New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Marfa, TX-based multidisciplinary artist/musician Rob Mazurek has released two new singles, "Galaxy 1000" and "The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)," from his forthcoming Exploding Star Orchestra album, Dimensional Stardust, out November 20, 2020, on International Anthem / Nonesuch Records. Both songs come with accompanying videos directed by Mikel Patrick Avery, who presents the two new works as Part 2 and Part 3 of the First Kid in Space film series starring his daughter
Olivia Avery-Velez; you can watch them both below. Part 1 of Avery's film series accompanied the previously released album track, "A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling."
Tomeka Reid's funky cello plucks guide us into "The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)," a track on which Mazurek recalls the blown out polyrhythms of his comrades in Tortoise, but contrasts head-nodding post-rock grooves with advanced chromatic counterpoint. Vocalist Damon Locks narrates through a three-minute frenzy that peaks with Jeff Parker's guitar solo. As Mazurek says: "Jagged melodics give way to smacked break beats into a question and answer trope moving towards the center of the sun."
"Galaxy 1000" is an ancient-sounding, pan-humanist pentatonic anthem. String playing by violinist Macie Stewart (Resavoir, Ohmme) and cellist Reid flank electric piano melodies as Locks lets out megaphone shouts about "the promise of eventually!" "'Galaxy 1000' is a four-to-the-floor banger with a B-section street parade from another dimension referencing the great John Coltrane's A Love Supreme as the Universal Anthem of love and brilliant positive transformation," Mazurek explains.
Rob Mazurek has made an indelible impact on creative music over the past thirty years, since emerging from the musical nexus of the 1990s
Chicago scene. He has written more than 400 compositions, is featured on more than seventy recordings from various labels, and has led or co-led many ensembles, including Exploding Star Orchestra (his flagship large ensemble),
Chicago Underground, Isotope 217, and more.
Dimensional
Stardust features twelve musicians—Damon Locks,
Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, Jaimie Branch, Joel Ross, Mikel Patrick Avery, Tomeka Reid, Chad Taylor, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Macie Stewart,
Angelica Sanchez, and John Herndon—rigorously arranged and conducted by Mazurek.
The album recalls an array of Mazurek's symphonic influences—from Béla Bartók to
Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro
Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, on Dimensional
Stardust Mazurek distills a maximal orchestra of explosive improvisers into a beautifully restrained, graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.
