Margasak writes about disparate musical times and communities within the broad field of late-20th and 21st-century music. His contributions to
The New York Times include a piece about Algerian "pop
rai" artist Khaled Brahim and another on the
avant-garde artists of the
Theatre of Eternal Music and their battles for proprietorship of
drone music; a
Pitchfork feature on the year 1979 in Chicago touches on both
power pop and the racial dimensions of anti-
disco sentiment during "the Rise of
House Music"; he has written about
trip hop for
Rolling Stone and reviewed new work by jazz saxophonist
Matana Roberts for
NPR's
All Things Considered. Margasak is a regular contributor to
DownBeat,
Chamber Music America, and
The Quietus, and he is the lead
contemporary classical music reviewer for
Bandcamp Daily. Among many other publications, he frequently wrote for the
Chicago Tribune in the 1990s. Margasak is best known for his work writing for the
Chicago Reader from 1993 to 2018. 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. In 2017, Dare Mighty Things declared Margasak one of "37 Influential Media People Shaping The Future Of Chicago". In September 2018, Margasak announced he would be leaving the
Chicago Reader to attend the
American Academy in Rome as part of its Visiting Artists & Scholars Program. == Frequency Series and Festival ==