Gossip Wolf first caught wind of local producer-rapper Montana Macks in 2015, when his work appeared all over the Rich Jones EP Pigeons & Waffles. Macks has been a little quiet for the past couple years, but he’s had his hands full working on an instrumental album called Arrivals & Departures. He tells Gossip Wolf that he began working on it when Jones suggested he compile his unreleased material for a beat tape—but because Macks has been recording for around a decade, he has a whole lot of unreleased material. “We collectively went through over 2,500 beats to make these selections,” he says. The tracks collected on Arrivals & Departures have a soulful, sophisticated, and thoroughly relaxing vibe; the album drops Friday, August 7.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Anni Rossi left for New York in 2010, but Gossip Wolf will always consider her a Chicagoan. After all, her outstanding 2009 full-length, Rockwell, is still the best (if not only) album named after the start-and-stop street that runs north-south the whole length of the city. For the past few years, Rossi has been releasing mixtapes of what she calls “strange pop experiments, curiosities, comedy and characters.” Last week, she dropped the latest installment, a charmingly homemade video mix called House of Rossi. “Most of these songs and videos were captured on my iPad and DV camera in restaurants, airplanes, trains, on tour, with friends or at home,” she says. The mix is streaming on Spotify and YouTube, and Rossi is already on to new projects—including an EP due later this year and a 2021 full-length produced by Bobb Bruno of Best Coast.

 The audio portion of House of Rossi is streaming on Spotify.

Last week local arts nonprofit Quiet Pterodactyl dropped the all-star compilation SituationChicago, which benefits 25 of the city’s music venues. It contains tracks from Jeff Tweedy, White Mystery, Big Silky, Ric Wilson, Girl K, Dee Alexander, the Twilite Tone, and 18 other amazing local acts!  

Click here to see the full article!

Click here to read the full article on the Chicago Reader.

Four pages in this week’s Chicago Reader give thanks to the more than 2,400 people and businesses who contributed fund-raising drive for the local newspaper. Hundreds of others contributed anonymously, and we thank them as well. You can pick up copies of the paper at nearly 1,200 distribution outlets (see chicagoreader.com/map, papers are being delivered through Friday this week), and you can also download a PDF of the entire paper here: chicagoreader.com/20190331.pdf.

Kudos to the new publisher, Tracy Baim for these efforts! And if you squint, you’ll see White Mystery signed up as a Chicago Reader “Founder” in the list above. You can support the Chicago Reader too, just go to chicagoreader.com/support.

So far Riot Fest Magazine’s content has included listicles about festival acts and their side projects, updates on the Lake Michigan Bat Creature, and a DIY advice column by Alex White of White Mystery, which takes a practical and battle-tested look at punk praxis. Read the whole article here.

Even when the weather doesn’t behave, Chicago rock fans can always tell that spring has sprung when a new album arrives from Gossip Wolf‘s favorite flame-haired sibling garage duo, White Mystery. When Alex and Francis White drop the new F.Y.M.S. (aka Fuck Your Mouth Shut), it’ll make 2017 the eighth year in a row they’ve put out a record (or in one case a movie soundtrack) on April 20. (That’s 4/20—as in pot o’clock—for all you nonjokers, nonsmokers, and non-midnight tokers out there.) The Whites have decided to introduce the album to the world by sharing its raging title track a few weeks early, and as usual this wolf is super down with the band’s blistering chops and thundering rhythms—and on this particular jammer, Alex switches from Greek to potty-mouthed English at the drop of a chorus! Sophocles would be impressed! (more…)

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