Dimensional Stardust

Rob Mazurek, Exploding Star Orchestra

Released on 11/20/20 by International Anthem - Nonesuch
Main artists: Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra
Genre: Contemporary Jazz

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Dimensional Stardust from Rob Mazurek's evolutionary Exploding Star Orchestra is easily his most complex, ambitious, and detailed offering in a nearly three-decade career. It defies easy categorization as it weaves through contrapuntal episodes in avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical music, engaging tenets from electronic and pop musics, spoken word, and contemporary art. Mazurek created the then-14-piece Exploding Star Orchestra in 2007 for We Are All from Somewhere Else, a manifesto of musical otherness. Its signature, like much of Mazurek's work after that, was one of polyphonic contrapuntal conversation and dialogue. The polyphonous project shifted his aesthetic worldview. His recording projects grew more involved, abstract, and at times, exotic -- à la the exploration of avant-futurist tribalism with São Paulo Underground and Black Cube SP, as well as the ESO's own recordings with Bill Dixon and Roscoe Mitchell, and on 2015's Galactic Parables: Volume 1.
Dimensional Stardust was recorded in five studio sessions between August 2019 and March 2020. Mazurek recorded 11 musicians responding to and improvising on his compositions separately. He then overdubbed and edited the entire proceeding together over three arduous, painstaking months. This version of ESO includes flutist Nicole Mitchell, guitarist Jeff Parker, vibraphonist Joel Ross, drummers/percussionists Chad Taylor and Mikel Patrick Avery, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, violinist Macie Stewart, pianist Angelica Sanchez, and Damon Locks, who wrote lyrics and provided narration. Opener "Sun Core Tet (Parable 99)" weds pulsing chamber strings and flute to organic and synthetic rhythms; its flow is conversational, careening across dynamic and textural shifts before opening onto structured group improvisation ushered in by Ross. The single "A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling" offers Locks' disembodied narration of eternal dislocation atop contrapuntal strings, flowing guitars, and elliptical vibes. Its pulsing cadence eventually admits statements from the other musicians, as drums, horns, and flute entwine in elegant, Zappa-esque combinations. "The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)" sets a punchy upright bass and trap-kit groove, appending striated string counterpoint and electronic percussion before they all lock in as an ensemble amid distorted industrial and organic percussion and screaming electric guitar. While the electronic keys, sweeping strings, trumpets, flutes, and vibes in "Galaxy 1000" offer a mutant impression of a pop tune, "Parable 3000 (We All Come from Somewhere Else)" is redolent with enormous drums, searing horns, and sensually undulating bass in interlocking grooves. Nothing on Dimensional Stardust regards abstraction as its own end. Instead, Mazurek's musical landscapes are deeply emotional. This is music developed for perceiving the heretofore unseen and feeling from an interior landscape that words cannot describe. There are no seams here, ragged or otherwise. No matter how strange these compositions appear initially, each contains an intimate, nonspecific part of an indefinable whole. Mazurek's music is a labyrinth that reveals canny perceptions of sound and meaning via expert compositional technique and relational trust among musicians. Dimensional Stardust illuminates the murky depths of Mazurek's visionary sound world even as it evokes strong, benevolent emotions in the listener.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo

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Dimensional Stardust

Rob Mazurek

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Sun Core Tet (Parable 99)