Cold Mountain may be Tim Eriksen’s first brush with the mainstream, but he’s been making music for years. The Minneapolis-based singer, multi-instrumentalist, and musicologist lent his vocals to Brendan Gleeson’s character and taught the rest of the cast, from Nicole Kidman to the Romanian extras, how to sing hymns in the Sacred Harp style–also known as shape-note singing because its hymnals use geometric shapes rather than conventional musical notation. Sacred Harp vocalists belt out the words with a lusty intensity that generates rough, clashing sonorities instead of the more familiar gospel harmonies....

Friday 3/5 – Thursday 3/11 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chicago Irish Film Festival begins tonight with the U.S. premiere of Mystics, a black comedy in which two washed-up actors set up shop as spiritual mediums. Two actors from the film, David Kelly and Milo O’Shea, will attend, as will Colm Meany (best known to Trekkies as engineering genius Chief O’Brien) and Irish Film Institute curator Sunniva O’Flynn....

Drummer and composer Damon Short wrote the extended composition Zones for a 1979 graduate recital at Northern Illinois University and, he says, hasn’t performed it since; now, as a 50th-birthday gift to himself, he’s bringing it back, having made only a few changes in the score to reflect the instrumentation of his current band. Obviously I’ve never heard the piece, but I recommend it with confidence; listening to some of his recordings recently (in particular a 1994 limited-release CD called Airplay) reminded me of the virtues that are a constant in his work....

For Delmark Records founder and owner Bob Koester, the past five years have nearly spelled the end of a lifetime’s worth of work. “Essentially, the label almost got fucked right out of business,” he says. “The drop in our sales was precipitous. It kind of felt like, ‘Welcome to the new century.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Koester cites a number of reasons for the plunge in sales: indie record stores carrying Delmark CDs began closing, major retailers began whittling down their jazz and blues sections, and, he says, more and more people were burning copies of his releases instead of paying for them....

It’s an event when this Australian trio puts out a new album these days; after all, the members live on three different continents, and violinist Warren Ellis–a true guitar hero without a guitar–has actually been more prolific over the last half decade as a member of the Bad Seeds. Cinder (Touch and Go), their first release since She Has No Strings Apollo in 2003, crackles with the crisp craftsmanship of older, drier-eyed men (and women: Chan Marshall and Sally Timms sing on two songs, a departure from the band’s instrumental tradition)....

Emily Schwartz’s new black comedy, produced by Scott Dray Productions and the Strange Tree Group, is set in early-20th-century America. A rambling novel of a play, it features garrulous, often charming characters, Dickensian plot twists, caustic comments on modern life, two ghosts, and a macabre story touching on pedophilia, incest, suicide, and murder. The most charming character of all is Alvin (played with quivering emotion by Matthew Holzfeind), who locked himself in the attic years earlier after witnessing a grisly incident....

There’s a bold concept behind BackStage Theatre Company’s production of Euripides’ classic: Jason is played by deaf actor Chris Lopez while the scorned, vengeful Medea can hear. The conceit pays off intermittently in Michael Pacas’s staging. Using the two children as ASL translators for their parents’ battles makes it clear they’re tragic pawns; it’s especially poignant when the daughter delivers Jason’s encomiums to his son–praise that she’s denied. Karen Yates’s performance as Medea blends slyness with feral passion, and Lopez’s anguish at the end is chilling....

Move Over, Harry Potter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trish Lindsay trained as an architect and came to Chicago in 1991 to work for Eva Maddox Associates. She redesigned some hospital and museum gift shops and says she realized that what nonprofits really needed were better products to sell. By 1993, she and Rick Carton–an artist she’d hooked up with after admiring the posters he did for his band Tarnations–had founded Treehouse Productions, a toy company with a storefront on Lincoln Avenue....

Snow White and Russian Red Irinia Denezhkina, translated by Andrew Bromfield The decline and fall of communism is a distant memory in Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, Snow White and Russian Red, published in Poland in 2002. The same goes for Irina Denezhkina’s short story collection Give Me (Songs for Lovers), published in Russia the same year, while the teens in Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings, published in 2003, came of age after Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 90s....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features the full-length trilogy “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly (Idris Goodwin’s “The Danger Face Trilogy” has completed its run). Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....

The arc of most psych-rock careers bends in one of two ways. Usually it curves toward the slick, soft, and eventually the ignominiously drab (aka “mature”). But savvier and more committed musicians in the genre, the ones who are in it for the long haul, dig deeper, and with each album he makes as SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE Ben Chasny has become more adventurous. Last year’s School of the Flower showed off his ability to shape folkish lines into beautiful ice palaces, but his new album, The Sun Awakens (Drag City), burns mostly hot and dark red; the 24-minute “River of Transfiguration” steadily builds into sharply focused madness....

Aesop Rock Musically, his new EP, Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives (Definitive Jux), isn’t an atypical release–its surrealistic backdrops and spastic beats are solid, if familiar–but a limited edition of the disc includes an 88-page book, The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow, which for the first time publishes the lyrics to every Aesop Rock song. (Clearly his fans are eager to figure him out–the run of 25,000 copies sold out more than a week before its February 22 release date....

Being Swiss and a writer, Max Frisch naturally took as his subject bourgeois complacency, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. Hence this 1953 satire about Gottlieb Biedermann, a successful businessman so complacent, hypocritical, and self-deluding even the Swiss might find him unsettling. The Firebugs is a sly, cool, relentlessly subversive thing, largely because it doesn’t stop at beating the burghers–it takes its critique all the way to hell. National Pastime Theater and Clock Productions fail the material....

Dialogue, special effects, and hordes of creatures and characters from the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy come to life when Charles Ross throws himself around the stage in this solo show. He can be everything from the monstrous orcs (played with many grunts) to the hobbit Sam (wide eyes) and greedy Gollum (hunched over on the floor). And he doesn’t describe battles–he becomes them. Unlike his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, this hour-long encapsulation of the films requires more than a passing familiarity with them....

Prefuse 73 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On each of his full-length releases as Prefuse 73 since–One Word Extinguisher (2003) and the new Surrounded by Silence–he’s advanced a fresh and immediately appealing vision of what hip-hop production can be. Broadly speaking, most producers fall into one of two camps: those who use mainly synthetic sounds to shape sleek, futurist beats (Timbaland, the Neptunes) or Atari’d-out crate diggers mining jazz and soul stacks to make beats crackling with the sound of old vinyl (Madlib, DJ Premier)....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

KILLER OF SHEEP ssss WHERE Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We also catch a few glimpses of the hero at his job, but most of what we know about his work and how he feels about it comes from seeing his general alienation and exhaustion when he’s at home: repairing the kitchen sink or laying out linoleum, sluggishly dancing with his wife in the living room, berating his son for addressing her in a “country” fashion as “dear,” refusing to participate in a robbery being planned by a couple of neighbors, or trying to fix a broken down car....

Last year photographer Amir Normandi mounted an exhibit in his Pilsen gallery of photos by students depicting the daily life of women in Iran. Normandi had smuggled the images out in early 2001, and the show, “Hejab Exposition,” attracted a fair amount of interest and an invitation to bring it to Harper College, where it was up for eight days last February. In the spring Normandi proposed another installation to Harper’s international studies coordinator Richard Johnson....

The 23nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, runs Wednesday, March 17, through Sunday, March 21. Screenings are at the Women in the Director’s Chair Theater, 941 W. Lawrence. Tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair. Festival passes are also available; for more information call 773-907-0610....

All stars in their own right as soloists, pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Gil Shaham, and cellist Lynn Harrell (replacing Truls Mork) are touring together as a supertrio, like many before them. Their Chicago program consists of Mozart’s sunny Trio in C Major, Schubert’s intoxicating Trio no. 2, and, even more appealing, Shostakovich’s profoundly personal and moving Second Trio, one of the great works of 20th-century chamber music. Stunned by the death of his close friend and mentor Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich wrote the piece as an elegy....