Live Picks: 2/8
Lucrecia Dalt
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Experimentation all-around: ambitious R&B and heady sound art.
Bilal, Chop Shop
We previewed Bilal’s show at City Winery last March:
“One of the most underrated neo-soul artists of the century is Philadelphia’s Bilal. Featured prominently on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, his greatest achievements are three excellent solo albums–2001′s First Born Second, 2010′s Airtight’s Revenge, and 2013′s A Love Surreal–and one very good one, 2015′s In Another Life. More perfectionist than prolific, seeing him perform and listening to his music seems like a rare treat.”
Local DJ Jay Illa & singer-songwriter AMI open.
Lucrecia Dalt & Bitchin Bajas, Hideout
A former geotechnical engineer, Colombian experimental artist Lucrecia Dalt led up to her latest album Anticlines by researching synthesizers, creating patches for the Clavia Nord Modular and studying the Moogerfooger MuRF. But her ideas are at the intersection of science and art, of technology and nature, of the concrete and the mythical. Take opening track “Edge”, inspired by the Colombian myth of El Boraro. Dalt dryly recites lines about the monster converting its victims’ insides into pulp before blowing up their bodies like balloons, gruesome imagery over high-pitched notes. The monster is a protector of nature; as such, throughout Anticlines, Dalt imagines humanity on the brink of existence. On “Tar”, she imagines the end of the universe and what it actually might be like to breathe there, its layered and panning percussion otherworldly. The arpeggios of “Analogue Mountains” are inspired by martian traces found in Antarctica embedded by the meteorite ALH84001; her half-joking admission that, “We might well be living on mountains transferred from Mars” as existential as it gets. Dalt even evokes with her song titles, like the appropriate paradox of “Concentric Nothings”. Both the song and the album in general manage to carry so many elements but allow for seemingly infinite space.
Dalt plays tonight as part of the Hideout’s Resonance Series, a set that promises to be equally academic and meditative.
We previewed Bitchin Bajas at Hungry Brain in June:
“We’re big fans of local experimental heroes Bitchin Bajas here at SILY. They’ve given great, organ, synth, guitar, and woodwind-heavy sets at Pitchfork Music Festival and the MCA, and their most recent album Bajas Fresh was one of our favorites of last year. They’re on quite the streak, their self-titled record and collaboration with Bonnie “Prince” Billy preceding Bajas Fresh, cementing the band as one of the most forward-thinking in the country, let alone Chicago. They continue to do their thing at Hungry Brain tonight.”
Local electronic artist M. Sage opens.
