In 2019, George Mashour aspired to make a psychedelic rock album.

The anesthesiologist and neuroscientist had just turned 50 and wanted to step outside the medical world to pursue a musical project.

“I was reflecting on what I wanted to do in the next phase of my life … and [I’d] been writing all these songs—sometimes just in my head—some of them [were] decades old,” said Mashour, a University of Michigan researcher who studies consciousness and has been dabbling in music over the years.

“For my 50th birthday, my wife got me a gift certificate for studio time at Big Sky [Recording], which was cool, and in retrospect I’m really glad she did that.”

Later that year, he became chair of U-M’s Department of Anesthesiology, and then COVID hit in early 2020.

“I was super busy, and of course, everything was shut down,” Mashour said. “And yet I still had that physical gift certificate for eight hours of studio time … so it was just always on my mind. And then it was 2023 when I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to do this,’ so I got in touch with Geoff [Michael], who’s the owner of Big Sky.” 

The word "cosplay" is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and the activity's participants—cosplayers—wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent specific characters.

For playwright Shavonne Coleman, cosplay is a way to open the doors of creativity to children and put them on the road to being superheroes.

Eastern Michigan University Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Coleman’s Cause Play on April 3-6, with school matinee performances on April 7-8.

Last year a staged reading of Cause Play was presented in May at EMU in collaboration with Ann Arbor Spinning Dot Theatre as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project. That collaboration continues with the premiere of the fully acted production.

Coleman is an alumna of EMU and an associate professor of theater at the University of Michigan's Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Cause Play centers on three middle school students, Zuvi, Zipper and Aaron, who meet at an after-school cosplay club at the Southwest Academy Magnet Middle School in Detroit. They discover their talents in creating costumes and adopting identities with the goal of attending a Comic Con—as well as developing their secret powers along the way. Coleman said there were changes made following the staged reading in response to the audiences who wanted the students to go to the Comic Con.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features Persian fusion by Babak Soleimani, electronica by Broomway, hip-hop by Blaine Nash, singer-songwriter soul by Jeff Karoub, and synth-pop by Same Eyes.

The party was going on too late, with people milling inside my Ypsilanti group house way past when my roommates and I wanted them there. Gentle prods of "Time to go home" and "Get the hell out" were unheeded by the bad-beer masses, so it was going to take a sonic bouncer to clear the joint.

That's when we played Devo's "U Got Me Bugged" at energy-dome-shattering volume, utilizing the CD player's repeat function for the maximum annoyance we could wring out of a song that runs 2 minutes and 49 seconds. I don't recall how many times we played "Bugged"—a modular-synth squelch-fest revealed on the then newly released Hardcore Devo: Hardcore Devo: Volume Two, 1974-1977, which collected demos and experiments from the Akron, Ohio surrealists who were still years away from the mainstream success of 1980's "Whip It."

But I do remember "Bugged" worked like a can of Raid made from waveforms, making our unwanted guests (and perhaps some wanted ones) scurry off into the night.

Sasha Gusikhin founded NeuroArts Productions in response to a tragedy.

Luke Balstad was Gusikhin’s best friend, and a straight-A student at Harvard, but he also knew that he needed mental help assistance. Balstad was in therapy, was honest and open about his bipolar condition, and was attended to by a supportive network—but it still ended with him dying by suicide in 2022.

Balstad was being treated with medications—he tried at least 10—and therapy in the standardized modern way, but Gusikhin believes that let her friend slip through the cracks.

“No amount of checking in on Luke would have been able to save him," says Gusikhin, a University of Michigan senior double majoring in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience along with voice performance. "He had all of this care and yet there was all this impression with this one size fits all, this ‘let’s try this, and that, and that.' When we do that we are never attuned to: ‘What if this medication [causes a] toxic reaction to that person’s brain chemistry?’ It’s very dangerous, and it can cause very dangerous situations and even loss of life in this case.”

Gusikhin's NeuroArts Productions organizes multidisciplinary arts events to promote mental health education and reform.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features sample-heavy electronica by Obsolete Aesthetics, fuzz-fi by Lantern Lens, Irish-steeped instrumentals by Kitty Donohoe, multigenre pop by Andrés Soto, and an experimental jam by Laserbeams of Boredom.

Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

Not a lot of marriages reach the 50-year mark, and even fewer bands do.

But Ann Arbor-based folk group Mustard’s Retreat has always blazed its own path, weathering changes and challenges across an astonishing five decades.

To celebrate this milestone anniversary, the group has scheduled a handful of concerts— including one at The Ark on March 28—featuring all three original members, who started playing together at the Heidelberg’s Rathskeller in 1975.

David Tamulevich remembers auditioning there as a solo act when he’d only done some open mics previously and was working as a cook at the Brown Jug. Libby Glover, who would later become part of the original trio, was tending bar there when her boss asked what she thought of Tamulevich.

The Neighborhood Theatre Group’s small, minimalist theater is an intimate space for what it calls an anthology play in four parts.

The seating is limited. The stage area is small. The audience is practically part of the scene.

All these limitations are a plus for a theater that emphasizes a tight story, engaged actors, and a very different theater experience, especially for a production like The Hotel Del Gado.

The anthology drama will conclude its two-weekend schedule March 14-16 at The Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti. 

Its four plays are set in a cheap, rundown hotel room. The time is the 1970s. The Neighborhood Theatre Group (NTG) co-founder and literary manager A.M. Dean created a conceit that many of the NTG plays will be set in a place called the Huron Valley Universe, drawing on the college towns of Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, and East Lansing.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features worldly improv-rock by Jesse Stiles and Bombici, healing ambient by Golden Feelings, political metalcore by Loss of Life, hyper-pop emo by Sacha, and electronica by Delphine Delight.