10/10 Would Listen Again.

Track I’d include in a mixtape: Autumn Pleiades

Background:

Rob Mazurek is a multi-disciplinary multi-instrumentalist mutli-style composer with strong ties to Chicago. Dimensional Stardust is the sixth(?) Exploding Star Orchestra album. Exploding Star Orchestra is a collection of musicians brought together by Mazurek and given a set of detailed compositions that they can work within and around to give the us a really refined, restrained, imaginative listening experienced.

The Music:

It starts off with a Shastakovich like string ensemble intro abrupt shifting into a groove that maybe could have come from that world if that world had grooves. This is a jazz-ish album though, and you get jazz-ish thoughts throughout, but avoiding the standard jazz-ish forms and chords. It’s music that can be intricately built up on a tea table for you to pull up a chair and stare into the details, except the details are those of the cosmos, and for me, with song titles subtitled Parable 43 and Parable 3000 it feels like an extension of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed. An extension far into that particular future.

So while previous Exploding Star Orchestra albums worried about the shape of stars, this one worries about the people populating the cosmos far far into the future. Mazurek is very comfortable in electronic music (See: Love Waves Ecstatic Charge) but in this album electronics are used sparingly in a way as to give a cosmic background to the human experience and let the human musicians come to the forefront.

The musicians are all of your favorite Chicago connected musicians and it’s nice to check in with this collection and see that they’re all creating yet more creations. This seems to be recorded all pre-pandemic and I’m looking forward to what Rob Mazurek and all of these musicians might be creating during or post-pandemic so that we can all connect on that pandemic and post-pandemic level.