Chicago

 Long-distance duo SUN CIRCLE--former Chicagoan and "laptronica" artist Greg Davis, who's now in Vermont, and Montana-based Zach Wallace, who also plays bass in Memorize the Sky with another former Chicagoan, reedist Matt Bauder--stick to sustained drones on every track of theirs I've heard so far. One piece on their self-titled debut CD-R is built around intersecting vocal chants--low, guttural notes, drawn out Tibetan-monk style and amplified till they're strident and grainy, a la Tony Conrad--but most of their material is purely instrumental, combining organ, bowed strings, and gongs in slowly shifting epics that sometimes hover and sometimes pulsate vigorously. Beneath its surface each drone swarms with microscopic activity--tiny changes in texture, density, and pitch that keep your ears busy once you surrender to the sumptuous sound.

I've been pretty amazed by the variety and quality that the loose group of New York musicians affiliated with the Desco/Daptone Records juggernaut has maintained over the past decade, combining funk, Afrobeat, and hard soul. Flagship band the Dap-Kings have enhanced the already considerable appeal of singer Sharon Jones to the point that they're headlining the Vic with her on Thursday (it wasn't so long ago that they were playing the Double Door), and their members have also turned up in various combinations backing Amy Winehouse, Al Green, and Lily Allen, among others. Other label-affiliated groups, some of which predate the Dap-Kings, include the Daktaris, Antibalas, the Soul Providers, the Sugarman 3, and the Budos Band.

Nashville singer Raul Malo, who first made his name as front man for Music City outcats the Mavericks, rolls into town Wednesday for a gig at Joe's. On his solo records Malo has consistently nailed a retro feel, and unlike many artists treading similar turf, he doesn't come off as a creatively bankrupt hack exploiting other people's nostalgia to make a buck. With a voice like his--a gorgeous blend of keening Roy Orbison pathos and cool Frank Sinatra swagger--"retro" is the only path it'd make any sense for him to follow. It's not his fault he was born in the wrong decade.

Few musical traditions are more peculiar and compelling than the katajjaq throat singing of the Inuit, a 25,000-strong native population concentrated in Canada's Nunavut territory. It's as much a game as a form of music: pairs of women face and embrace one another, unleashing a wild torrent of grunts, exhalations, inhalations, and all manner of guttural, rumbling low-end noises. Each woman rapidly follows her partner, so that their streams of sounds are almost like fun-house reflections of each other--this is made easier, one presumes, because the singers hold their faces so close together that they can use each other's mouths as harmonic resonators. A "song" ends when one of the women is reduced to laughter or simply runs out of breath.

A few years ago a singer calling herself Tagaq (aka Tanya Tagaq Gillis), who'd grown up in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, largely ignorant of the tradition, began to attract notice by radically recontextualizing katajjaq for the pop world. Homesick while attending art school in Halifax in the late 90s, her mother sent a care package that included some katajjaq cassettes that inspired to experiment with the style while in the shower. Over the next few years she refined her practice and eventually began performing, adapting the tradition for solo voice, with a DJ.

With his youth, virtuosity, good looks, and dramatic flair, 26-year-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang is as big a star as the classical-music world produces these days. He's spending the weekend in Chicago and playing several concerts at Symphony Center, of which the most intriguing is perhaps on Saturday night: he'll perform material from his album Dragon Songs (Deutsche Grammophon, 2006), a sparkling collection of recent compositions from his homeland.

Given song titles like "USA Highway," "Paris to New York," and "Road Song," I'm tempted to say that the new Desolation Wilderness album, White Light Strobing (K), has a travel theme, but front man Nicolaas Zwart tends to hide behind such thick layers of echo I can't be too sure what he's singing about. The music makes me think I'm right, though: similarly heavy on atmosphere, with droney, jangly guitars, reverbed vibraphone, and washes of cymbal, it combines spacey psychedelia and twee pop in a strange union that evokes the kind of out-of-time meditative state you sometimes get into on a long drive.

Tue., Nov. 18, 9 p.m.
Ladyhawk, Lake, Desolation Wilderness @ Schubas

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Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista has long been one of the most prodigiously versatile session cats in New York, and over the decades he's also built up a sizable discography of solo and collaborative recordings with his name on the cover. In recent years he's attracted some attention with his eccentric combo Beat the Donkey, which translates Brazilian rhythms and forms into a highly theatrical language using a lineup that sometimes pushes a dozen. It's exactly that theatrical quality that makes it hard for me to enjoy Beat the Donkey, though, so I'm happy that Baptista's most recent album, Banquet of the Spirits (Tzadik), uses only a resourceful quartet.