a number of factors, but the most important is its reliable infusion of new blood. Bassist Eli Namay and drummer Phillip Sudderberg have been playing out for a couple of years, but I’m only now beginning to catch up with them. This evening they celebrate the release of a new self-titled album by their Vibrating Skull Trio, which also includes clarinetist John McCowen (Wei Zhongle)....

From Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together During last night’s screening of La Ciénaga at Doc Films I noticed throughout the presentation a subtle rippling effect in the upper part of the screen. It looked as though part of the image were being projected onto a little cascade—whenever the top of the frame was bright, the light seemed to be flickering gently downward. A friend who has greater knowledge of such matters than I do explained to me afterward that this effect was a common result of wear and tear on the projector’s bulb....

Death by Hanging In her essay for the winter series “Early Katharine Hepburn,” Doc Films programmer Ursula Wagner writes that “Hepburn’s unconventional looks, intense personality, and ambiguous gender presentation all posed problems for the 30s film industry.” Despite having won an Oscar in 1933, the actress was deemed “box office poison” for most of the decade. Several of her films which are considered classics today—including Holiday and Bringing Up Baby (both of which screen later in the series)—were flops upon first release....

Nam June Paik’s Global Groove (1973) Before attending the David Bowie exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I was unaware that Bowie had collaborated on a music video in the 1980s with Nam June Paik. I wasn’t surprised to learn of this collaboration, however. Paik, who died in 2006 at the age of 74, is widely considered to be the godfather of video art. His groundbreaking work from the 1960s and ’70s introduced a range of devices to the new medium of video, such as stroboscopic effects, closed-feedback loops, and the use of magnets to deform how the images appeared on TV sets....

Diegesis Local art-rock collective Ono, a band that formed in the early 80s and was resurrected from a long dormancy a few years ago, released Albino on Moniker Records in late 2012. The band’s first recordings since 1986, Albino saw Ono picking up where it had left off, creating sprawling, herky-jerky soundscapes crossed with theatrical performance art. Since the band’s initial return in 2008, they’ve become one of the busiest and most visible bands on the local underground circuit, and this weekend they’ll be releasing their second postreunion LP, Diegesis, also on Moniker....

Despite her artistic and commercial success, Peaches’ provocations and witty (but biting) critiques of cultural obsessions with beauty and gender roles have kept her firmly straddling the line between the cult and mainstream; a perpetual outsider and badass in a saccharine, pop-centric world.

ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: Fake Limbs, Absolutely Not, Walking Bicycles, and Beat Drun Juel at Emporium Arcade Bar on Fri 5/5 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com

Like most festivals with more than one stage, Pitchfork sometimes books two great acts to play overlapping sets, forcing fans to make a painful choice. Reader writers found quite a few of those conflicts on the fest’s schedule, and thought long and hard about who they’d go to see. These write-ups compare those decisions with the “winners” as determined by Pitchfork itself, via rounded averages of the ratings the site has given to each artist’s releases....

Firefighters are currently battling a three-alarm blaze that broke out this afternoon and flared through the roof of a building at North Avenue and Wells Street, just south of the Second City complex. The offices have burned, but the fire has not reached the theater. UPDATE: All Second City faculty and training center campers have been safely evacuated. Stay tuned for more info. pic.twitter.com/BohRT3NK9N — The Second City (@TheSecondCity) August 26, 2015...

There’s a scene that occurs about a half hour into War Room, a low-budget drama that replaced Straight Outta Compton as the number-one movie in America a couple weeks ago and currently sits third on the box-office chart. An old woman—presented as a wise, voice-of-reason type—is meeting with the real estate agent who’s going to help her sell her home. To find out whether she wants to work with this agent, the old woman asks her about her religious life....

Thus far Discwoman’s Volvox has stuck to DJing, with none of the same production releases that fellow collective members Umfang or DJ Haram have used to make their names. Still, she’s built an unmistakable identity via her mixes. She mostly opts for straight-ahead techno that’s seemingly impenetrable up to the point at which it becomes just a bit off-kilter. And every once in a while her Berlin-style barrage opens up into something ever-so-slightly spiritual....

Peanuts would never have been any good without the grief. When Charles Schulz’s daily comic strip debuted in 1950, it offered cute jokes about neighborhood kids and their dog, but as Schulz began to find his characters in the late ’50s and early ’60s—the depressed Charlie Brown, the hardened Lucy, the insecure Linus, the monomaniacal Snoopy—Peanuts developed an emotional depth that made it hilariously funny and revolutionized the art form. Last week The Peanuts Movie brought Schulz’s cast of characters back to the big screen for the first time in 35 years, adding the modern technology of 3-D animation to give the characters physical depth....

Michael Litchfield Julie Ganey performs at the Fillet of Solo Festival. Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.