This year’s Pitchfork Music Festival had an endearing combination of clear skies, colossal black metal, and lots of hand waving courtesy of Giorgio Moroder. The Italian producer behind Donna Summer’s big hits was one of 43 acts that played Union Park over the past three days, part of an eclectic lineup that featured Kelela, Hudson Mohawke, Pusha T, and Hundred Waters. Not every band was fit for the fest (Sun Kil Moon‘s intense, dour songs are better suited for a dark concert hall that forbids talking) and some groups had to struggle with severe sound issues (Neutral Milk Hotel sounded like hot garbage for a couple songs), but the festival’s exciting mix of artful R&B, introverted hip-hop, celestial folk, and noisy punk proved to be quite potent....

Courtesy Loyola University School of Hard Rocks 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.

Driving through Hubbard’s Cave is one of the greatest cheap thrills in Chicago. Really, it’s just a very long highway underpass, but the “cave” in its name gives it a special tinge of excitement. As do the white tiles on the walls, which are not really cavelike at all. Normally Canvas has a year to plan a Sub Chroma event. This time they had only two months. As of Friday morning, the viaduct was still empty....

If you’re too young to have lived through the civil rights movement, it’s likely your memory of it has been shaped by family stories, PBS documentaries, and, most of all, black-and-white news photos. So you may be forgiven for thinking the movement was all marches and speeches and angry mobs and acts of violence. “There’s a sensation of standing in the moment, like we’re in the photo, or about to take a photo ourselves,” MCA curator Naomi Beckwith explains....

On her forthcoming album The Order of Time (due from Concord on March 10) Tennessee-bred singer-songwriter Valerie June settles into a more naturalistic groove, adjusting from her 2013 breakout Pushin’ Against a Stone—influenced by the heavy hand of producer Dan Auerbach—to something that feels morelike it belongs to her. Her music continues to draw from a wide swath of influences: bits of gospel, soul, blues, pop, and even a version of Tinariwen’s Saharan blues (“Shakedown”) are folded into an atmospheric amalgam that toggles between tender and taut, with June’s nasal drawl pulling everything together....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, June 23, 2017. Have a great weekend! Durbin slams Senate GOP health-care plan: “You can put a lace collar on a pit bull and it’s still a mean dog” Senator Dick Durbin slammed the Senate Republicans’ new health-care bill Thursday, saying, “You can put a lace collar on a pit bull and it’s still a mean dog.” Republican senators have been trying to claim that its newly released draft legislation is not as “mean” as even President Trump at one point proclaimed the House version to be, but that’s not true, according to Durbin....

Born Mariya Ocheretianskaya in Moscow in 1986, Mary Ocher (pronounced “Oh-chur”) moved to Israel with her family at age four, then to Berlin at 20. In 2011 she caught the attention of the inimitable King Khan at a karaoke bar (he also lives in Berlin), and she recorded what’s still her most recent full-length of new material, 2013’s Eden, at his Moon Studios. EDEN by Mary Ocher

Once the refuge of the nerd, the otherworld of video games is now accessible to nearly everyone. An untold number of hours are spent gaming on home computers, on cell phones during el rides, and, increasingly around these parts, at bars stocked with classic arcade cabinets. We called a couple of authorities from the indie gaming realm to help us assess two of Chicago’s arcade bars. Tibitoski found out at DePaul....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Aimee Levitt A sign of things to come in Rogers Park? One sign that a neighborhood is truly gentrified and done for is the presence of a restaurant that serves brunch. (Another is a store that sells handwoven tablecloths and clocks made from old books. And also a dog groomer.) Brunch is for people who would rather go out and pay $15 for something they could just as well assemble at home by scrounging through their refrigerators and pantries without having to bother with getting out of their pajamas....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, April 13, 2017. Rahm returns to Washington to discuss infrastructure, meet with DeVos Mayor Rahm Emanuel returned to his old stomping grounds in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to discuss infrastructure at a Wall Street Journal event and meet with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. In order to improve infrastructure, President Donald Trump will have to spend federal money and not rely on tax credits, Emanuel said at the WSJ event....

On Friday remarkable Scottish folksinger Alasdair Roberts released yet another fantastic record, Pangs (Drag City). I’ll certainly write about that soon, but right now another record with which he’s intimately involved is stuck in my head. Roberts is a member of UK folk group Furrow Collective, along with singers and multi-instrumentalists Lucy Farrell, Rachel Newton, and Emily Portman. As each of them do in their own careers, the group draws its repertoire from the vast UK folk tradition, but compared to its members’ solo work, Furrow Collective’s arrangements generally tend toward a sweeter, gentler pop-flavored sound, with gorgeous harmony singing and a comforting blend of guitars, fiddles, and harp....

Postponed, indefinitely UPDATE: Late this afternoon, Evanston Library director Karen Danczak Lyons reported that she’d just spoken with Ali Abunimah by phone and that “we’re back on track.” The program has been rescheduled for the same date, August 11, at 7:00 PM in the large community room of the main library. No new date was announced. *Library director Karen Danczak Lyons has since posted the following on their website:...

Anyone that follows the Chicago music scene closely has surely encountered drummer Charles Rumback, one of the most versatile and tasteful musicians in town, a player who moves easily between jazz, free improvisation, rock, and folk communities. His hard work ethic often means his own projects convene only sporadically, and his regular collaborations with musicians who don’t live in Chicago—like Denver trumpeter Ron Miles and New York saxophonist Tony Malaby—further limits their activity....

The Asian arowana, or dragonfish, the creature that gives its title to U. of C. prof Vu Tran’s first novel, looks like a golden Chinese dragon and is supposed to bring good luck. But the book itself more closely resembles a hermit crab: a literary novel that borrows the snail shell of noir to give itself a form and structure. The soft underbelly is the story of Hong Thi Pham, a woman who, with her daughter, flees Vietnam by boat after the fall of Saigon and lands in a ghost-filled Malaysian internment camp....

It’s only been a few months since Pinwheel Records opened near the 18th Street Pink Line stop, but Pilsen isn’t done welcoming new record stores. Head east from Pinwheel for half a mile or so, and you’ll find 606 Records, at 1808 S. Allport; it’s nowhere near the 606 (the elevated path also known as the Bloomingdale Trail), but it is across the street from Thalia Hall. The new shop, which specializes in vinyl and cassettes by lesser-known musicians and labels from around the world, had its grand opening last Saturday....

Former Chicagoan Ben Pirani has been performing as his R&B alter ego Benjamin for more than six years now, and next week the project’s full-length debut, Arriving, will be released on Cherries Records. Benjamin’s first physical release was an ultralimited two-song cassette on local label Priority Male, and a couple of years ago Cherries released his first vinyl single, “Love Is Gonna Let You Down” b/w “Not a Moment Too Soon,” shortly after his relocation to New York City....

A former editor introduced me to the Poetry Foundation‘s Poem of the Day. His parents were poets—not amateurs who scribbled doggerel on birthday cards, but professionals who published books and taught in a university writing program—and I imagine that for him, poetry was not something that was painstakingly pored over and decoded in a classroom but an especially beautiful and compressed way of expressing complex thoughts and feelings, one that’s not incompatible with the language of everyday life....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Why on earth did SEIU Local 73 write a $25,000 check to Mayor Emanuel? I was sitting by a pond on a bright sunny day, watching the little ducks float around, when a friend texted to say: SEIU Local 73 donated 25 grand to Mayor Rahm. WTF?!! Not just on the work front, where the mayor’s been firing workers at schools, parks, and the city—in the name of reform—while endorsing tax breaks for the rich in the name of economic development....