Gossip Wolf’s first exposure to newly local cellist and sound artist Dorothy Carlos was via her 2022 cassette Circuit Sphere (American Dreams), which features five stunning tracks of her cello alternating with synthesizer lines performed on instruments designed and built by Brian Oakes, aka United Sound Systems. The Reader’s Leor Galil hailed her work on the album for teasing out “resonant textures, prodding humming drones till they shriek (“I Started”) or making nuanced textural shifts that feel as rejuvenating as a hint of cool lakeside breeze on a hot July evening.” If you find yourself missing hot summer nights now that temperatures are finally dropping for real, Carlos’ new site-responsive sound installation, My Ideal Is Windy, is featured at the Lincoln Park Conservatory’s toasty Fern Room through Sunday, January 14.
Organized as part of Experimental Sound Studio’s installation series Florasonic, and presented in partnership with the Chicago Park District, the roughly 20-minute piece fills the space with an entirely new sense of dense atmospherics. Carlos, who was born in Chicago, but hadn’t lived here until she relocated for graduate school two years ago, describes My Ideal Is Windy as “a reflection on real and imagined places” inspired by the mental images she’d conjured from her parents’ recollections about their own time living in the city. As she told Gossip Wolf, “The installation is a way for me to reconcile my past imagined and current realistic perceptions of Chicago, and express the conflicting emotions that emerge from that experience.”
Local metal legend “Professor” Chris Black has been annihilating gloom via his melodically majestic trad metal project High Spirits for nearly 15 years. In fact, it seems like every time Gossip Wolf is seriously down in the dumps, the good Professor (also known for his work with killer ensembles Superchrist and Dawnbringer) arrives just in time with another fiery missive! (High Spirits’ last album, Hard to Stop, arrived during the very crappy summer of 2020, which proves this wolf’s point.) On November 24, Black will drop another glorious High Spirits album, Safe on the Other Side, on which he cranks the amps to 11 and unleashes a torrent of positivity—on tracks like “In the Moonlight” and “One Day Closer,” his supercharged riffs and sing-along choruses are sure to have hard rock fans raising their fists to the skies in celebration. Though Black records High Spirits albums all by his lonesome, he fronts a thunderous five-piece version of the band live, and their next performance is on Saturday, February 3, 2024 at Reggie’s with Bear Mace and Acerus. Gossip Wolf has seen them perform numerous times, and recommends wearing plenty of leather and denim and doing some serious headbanging exercises beforehand. You’ll thank this wolf later!
Earlier this month, local dance label Yearning dropped its debut release, a stylistically broad 14-track compilation titled Yearning for Beauty. “It’s been a long time coming for me,” says cofounder Michelle Hathaway, who produces ambient techno under the name Misia. “I’ve always wanted to start some sort of label in Chicago. I started out years ago throwing shows and raves.”
Chicago’s sprawling nightlife scene first brought Hathaway into contact with future Yearning cofounder Collin Kirk, who makes darkwave tracks under the name Pharmacist. They discovered they’d both long been drawn to dance’s underground. “Raves, DIY—as always—that’s kind of where things begin, culturally,” Kirk says. “That’s the heart of culture when it comes to experimental and electronic music, most of the time, in history.” The underground also provided Hathaway and Kirk a creative home when they felt marginalized by more mainstream dance communities in the city.
“The dance music scene in Chicago, it was always very masculine—I always felt like I was an outsider,” Hathaway says. “That was something we talked about a lot where both of our music never felt like it fit into what already existed in Chicago, and both of us have a ton of friends who are coming from the same place.” This summer, Hathaway came up with the idea to put a compilation together, and reached out to Kirk to contribute. “He seemed really excited about it,” Hathaway says, “and was like, ‘Let me know if you need help with anything.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m actually gonna probably need a lot of help.’’
Hathaway and Kirk each contributed tracks to Yearning for Beauty, and cast a wide net for other contributors, too. The album features a handful of local artists, including breakcore star Casper McFadden, techno producer Mina Mills, and acid-tinged IDM artist DJ ColdSteel. Stylistic variety was important for both curators. “It was important for it to be a scope of experimental electronic, and not necessarily one rigid thing that might be kind of same-y,” Kirk says. “It was important for us to try to bring a kaleidoscope of sound that still comes together cohesively, for the image—like, the romance, the silliness of what we are hoping Yearning can be.”
Yearning for Beauty is available digitally and in a short run of 60 CD-Rs. “I think CD-Rs are underrated,” Hathaway says. “I know there’s a lot of tape labels that are super cool. I just never was a tape girl. We talked about doing tapes in the future, but I just think CDs are awesome.”
“Also our friendship was founded on CD-R jokes,” Kirk says. “Which is very weird and random, but it’s true.”
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