Micco Caporale

23 hours ago | chicagoreader.com | Micco Caporale

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at [email protected]. Tonkotsu ramen is a Western favorite of Japanese cuisine because it’s peak East-meets-West comfort food.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Micco Caporale |Savannah Ray Hugueley |Taryn McFadden |J. Patrick Patterson

It’s a great time for sapphics in Chicago—maybe not as good as it was five months ago, when there were more federal protections and resources allocated for women, nonbinary people, and the LGBTQ+ community. But it’s a better time than when homosexuality was pathologized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, women needed a male signatory to open a bank account, and most public trans women wanted husbands, never wives or girlfriends.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Micco Caporale

Bartees Strange is one of several high-profile musicians who’ve recently adopted a goth visual aesthetic, but his sound remains grounded in indie rock, neosoul, and hip-hop. On his latest album, Horror (4AD), which dropped on Valentine’s Day, Strange mines the existential dread that’s haunted him for most of his life. Born in England in 1989, he moved all over the world as his parents changed jobs, but when he was 12 years old, the family settled in Mustang, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Micco Caporale

Controversial music opinion: Right now the most exciting, forward-thinking bands in the evolving landscape of postpunk and EBM aren’t coming from Chicago. They’re clamoring out of smaller midwestern metropolises. Need proof? Look no further than Cincinnati, where the Serfs—whose name captures the truly medieval state of today’s underclass—are making songs that pulse with the tension between dance music’s lust for abandon and industrial music’s fascination with decay.

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Micco Caporale

Tia Cabral is in her ballad era. The Oakland-based artist, who makes music as Spellling, began experimenting with songwriting in 2016, after a friend brought her a MicroKORG synth to fiddle with. An English-lit major with a poet’s soul, she started by making song fragments and vocal loops (which she described as “sound poems” in a 2023 interview with the Synth History blog) and quickly learned to transform them into entire pieces without the help of a band.