Fever Ray itself provides a perfectly eerie Halloween soundtrack. So much so that if you piped its album out of your windows on Halloween you’d probably scare all the kiddies away and get yourself blacklisted from the next neighborhood block party. But for you super fans out there—and we know there are a lot of you—Fever Ray sold out the Metro show a few weeks back—here’s your opportunity to hear Karen Dreijer Andersson’s personal fright night favorites in this mix she did for popular electronic music site Resident Advisor.

Download Fever Ray’s Halloween mix.

Tracklisting:

01. Neil Young - Guitar Solo 1
02. Yo La Tengo - Everyday
03. Journey To Ixtlan - Corpse On The Mesa
04. Jad & David Fair - Nosferatu
05. Zola Jesus - Devil Take You
06. Bruce Haack - Mean Old Devil
07. Krause - Duo Canopolis
08. Burial Hex - Will To Chapel
09. Suicide - Ghost Rider
10. Amadou & Miriam - Ja Pense À Toi
11. Shackleton - Death Is Not Final
12. Entombed - Night Of The Vampire
13. Maddalena Fagandini - Interval Signals
14. Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles - Chant Avec Cithare

Photos courtesy of Rez Avissar

I’ve been to a lot of shows at the Metro. And I’ve seen some weird ones. Marilyn Manson walking around on stilts in front of a Ouija board backdrop beckoning the crowd to spit on him comes to mind. Even last weekend’s Grizzly Bear show and the band’s powerful stage presence comes to mind. But none quite reached the light, costume and musical spectacle of last Saturday’s performance from Sweden’s Fever Ray—even if most of the show was covered in a thick—thick—shroud of smoke.

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DJ, record-label owner, party ambassador and all-around marketing guy David Wolstencroft—known to his fans as Trus’me—brings his global party brand D3K to Chicago’s Sonotheque tonight, for what is to be the first of a quarterly party series. Wolstencroft stormed onto the scene in 2007 with his cutting-edge productions that blended influences from the past and present of dance music, for a decidedly futuristic finished product. Mixing house, techno, Afro, boogie, disco and soul, Wolstencroft’s music has captured the attention of a wide cross-section of the dance community.

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Listening to the latest DJ-mix from dynamic Berlin duo M.A.N.D.Y. (a.k.a. Philipp Jung and Patrick Bodmer) is always more of a treat than a task. The two head up one of Germany’s sources for the techier side of house and the housier side of techno, Get Physical Records. Home to a star-studded cast of producers and DJs that includes Booka Shade and DJ T, the label is often synonymous with the best in dance music.

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When genre tags like IDM (intelligent dance music) or minimal techno get thrown around, the qualifiers that follow rarely include lush, sexy or human. Usually pigeonholed as being sparse and cold, it all gets backed into a mechanical-feeling corner. Refreshingly, both sides of spectrum—from blood-pumping humanism to well-oiled mechanics—are given room to breathe when Texas-born, Seattle-based producer Lusine is at the controls. On his latest album for Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International, A Certain Distance, he works in the techno or IDM realm—what he’s known for—but brings a needed warmth and emotion to his sound.

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Dubstep—the U.K.’s latest bass-music obsession borne of drum ‘n’ bass and garage—has grown into such a phenomenon that the genre has garnered its own show on BBC’s Radio 1, has dedicated stages at electronic music festivals across Europe and has started making an inroads into popular culture here in the U.S.—various pop acts are incorporating it into their songs.

The genre’s most vocal spokesperson—and the woman behind its presence on the BBC and at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona— just touched down to begin her debut U.S. tour, bringing this distinctly British sound to the American masses. Mary Anne Hobbs has been involved with dubstep practically since day one. Speaking prior to the show, she recalled its early days when audiences would consist of her, the DJs and the DJ’s girlfriends. And that’s it. Now at the many regular London dubstep nights, fans will queue up down the block to get a taste of the bass. While the hype is not that large here in the U.S., the Midwest’s receptive DJ culture has given it legs here. This proved to be true at Smart Bar last night. The club wasn’t packed to the gills, but there was a respectable turnout and everyone was hyped for some low-end madness.

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Little Dragon likes to work in contrasts. It’s based in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is not the first place that comes to mind as a musical Mecca. Yet, with The Knife, José González and The Swell Session there, it has a bubbling underground electronic scene. Gothenburg’s close proximity to Oslo (Lindstrom and Prins Thomas), Stockholm (Lykke Li), and Berlin (too many greats to name here) also puts it at the center of many wonderful movements in electronic music. Then there’s the band’s name. Ahem. There’s nothing little about dragons. There’s the fact that this act, that’s relatively unknown here in the U.S., spent a good portion of 2009 touring with TV on the Radio. And, most recently, there’s the name of its sophomore release for Peacefrog, Machine Dreams, which, channeling the alternate reality of Philip K. Dick, starts playing with artificial intelligence and the conflation of man and machine.

With a solitary, modulating tone, the slumbering robot that is Machine Dreams slowly stirs on its opening track, “A New.” Undulating bass and marching band snare follow to bring things fully to life. But when lead singer Yukimi Nagano enters the track, what had seemed to be our mechanically-led near-future takes an organic turn. Read more »

The silver-haired DJ, known to dance floors around the world as D. Ramirez, is back in Chicago this weekend, holding down the top spot at Crobar Saturday 29. Ramirez came to prominence championing electro house on global scale. He’s been voted best DJ in numerous dance-music magazine polls and garnered more than 20 chart toppers in the U.K. and Europe. As the electro-house sound has started to fade from public consciousness, Ramirez has gone to great new lengths, keeping himself relevant on the club scene with explorations into deeper techno and house sounds, teaming with Mark Knight of Toolroom Records and even producing remixes for the likes of Underworld.

The promoters putting the event together have been gracious in offering us a couple of guest-list spots for his performance, and we’d like to pass those on to you, our faithful Time Out readers. All you need to do to nab the guest-list spots is sign up for our new music e-mail newsletter before midnight tonight, Thursday, August 27. Friday, we’ll notify the winners via email. E-mail promotions@timeoutchicago.com, and for clarity’s sake: by entering this giveaway contest, you will be subscribed to Audio File, Time Out Chicago’s music newsletter. Winners will be on the will-call list at Crobar.

As an extra bonus, you can wet your whistle with the new D. Ramirez August mix, which includes two versions of his new single “Satur8,” the aforementioned Underworld remix “Downpipe”—voted by the BBC’s Pete Tong as an essential new tune—and ten other heavy hitters. Check the tracklist after the jump and download it here: Read more »

Every summer, the musical tornado that is Lollapalooza attracts bands, DJs and tens of thousands of fans for a larger-than-life weekend of indie-rocking, five-dollar Budweiser swilling, and after-partying like your hipster life depended on it in Chicago. Little do these hordes of Ray-Banned devotees and industry slackies know that, a mere continent away, across the pond and up the Great British countryside, a scant three-hour train ride north of London, in a valley (a dedicated deer park), surrounding a castle (Eastnor Castle), in Herdfordshire (a shire, of all places! it’s all so very British), a whole other world of music, with a lifestyle and following all its own, is growing out of a quiet English province. Welcome to the Big Chill.

While the Big Chill attracts less than a quarter of the people Lollapalooza does, in every other aspect it far outdoes anything that finds itself in Grant Park the first full weekend in August. I’ll be the first to brag of the beauty of Chicago’s skyline. There are few better spots in the city to take in its magnificence than from Buckingham Fountain. I’m also a firm believer in the spectacle that is Lollapalooza and the weekend of enjoyment that is to be found there. But, when there’s a 300-year-old castle looming on the hillside beside a sprawling valley—complete with a stream running through it—and aged trees scattered intermittently, reaching for a starry sky and full moon, well, the city life fades quickly from memory.

Photo: Roy Shay

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The former Avenue M space (695 N Milwaukee Ave) has been officially rechristened and opens this weekend as the Red Canary. Walking up to the new joint for a media preview night, I picked up a speakeasy vibe. Or maybe it was more of that Great Depression, as all the windows were papered up and the ease of parking gave the neighborhood a quiet feel. But ushered in, I was surprised by the degree to which the looks on the outside deceived me.

Paneled in rich wood, the foyer simultaneously exudes both a Victorian and modern feel. Ornate cabinetry mingles with a partition fashioned in long, straight lines with the occasional rectangular hole allowing the red from the next room to bleed in. As you may have heard, there’s a bit of  The Great Gatsby in this new venture from business partners Shane Hudson, Jamie Ulhir and chef Rick Spiros (formerly of Mantou Noodles).The large crystal chandelier, main bar and prominently placed flapper painting give the room class and recall an era when drink prices were not the issue, only whom with you socialized. The Canary, and its welcoming female staff members, made me feel at ease. Wealthy-looking business types mingled with a solid twentysomething hipster crowd.

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