Rob Mazurek Returns With New Exploding Star Orchestra Release Lightning Dreamers, Due March 31 on IARC, Shares "Future Shaman" Video

“Future Shaman”

Rob Mazurek
Exploding Star Orchestra

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Lightning Dreamers

Out 3/1 on
International Anthem

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Rob Mazurek Returns With New Exploding Star Orchestra Release Lightning Dreamers, Due March 31 on IARC, Shares "Future Shaman" Video

Press Release

Today, composer, trumpeter, interdisciplinary abstractivist and modern music mogul Rob Mazurek announces Lightning Dreamers, a new work written for a compacted version of his long-running Exploding Star Orchestra, releasing March 31 2023 on International Anthem. A track from the album, “Future Shaman,” and an accompanying video directed by Rob Mazurek are available today. A follow-up to the acclaimed 2020 Mazurek/ESO release Dimensional Stardust, the album features guitarist Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn, among others. It was recorded mostly at the remote Sonic Ranch studios in West Texas, not far from Mazurek’s current home in Marfa, in the days leading up to a debut of the music at Trans Pecos festival in September 2021. Mixing and post-production was headed by Dave Vettraino from IARC studios in Chicago across 2022. Today’s single and album opener “Future Shaman” was co-produced by Jeff Parker and features added percussion by Mazurek’s longtime São Paulo Underground collaborator Mauricio Takara. The track finds Mazurek and ESO where they left off with Dimensional

Stardust – deep in a chromatic funk fantasy of outer-space grooves and Bartok-ian riffs. Vocalist/MC Locks brings the Orson Welles via Deltron 3030 energy while Taborn and Sanchez face-off from behind Wurlitzer pianos and Moog synthesizers. Mazurek describes the track as “a beat and lyrical sojourn into the clouds and then the eye of the storm and finally an ascension to the stars. A snaking counterpoint summoning the spirit world. An attempt at communication, renewal/rebirth through sound and movement.”

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. 

In the liner notes for Lightning Dreamers, Mazurek writes that the music is “an evocation of a theme from the “Black River Suite,” which I have been revisiting and reimagining over time.” He elaborates: “I spent 3 years of my life on the great Rio Negro in Manaus, Brazil, where the Black and White Rivers meet. It is custom and a kind of rebirthing to take a boat to the dividing/divining line of these 2 great rivers and dive into and through, as an affirmation of the simple premise (although We All Come from Somewhere Else) that we all come from the same place... the stars. The feeling of moving between and through these great bodies of water is etched in my soul forever. The visual and sonic material (both thematic and imagined) evokes the spirits past, present and future along this mighty river. The undercurrents of time, the movement of storm systems in the sky, the gentle sway of a boat moving upriver, the power and intensity when the wind decides to blow and the torrential rains fall. The sound of the electric eels below, the melodies of the inhabitants along the way, the shattering blasts from lightning in the sky. The river flows on and on and on.”

Among the artists present on the expansive B-side track “Black River” is the late jaimie branch, playing synthesizers & electronics behind the guiding trumpet improvisations of Mazurek (whom she long considered a mentor in multiple mediums). She passed away in August 2022, and her earthly absence has since imbued an otherworldly presence into the chaotic riptide of sound. As production wrapped on the album that Fall, Mazurek was moved to present Lightning Dreamers as a dedication to branch’s memory.

BIO

Rob Mazurek is an interdisciplinary artist & abstractivist, with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation, who spent much of his creative life in Chicago, and then Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, Texas.

As a composer Mazurek has written over 400 compositions over the past 30 years and has released 70+ recordings on various labels including International Anthem, Nonesuch, Astral Spirits, Corbett vs Dempsey, Cuneiform, CleanFeed, Delmark, El Paraiso, Family Vineyard, Harmonipan, Mego, Northern Spy, Rogue Art, Submarine, Aesthetics, and Thrill Jockey. He has led/co-led many ensembles of various sizes and shapes including Isotope 217, Chicago Underground (Duo, Trio, Quartet, and Orchestra), Alternate Moon Cycles, Alien Flower Sutra, Pharoah and the Underground (featuring Pharoah Sanders), Jeff Parker Duo, São Paulo Underground, and Exploding Star Orchestra.

Originally inspired by a joint commission from the Chicago Cultural Center and Jazz Institute of Chicago, Mazurek founded the Exploding Star Orchestra in 2005 to investigate the city’s avant-garde musical traditions. He brought together a group representing the diversity of the city’s contemporary music scene including musicians from Chicago’s North, West, and South-sides, from the then burgeoning post rock scene to the highly influential AACM and Northside Improvisation Scene. Since the inception the Orchestra has expanded to include musicians from around the world, with an ever-expansive pool of visionaries joining the fray based on the needs of the composition at hand. The group has featured Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Dixon, Fred Anderson, Nicole Mitchell, Damon Locks, Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, John Herndon, Tomeka Reid, jaimie branch, Joel Ross, Mikel Patrick Avery, Macie Stewart, Joshua Abrams, Angelica Sanchez, Ken Vandermark, Mike Reed, John McEntire, Jason Ajemian, Hamid Drake, Matthew Lux, Matana Roberts, Mauricio Takara, Guilherme Granado, Avreeayl Ra, Dan Bitney, Luke Stewart, and more!

Mazurek’s most recent Exploding Star Orchestra recording, 2020’s Dimensional Stardust, was co-released by International Anthem & Nonesuch Records and received widespread critical praise – including The New York Times who called it one of the Best Albums of 2020 and “an intoxicating android of an album,” and Pitchfork who rated it 8.0 and called it “an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music,setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of howeach of these components is necessary to the whole.”

LINKS

International Anthem: Website || Bandcamp || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram
Rob Mazurek: Website || Instagram