friday29
LESLIE & THE LY’S Iowa native Leslie Hall, who runs a traveling RV museum of at least 165 amazingly hideous plastic-jewel-encrusted sweaters, is like a magpie with an art degree–she’s not attracted to just anything shiny. She is fond of glittery disco beats, though, and in her band Leslie & the Ly’s she raps and coos over canned dance tracks like a deep-throated diva. Crowd favorites include “Zombie Killers,” an uplifting ballad about shooting the undead, and “Gold Pants,” a dated-sounding R & B ditty about her favorite trousers. Onstage the husky lady favors sci-fi jumpsuits, giant blond helmet hair, and 70s bank-teller glasses, but the show’s about more than just “ha ha, look at the fat girl with the camel toe and the wicked dance moves.” Hall is fearlessly original: cool and inspiring without being any less ridiculous and brilliantly entertaining without technically being any good. Snobs stay home. Lesbians on Ecstasy and Stinkmitt open; also on the program are the finals of the “B-Girl Battle” that began today at 5 PM in the Wicker Park field house. Hall and Lynne T (of Lesbians on Ecstasy) spin at an afterparty. This show is part of Estrojam; see page 34 for a complete schedule. a 9 PM, Abbey Pub, 3420 W. Grace, 773-478-4408 or 866-468-3401, $14.50 in advance, $16 at the door, 18+. –Liz Armstrong
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cDANIEL MENCHE, OLIVIA BLOCK Prolific Oregon sound artist DANIEL MENCHE uses often indeterminate source material–sometimes little more than thick drones and rhythmic pulsing–in an ongoing quest to convey intense emotion. For some recent releases he’s focused on percussion in his harrowing soundscapes; Concussions (Asphodel), for example, is two relentless hours of primal beats manipulated and layered into a jagged, disorienting architecture. The brand-new Creatures of Cadence (Crouton/Longbox) is more kaleidoscopic: electronically enhanced strings and drums throb, thrum, and glide, shifting in vividness and density. This performance is his Chicago debut.
nina hagen, paradise island If you remember NINA HAGEN as the freakish and squeaky new-wave diva who helped establish the image of Berlin’s cultural life in the 80s as a nonstop pansexual orgy of pomo cabaret and angsty performance art, you might be surprised to learn that her two latest albums, notably the recent Irgendwo auf der Welt (“Somewhere in the World,” released overseas by Island), reimagine big-band music and pop standards made famous by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Judy Garland. Or maybe you’d just take it in stride–maybe, like Hagen herself, you’ve figured out that the material she’s working with matters less than the thousand-watt presence she brings to it. –Monica Kendrick
SKULL DEFEKTS This Swedish collective specializes in oppressively minimalist stretches of trudging low-end noise. On last year’s Rotating Feedback & Save the Skulls (Ideal/AA), a feedback drone rumbles and undulates, its pitch shifting like a slithering snake. Minute details emerge from the floor-rumbling oscillations–a helicopterlike ripple, siren wails, staticky debris–but the emphasis is on the grinding, sludgy tone. Skull Defekts’ Web site lists four members, but only two, Henrik Rylander (who played drums in the rock band Union Carbide Productions) and Joachim Nordwall, are playing this show, the group’s U.S. debut. They’ll each play new solo works, then join for a piece called “The Sound of Defekt Skulls and Intense Cranium Contact (Feedbacking Gothenburg & Chicago)” that incorporates found sounds collected in Sweden and Chicago in the days prior to the show. a 9 PM, 6Odum, 2116 W. Chicago, 773-227-3617, $12. A –Peter Margasak
cmew A new album from this Danish quartet, now based in London, is always a real occasion. Their fourth full-length, And the Glass Handed Kites (released in the States by Columbia), further perfects the rarefied pop of 2003’s Frengers: the music is icy and prismatic, like crystals growing in a time-lapse film. It’s hard to say just what differentiates Mew from groups like Radiohead and Sigur Ros, which shoot for similar effects by similar means. (Singer Jonas Bjerre has that same sort of glassy, otherworldly voice.) The word I keep coming back to is refinement: Mew coaxes its songs into sublime symphonic realms without self-conscious artsiness or cheap signifiers like string sections, and there’s never the telltale whiff of experimentation for its own sake. It probably helps that the production on Glass Handed Kites is interstellar: it sounds like it cost $30 billion to record. The densely articulated studio sheen was what hooked me first, but the entrancing vocal harmonies would’ve wormed their way into my brain even without it–in the age of the earbud single, Mew makes headphone albums. Kasabian headlines and One Thousand Pictures opens. a 7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203 or 312-559-1212, $15. A –J. Niimi
cschnee, los glissandinos Viennese musicians Burkhard Stangl (guitar) and Christof Kurzmann (computer), who together form SCHNEE, were among the first practitioners of what’s now usually called electroacoustic improvisation–a gestural, texture-oriented music in which an instrument’s traditional sound is often obscured and subsumed. (In particular, Stangl was a founding member of the paradigm-shifting group Polwechsel.) But Stangl has never been shy about letting his guitar sound like a guitar: on Schnee’s self-titled 2000 debut he complemented Kurzmann’s hovering, abstract sound sculptures with the occasional strummed chord or damped-string scrape, enhancing the music’s gorgeously meditative flow. Last year’s Schnee Live (ErstLive) adds spoken word, singing, and actual chord progressions, but the duo’s music is still built around subtle interaction and patient resolution.
