Tag Archives: s t a r g a z e

David Longstreth shares three-song suite, ‘At Home’, ‘Circled in Purple’ and ‘Our Green Garden’

27 February 2025

Last month, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter David Longstreth announced the release of Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices performed by him with his band Dirty Projectors and Berlin-based experimental ensemble s t a r g a z e, and conducted by André de Ridder. The forthcoming Song of the Earth features a stellar cast of guest contributors including Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and it also includes words by journalist David Wallace-Wells.

Following ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, Longstreth is teasing the album again with a three-song suite from the album, ‘At Home’, ‘Circled in Purple’ and ‘Our Green Garden’. Of the suite, he says:

“Past reports of Dirty Projectors going full prog are greatly exaggerated; until now I’ve never released an album with a straight-up suite of songs. As the slashes in the title imply, this is a three-song suite. It’s just the way it happened. Consider it an entry in your ‘A Day in the Life’ / ‘Paranoid Android’ / ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ / ‘Sicko Mode’ category: a sprawling journey that feels like slipping into a dream. A kaleidoscopic river-of-consciousness.”

The suite is offered with an accompanying lyric video and you can watch it below.

Song of the Earth is out on April 4th through Transgressive Records (UK) and Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records.

David Longstreth and s t a r g a z e set to release Song of the Earth in April

08 January 2025

2025 is starting on a high with Song of the Earth, the newly announced collaborative album from producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter David Longstreth and Berlin-based experimental ensemble s t a r g a z e. A song cycle for orchestra and voices performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors – Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell – and s t a r g a z e, and conducted by André de Ridder, Song of the Earth also features a stellar cast of guest contributors including Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells.
The first draft of Song of the Earth was written by Longstreth over the course of six “manic” weeks for a commission arranged by s t a r g a z e, in a period where he had to coordinate the pandemic madness, new fatherhood and writing for a large ensemble for the first time. Longstreth comments:

“The need for this music arose in a few days in Fall of 2020, when T was pregnant with our daughter. The fires in California were insane, as they are right now. We got on an empty flight to Juneau. It was the middle of the pandemic; no one was flying. The irony of escaping the fires by burning more carbon.”

According to him, Song of the Earth “is not a ‘climate change opera” but he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humour, rage.”

Song of the Earth arrives on April 4th through Transgressive Records (UK) and Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records and we can already get a first marvellous taste from it with album track ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, taken from the opening paragraph of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth. The single comes with an accompanying lyric video featuring drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up in the 1880s from agricultural irrigation but has reappeared during periods of wet weather. The video was shot by Jake Longstreth and you can watch it below.

Listen to s t a r g a z e’s second single, ‘Voicecream’, composed by Arone Dyer

20 October 2022

Photo: Reiner Pfisterer

Berlin-based experimental ensemble s t a r g a z e is gearing up to release their much anticipated One, an orchestral suite composed for them by Tyondai Braxton, Nik Colk Void, Greg Saunier, Arone Dyer and Aart Strootman. Following the monumental ‘Recollection Pulse #3’ composed by Nik Colk Void, s t a r g a z e have shared a second single, ‘Voicecream’, composed by Arone Dyer. She comments:

“it was such a foreign process to create – I typically write in real time, improvising with others, but this piece I wrote alone on Ableton, mostly with my vocals and MIDI, creating what I thought sounded like a realistic arrangement. Then, knowing nothing of the range or key of the instruments, I worked with trumpet / horn player Romain Bly to arrange the piece for s t a r g a z e, and we sent individual parts along with a click track to each of the performers to record on their own. Without a conductor some interesting twists and turns came about which I had to correct in post-production. I tried to make all the individually recorded instruments sound like they were coming from the same place. I learned so much in the process and it was really fun.”

Listen to ‘Voicecream’ below and watch out for the release of One on November 25th through Transgressive Records.

s t a r g a z e announce new album, One, featuring compositions by Tyondai Braxton, Nik Colk Void, Greg Saunier, Arone Dyer and Aart Strootman

23 September 2022

Photo: Reiner Pfisterer

s t a r g a z e‘s upcoming One is one of the albums slated for release this year that we’re eagerly anticipating. An orchestral suite, the record was composed for the Berlin-based experimental ensemble by a phenomenal cast of musicians, Tyondai Braxton, Nik Colk Void, Greg Saunier, Arone Dyer and Aart Strootman.  “We tried to think of composers who knew s t a r g a z e’s musician well from previous live interactions, who had an appreciation of classical music, and who are known as innovative, flexible producers”, explained the ensemble’s conductor André De Ridder. “We wanted those who could think of the recorded parts as something that could also be ‘processed’ afterwards and manipulated. These tracks were open to development at every step, and no two pieces followed the same method or style. The only constant was remote collaboration.”

One is set for release on November 25th through Transgressive Records and we can already hear the first cut from it, ‘Recollection Pulse #3’ , composed by Nik Colk Void, who other than being one half of Factory Floor and one third of Carter Tutti Void, is also known for her work using modular systems, voice and guitar. She comments:

“Working alongside this collective of classically trained musicians brought me out of my comfort zone as a modular synth artist. I lean towards assertoric compositions built via the appreciation of chance happenings through improvisation, and the recording it was a challenge too; feeling blindfolded to the outcome, we began to naturally bend our known rules and experience a crossing which was far more reliant on emotion rather than direction.”

Clocking in at just under ten minutes, ‘Recollection Pulse #3’ is a monumental cut that summons a sense of the infinite and we can’t stop playing it.

Mixtape #139

02 August 2022


A seasoned musician with a background in drumming, and membership in rock and pop groups, Antoine Pasqualini began releasing music under his Monolithe Noir moniker in 2013, coinciding with his love for modular synths. The project gives him freedom to push himsef further into uncharted territory and bridge his influences across prog, ambient, electronica, folk, and Italian library music. Later this month he is releasing his third full-length studio album, Rin, a cosmically entrancing and groovy record brought to life as trio. We couldn’t be more stoked to kick off the month with a rad mixtape put together by Antoine. Tune in and zone out.

  1. Slowdive – Rutti [Creation Records]
  2. Roxane Métayer – Mille Pics [Morc Records]
  3. s t a r g a z e*, Greg Saunier – Returning the Screw [Transgressive Records]
  4. Ka Baird – Teaching Lodge of the Arrows [Rvng Intl.]
  5. Rémy Couvez – Dans le Désert
  6. Accident du Travail – La Boule [bruit direct disques]
  7. Roxane Métayer – Plus Brume, Que Lune [Morc Records]
  8. Green Ribbons – The Well Below The Valley [Matière Mémoire]
  9. Thomas De Pourquery & Supersonic – Love in Outer Space [Quark Records]
  10. Monolithe Noir – Balafenn [Capitane Records]
  11. June Chikuma – Broadcast Profanity Delay [Freedom To Spend]
  12. Roméo Poirier – Sarakiniko [Kit Records]

s t a r g a z e and Qasim Naqvi release new piece Inaugural Music

29 October 2020

Inaugural Music is the fruit of a divine collaboration between Berlin-based experimental orchestra s t a r g a z e and extraordinary percussionist and composer Qasim Naqvi, who is also one-third of longtime favourite avant-jazz band Dawn Of Midi. Eerie and riveting, Inaugural Music was written as a response to the disturbances Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory gave rise to and was just released fittingly ahead of the US election next week. Naqvi offered some insight into the piece::

“Inaugural Music was originally commissioned by stargaze for the Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki. I wrote it during the time between Donald Trump’s election victory and his inauguration – roughly from November 15th of 2016 to January of 2017. This was a deeply troubling moment in our country and the anxiety and sadness was palpable. Many people felt the ground opening under their feet. We were afraid of what was to follow, which most definitely surpassed our wildest expectations at the time. During this transitional period between presidents, writing this piece was a way to assuage a lot of life and death type fears and anxieties that were bubbling to the surface. It was like therapy for me – a coping mechanism.

Another main pillar of this work is the electronics, which were made on a Moog Model D synthesizer. I was drawn to its subtractive properties- a type of synthesis that involves the removal of certain frequencies from a complex sound, through the use of filters. This, along with many other magical properties of the Model D, became the nucleus of the work and the subsequent material for stargaze was the outgrowth. It was a kind of intermingling between complex voltage-created vibrations and the analog of instruments- acoustic sounds generated through breath and string vibration.

The premiere in Helsinki happened on February 5th of 2017 and the recording was made the following year at the Muziekcentrum van de Omroep in Hilversum, Holland. We had access to Studio 2, which is the oldest radio studio room in the Netherlands. I can’t thank stargaze enough for commissioning this piece. At the time it was my first opportunity writing for them, and since then we’ve developed a wonderful, long-standing friendship and creative partnership.”

s t a r g a z e conductor André de Ridder also commented on the piece:

“We first noted Qasim’s music through a release of his chamber work Preamble, which we wanted to perform and managed to program quite a few times. We had met when stargaze and Qasim’s band Dawn of Midi both played the same Dutch festival, Cross-Linx, I think in 2016. We exchanged emails and then it’s one of those things where we can’t quite recollect how we became good friends via quite similar interests and mutual respect for each other’s work. I was curating a festival in Helsinki, the Musica Nova Festival, where I was able to invite Qasim as composer in residence – stargaze were due to perform a concert too. For this concert we commissioned Qasim to write a piece for stargaze specifically, with the brief to create a hybrid work of electronics and live instruments, and this became ‘Inaugural Music.’ We’re so happy to have recorded this in the studio, where we were able to explore the particular sonorities that this beautiful work evokes and requires, as a dialogue of the ensemble and the sounds of the Moog and pulses that we compliment or comment on, while often being enveloped by the ambient soundscapes, too.”

Inaugural Music is a piece we want to hear again and again. Here it is.

Inaugural Music is out now on Transgressive Records