Peter Margasak


Peter Margasak is a music critic who wrote for the Chicago Reader from 1993 to 2018. In 2013, he founded and began curating the Frequency Series - a weekly series which was dedicated to showcase the new musicians at the Chicago venue Constellation. In 2016, Margasak launched The Frequency Festival, a week-long version of the Frequency Series featuring new musicians from the Chicago area each day and twice on Sunday. The third annual Frequency Festival took place from February 20 to 25, 2018. In September 2018, he announced he would be leaving the Chicago Reader to attend the American Academy in Rome as part of its Visiting Artists & Scholars Program.
Before he started working for the Chicago Reader, Margasak published the zine Butt Rag, which he started as a sophomore in college. A total of nine issues of Butt Rag were published, and one of them attracted the attention of three Chicago Reader employees, including the then-editor-in-chief Michael Lenehan. After they saw Butt Rag, they decided to offer Margasak a job at the Reader, in the hopes of bringing some of the zine's snarky writing to the Readers pages.