Around the time John Beltran was living in Ann Arbor prior to the pandemic, he resurrected his Placid Angles moniker, which has come to yield some of the most adventurous music in the electronic music producer’s celebrated and diverse catalogue.

While the Detroit-based producer and DJ no longer lives in Ann Arbor, Placid Angles has endured to become something of a go-to alias for Beltran to channel his love for combining nostalgic '90s-centric breakbeats with deep house and ambient techno.

His latest Placid Angles album, Canada, has received rave reviews. The record is dedicated to the country he visited as he finished the LP, and it encompasses everything the Placid Angles project represents since his first album under the alias, 1997’s The Cry, while channeling his love for labels like Warp and 4AD in equal measure.

“It's still fun, and I think Canada is my best offering,” Beltran said. “I'll get a lot of disagreements, because a lot of kids love [2019’s] First Blue Sky. I agree that's a good one, but this one really, really hits it for me.”

Julianna Loera-Wiggins’ journey in standup comedy has been a bit more academically motivated than most.

A Ph.D. candidate in the University of Michigan’s Department of American Culture program of Latino/a Studies, Loera-Wiggins decided to write her dissertation about the Latina stand-up comedy scene in Chicago, where she moved to take stand-up comedy classes.

“I figured you can't really write about comedy without doing it,” said Loera-Wiggins. “I like the idea of being sort of unruly, because you’re brought up with these sorts of cultural expectations, especially as a woman, and comedy sort of breaks those a little bit, or you can lean into that.”

While Loera-Wiggins hopes her time in Chicago as a scholar could one day lead to publishing a book about her research, she has worked to create additional opportunities for representation in stand-up in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area during the completion of her Ph.D.

After returning to the area from Chicago, the Ypsilanti resident inherited Femme Feedback, a monthly comedy open mic in Ann Arbor that offers feedback for aspiring female, trans, and nonbinary comics.

While Femme Feedback has elements of a typical open mic where comedians can try out four to five minutes of new and old material, it also provides a teaching element courtesy of a headlining veteran comedian who gives feedback via written comments to less experienced joke tellers.

“It's one of the few places where we can talk directly to the femme and trans experience, where if we were to do this material elsewhere, we would get no reaction, or we're often kind of met with unfortunate circumstances,” Loera-Wiggins said. “So, this is definitely a safe place for people to do that. My goal as the producer is for femme and trans comedians to know how to advocate for themselves and their own needs.”

Loera-Wiggins will showcase what Femme Feedback is all about during a special showcase hosted during this week’s Tree Town Comedy Festival at 7:15 pm on Thursday, March 5, at 212 South Fourth Avenue in Ann Arbor.

During an intro to playwriting class at Michigan State University seven years ago, Cole Hunter Dzubak found inspiration for his first play, Afterall, in an unlikely source: Oasis’ 1995 megahit "Wonderwall."

Given a prompt from his professor to write a play based on an existing piece of media, Dzubak said he ran with the idea of deconstructing what have become different interpretations of the song, repurposing them in his own story.

Originally believed to be a story about songwriter Noel Gallagher’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Gallagher later corrected the record that "Wonderwall" was actually a song about an imaginary friend “who's gonna come and save you from yourself."

Dzubak’s obsession with the song and its two supposed meanings made him realize what he had to do.

“Afterall is really about that idea of those two interpretations of the song kind of being pitted against one another, and it forces the main character to pick: imaginary friends or love of his life,” Dzubak said.

After years of tinkering, Dzubak and Ypsilanti’s Neighborhood Theatre Group will debut Afterall as its latest production, with shows set for February 27 through March 1 and March 6-8 at the Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.

The transition from writing heady, intellectual jazz compositions to folk songs was the breath of fresh air Janelle Haskell was subconsciously seeking to reinvigorate her career as a musician and creator.

Honing her skills as a saxophonist and clarinetist from a young age in Ann Arbor, Haskell said she became burned out chasing a career as a jazz musician after a decade of living in New York City. Despite earning accolades as a featured soloist with renowned ensembles, including Doc Severinsen and his Tonight Show Band, The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, and The DIVA Jazz Orchestra, to name a few, Haskell returned to Ann Arbor in 2016, unsure of her next move as a musician.

With the COVID-19 pandemic isolating her from being able to perform with local jazz ensembles a few years later, inspiration returned when she picked up an old guitar she bought from a Guitar Center in Brooklyn, spawning a new vision for creativity as a folk singer-songwriter as well as a new performing name: the artist born Janelle Reichman dropped her last name and elevated her middle one to become Janelle Haskell.

“The good thing about getting into songwriting at the age of 37 or something is you have a backlog of all of this material. It's kind of just gone from there,” said Haskell.

After publishing around 30 books together in 15 years as a creative duo, it took Erin and Phil Stead a while to come back to the story that got it all started.

The Ann Arbor couple’s first book together, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, set an impossibly high bar, winning over literary critics as the recipient of the prestigious Caldecott Medal, while becoming a defining children’s book of a generation.

While the Steads worked up the courage to publish a sequel in 2021 with Amos McGee Misses the Bus, putting the book out into the world during the COVID-19 pandemic meant the couple couldn't tour and promote it.

That has made the promotion of the recently published third book in the series, A Snow Day for Amos McGee, all the more gratifying, Phil said, as the Steads have been able to connect with lifelong fans.

“It's just been really, really rewarding to see people's enthusiasm for the book and enthusiasm for the character,” Phil Stead said. “This is the first time that we're seeing grown-ups who had the book as children—college-aged kids that are bringing their battered copies from when they were five or six of the first book, and now they're excited to see Amos back.”

Living in Ann Arbor together since 2008, the Steads will close out a season of promoting A Snow Day For Amos McGee with a special event on December 11 at Literati Bookstore, offering those who attend the ticketed event special handmade, limited-edition woodblock prints the couple is famous for featuring in their books.

During a Friday evening class, Mahsa Khazeni describes to a small group of faithful Dzanc House attendees the instructions on how to approach their colored pencil and marker drawings, with suggestions of creating hybrid creatures or scenes from dreams or nightmares.

“Forget logic and make something new,” said Khazeni, whose artwork fills the surrounding walls of the Ypsilanti nonprofit’s gallery space as its monthly featured artist.

This is what a typical weeknight has looked like at Dzanc House since it opened in the spring of 2024 as a hub for anyone who has a desire to create, hosting nightly figure drawing, fiber arts, and “collage and chill” classes.

When an opportunity to open a pair of sold-out shows in Chicago for the English band Dry Cleaning came up for Fred Thomas’ Idle Ray project in 2021, it was an easy “yes.”

There was only one slight problem: The Ypsilanti songwriter’s latest alias for writing and recording lo-fi indie rock was a solo project, not an actual group.

“It was, ‘Yep, no problem, we'll be there,’ without actually having a band at all,” Thomas said. “It was just me, and I hadn't played these shows for a couple of years. So I just asked everybody whose instruments I'd been borrowing if they’d play with me at those two shows.”

More than three years later, the individuals Thomas found to play the shows, guitarist Frances Ma and bassist Devon Clausen, have taken on official roles in Idle Ray, with each providing their own unique contributions to the band’s two 2025 record releases.

More than 25 years after starting the Ghostly International record label from his University of Michigan dorm room, Sam Valenti IV still feels the inspiration Ann Arbor provides the label, now based in Brooklyn, New York.

That includes one of its most famous small businesses, Zingerman’s Delicatessen, which Valenti describes as a good role model for young companies and one Ghostly looked to for inspiration in executing its vision as a trailblazing record label, famous for its diverse roster of electronic and experimental music and its wide range of branded merchandise.

“I think we were looking for inspiration, so to speak,” Valenti said. “[Zingerman’s is] independent, it's entrepreneurial, it's creative, it's quality-oriented, it's local. I brought the whole [Ghostly] team once to the class seminars they had and read the books.

“I love it as a framework, because it's not a lot of waste. So, we organized the company early on, kind of as these units. I'm not sure we were as successful, obviously, executing them, but it gives you something to sort of look at as like, ‘OK, most companies are just this hierarchical thing, but what if you create space, and you create safe space to do different things that self-serve the rest of the community?’”

Steeped in Ann Arbor and Southeast Michigan independent music lore, Ghostly International are commemorating the label’s story and the people who helped it grow with the release of its first hardcover book. The 488-page We'll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly International Catalogue includes a visual history of the label's archives, exclusive essays by critics Michaelangelo Matos and Philip Sherburne, as well as unseen photos, original interviews, and oral histories with both musical and visual artists from across the roster.

While the events and people who inspired Andy Kirshner’s latest film, Sex Radical, might date back more than 125 years, the University of Michigan professor and filmmaker said its subjects of freedom of expression and women’s rights feel as relevant now as they did then.

Exploring turn-of-the-20th-century American history through the words of little-known feminist, spiritualist, and sex educator Ida Craddock, Kirshner said the documentary-style drama illuminates a message that feels appropriate for current times amid a backdrop of lawmakers seeking to ban books and mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in school.

“Even though it's a film that's set in the past, I feel like it's very much resonant with the present,” said Kirshner, who is a joint professor emeritus with the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the Stamps School of Art and Design. “It was a different time, but some of the same cultural conflicts about separation between church and state and about gender roles are kind of the same struggles in a lot of ways.”

Attempting to describe the setting for her Neighborhood Theatre Group’s annual Black Cat show, group co-founder Kristin Anne Danko said audience members can expect similar vibes to a ‘90s TV classic anthology series that aired on Nickelodeon.

“They should expect horror stories—it's going to be a little scary, a little silly, and it should get everyone in the mood for Halloween,” Danko said of the upcoming production of Black Cat: Folklore. “A good thing to think about is something like Are You Afraid of the Dark?”

Regardless of whether you’re a fan of scary campfire stories or nostalgia television programming, the Ypsilanti nonprofit theater company’s annual fall production aims to provide an immersive experience, Danko said, with “campfire seating” available for audience members who want to sit close to the stage.

The Neighborhood Theatre Group has been producing “theatre from scratch” since 2015, Danko said, performing plays, musicals, sketch comedy, and even short films in recent years. Black Cat: Folklore is the ensemble theater group’s latest devised production, written entirely by its eight-person cast, along with Danko, Director Marisa Dluge and ensemble members A.M. Dean, Kim Gray, and Aeron C. Wade. Shows are scheduled for October 17-19 and 23-25 at The Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.