Thursday, April 21
Arte Para Todos @ Multiple Locations
Milwaukee’s Arte Para Todos (Art For Everyone) festival launched with big ambitions last year, spotlighting 70 local acts at 15 venues in three neighborhoods and raising more than $21,000 for area schools in the process. This year it’s going even bigger, adding an extra night and another neighborhood: It’ll feature more than 100 local bands at 25 venues over four days, making it arguably the most expansive, inclusive showcase of local music in the city—an incredible feat for a festival only in its second year! The long weekend kicks off Thursday night in Walker’s Point with performers including Fox Face, Soul Low, Lex Allen and Mark Waldoch. Friday night it heads to Bay View with big, eclectic shows at six venues. Saturday it hosts a whooping nine shows across Harambee and Riverwest and Sunday it closes with four shows around the East Side, including headliners Foreign Goods, De La Buena, Siren and Antler House. Weekend passes are just $25 and single-event passes are $9-$17. Proceeds will be split between four schools: George Washington Carver Academy in Brewer’s Hill, Escuela Vieau School in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee Parkside School of the Arts in Bay View and Riverwest’s Frederick J. Gaenslen School.
Great Lakes Environmental Film Festival @ Marquette Univesity, 7:30 p.m.
For the second year, Marquette University’s Diederich College of Communication will host the Great Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a series of screenings of films about the world we occupy. This year, the free festival kicks off Thursday night with a series of shorts, including one about aboriginal rainmakers, The Rainmakers of Nganyi, and another about the dangers of pipeline ruptures in Lake Michigan, Oil & Water (Director Spencer Chumbley will host a Q&A after the screening). The festival continues Friday with additional screenings throughout the day, including a film about scaling Mount Denali (formerly Mount McKinley), An American Ascent. Saturday’s films include the documentary Shipping Home, about one couple’s surprisingly fraught attempt to build a home out of a shipping container.
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Fear Factory w/ Soilwork and Spaces and Blades @ The Rave, 8 p.m.
For those within the industrial metal community, Fear Factory are considered one of the genre’s most reliable entities, enormously influential for their unique hybridization of disparate hard rock elements. Although the band has been slowed by frequent lineup changes and hiatuses since the millennium, they’ve still managed to record a rewarding series of concept albums written around dramatic sci-fi imagery, the latest of which is last year’s Genexus, their most approachable album in years. It’s their third album since founding guitarist Dino Cazares rejoined the band in 2009. This tour commemorates the 20th anniversary of the group’s second and best-loved album, Demanufacture.
Friday, April 22
The Lowest Pair w/ Buffalo Gospel @ Anodyne Coffee Co., 8 p.m.
The Lowest Pair is the collaboration between two distinctly different personalities: Olympia’s Kendl Winter (previously a solo artist on K Records) and Minneapolis banjoist Palmer T. Lee, a veteran of the city’s bluegrass scene. Together they make breezy, rootsy folk music colored by Winter’s punk background. This month the duo released two new records, Fern Girl and Ice Man, a more traditional, acoustic-minded folk album, and Uncertain As It Is Uneven, a fuller, more exploratory record that takes full advantage of the studio. They share this bill with Milwaukee folk-rock treasures Buffalo Gospel.
Saturday, April 23
David Sedaris @ The Riverside Theater, 8 p.m.
It took David Sedaris a few years (and more than a few odd jobs) to discover his niche. When the whirlwind success of his “SantaLand Diaries” radio essay afforded him the chance to write a book, he released 1994’s Barrel Fever, a collection divided between satirical short stories and autobiographical essays. The essays, of course, generated more response than the fiction, so Sedaris refined his approach, focusing mostly on memoirs for a string of best-selling follow-up collections, establishing the wispy humorist as one of the literary world’s marquee names: Where most authors appear at bookstores, Sedaris sells out theaters and auditoriums. His ninth and latest book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, is another collection of the non-fiction essays he’s best known for. He appears here tonight behind that book’s paperback release.
Pete Rose National Bobblehead Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony @ The Pabst Theater, 2 p.m.
Pete Rose is one of the greatest players baseball has seen or ever will see, the all-time leader in hits, singles and games played. Yet despite his long and storied career, he’s been famously exiled from the Baseball Hall of Fame for betting on games while he was managing the Reds. There is at least one hall of fame that Rose is eligible for, however: The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame, which will host an induction ceremony with the Hit King himself. Rose will deliver a speech and participate in a moderated Q&A session. All attendees will receive a Rose bobblehead; there will also be meet-and-greet opportunities after the ceremony.
M.I.A. Presents Pressure @ Studio 200, 8 p.m.
Las Vegas’s TribeSteppaz headline a big night of drum ’n’ bass, dance and electronic music at Studio 200, featuring artists from around the country. A number of TribeSteppaz’s peers from the M.I.A. collective will also be on the bill, including Seattles’ DJ Babel and S-Doobie, Minneapolis’s Kaspa MC, and the Milwaukee artists Syquest and UV. There will be two stages of music.
Sunday, April 24
Buckethead @ Shank Hall, 8 p.m.
Buckethead is one of the most distinctive guitarists of his time, not only sonically but visually, given how he blurs the line between music and performance art by wearing an eerie, Halloween-inspired white face mask and a KFC bucket on his head. You’d also be hard pressed to find a guitarist with a wider-ranging résumé. Since the 2000s he’s played with artists as diverse as DJ Disk, Les Claypool, Guns N’ Roses (during perhaps the oddest era of that band’s history) and actor Viggo Mortensen. This February he released his latest album, Pike #226, his 256th studio album (yes, you read that right).
Wednesday, April 27
Amy Grant @ Milwaukee Theatre, 7:30 p.m.
Contemporary-Christian music was still a small niche when Amy Grant found massive commercial success in the ’80s. Her run of crossover hit albums from that era laid the groundwork for today’s booming contemporary-Christian music scene, where she remains one of its biggest names (and also its highest-selling artist). For her current “Live Life Together Tour,” she’ll share the stage with two fellow CCM staples, Nichole Nordeman and Ellie Holcomb, songwriters who share Grant’s fondness for confessional storytelling.
