Micco Caporale

Judd Crud’s viral parody video "My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago" has long outlived the trend that inspired it.

Pharmakon embraces duality through sound. For 17 years, power-electronics artist Margaret Chardiet has been making bristling, textural chaos under the name Pharmakon—a Greek word that can mean remedy and poison. Deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced the concept “pharmakon” as a container for binaries central to Western logic traditions, like good/bad and internal/external. Chardiet has composed her five studio albums with these tensions in mind, striving for something visceral and organic with her harsh, mechanical noise.

Robert Hood and his Underground Resistance cofounders Jeff Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks will perform at Smart Bar. Credit: Marie Staggat

Power-electronics artist Margaret Chardiet performs at Empty Bottle in December; her latest album, Maggot Mass, is out now on Sacred Bones.

To attend a Machine Girl show is to straddle the worlds of hardcore and rave music: you’re just as likely to encounter moshing or stage diving as shuffling or footwork.

Biz 3 publicist Dana Meyerson works with the likes of Ms. Lauryn Hill and Chappell Roan, but she grounds herself in her Chicago community.

Fruit LoOops' live shows can switch between the raw, stripped-down aesthetic of punk and the rehearsed technique of performance art, but they’re never pretentious.

No color is more now than that Gak green. The color percolated in the zeitgeist all year.

“violet sissy fleur pinkie,” the Matt Morris solo show at Ruschman, is a southern gothic love letter to quietly decaying glamor.

The Reader revisits a 2011 feature on the Chicago high school origins of Grease.