David Lang interview with bassist Logan Coale

David Lang, one of America’s preeminent living composers and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, brings his contemplative work darker to Saint Paul for its Midwest premiere. As much a hypnotic sonic and visual object as it is a piece of music, darker weaves its intricate solo lines into a delicate and subtly emotional fabric. The performance will feature mesmerizing projections created live by New York based visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. Logan Coale, an NYC-based bassist and occasional performer with the SPCO, will be joining for this performance. Below is a conversation Logan and David had on November 9, 2016 in a Greenwich Village coffee shop. In addition to introducing the inspirations and ideas behind darker, they discuss classical music conventions, the challenges young composers face, as well as Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan.

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Why the title darker?

Part of the idea in titling it darker was asking myself, can I make something that is emotional without specifying the moment where it becomes emotional? Can I make something which becomes a little more introspective without doing it in the way we normally do in classical music which is to build something big and then take it away suddenly and we are left bereft and quiet and we feel emptiness. Classical music can be very manipulative in this way, where the composer determines what kind of emotions the listeners should have. We try to make the audience have this experience all at the exact same time so that everyone is full of hopefulness at this moment and then bursts into tears at this particular moment. This piece, darker, is a very different way of looking at it. One of the things I love about religion, quite honestly, is when you are in organized religion and are performing actions over and over again, the amount of thoughtfulness is up to you. You can be in that space but thinking about something else completely or be thinking about something very deep and personal. The action doesn’t change, it’s what you bring to the action that determines what kind of experience you have. And it’s nice to actually think that sometimes a piece of music can do that.

What do you think the audience should know going into this performance?

darker is more of an event than it is a piece. The music does actually change over time but the changes are so subtle that you sort of have to adjust your metabolism before you can notice what’s changing. It takes a while before you ask yourself, “I don’t know how I got into this environment, this is slightly different than where I thought I was, was the music eternally that way and I just didn’t know?” There’s never a brand new section where something surprising and exciting happens. So in that way, it’s similar to watching life go by and gradually realizing that there are moments and elements you can track over time.

Unlike a lot of classical music which usually uses very dynamic and extreme emotions. Did you write darker in this way to try to draw similarities between the the experience of listening to a piece and the experience of life?

There are two answers to that question. Point number one is that this piece is a memorial for Jeanette Yanikian and I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be the only person in every audience, including in St. Paul, who knew her. [You can read more about David’s accounting of Jeanette Yanikian here]

Point number two is just sort of a general though about classical music. I think we get used to things being a particular way but there’s no reason for those things to be set in stone except for the fact that we love and revere the music that came before us. We learn that that’s the way well-made pieces work. For example, we love how in a Mahler or Beethoven symphony, but Mahler in particular, the emotional range is really exhausted and we consider that to be exciting in a concert hall. But if that were our real lives, we would be wiped out.

It would be like watching that same Hollywood movie over and over and over.

Right, so I just think in order do what I want music to do, I have to use music to figure out how I actually feel things, in real life. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to say “music has to be more like the life I have.” You know, in a piece of music you hear something really exciting and you go, “Well that’s just the obligatory part where something exciting happens”. Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste is unbelievably cool, creepy, intellectual, and heady for the first two thirds of the piece and then it goes "Oh, we'll leave you with a folk tune because we want you to be happy." There are these tropes that we don’t examine in classical music because we like to follow the patterns that were set by our “betters” from the past. So in order to have an experience which reminds us of who we are, now, it might be necessary to challenge some of those with new music.

Do you feel the challenges young composers are facing today are similar to the ones you faced or are they different?

The biggest thing that happens for any composer is you feel like you put all this work into a piece and all you want to do is to be taken seriously. No one is in the field for money or fame. You’re in the field because you have a musical opinion, you work really hard on something, and it’s unbelievably satisfying if somebody comes up to you and says “oh what you did, I appreciate it” and you can live for a year on that! That, plus whatever other horrible things you have to do for a year… And I think that’s the biggest problem with our field. I think what people need is to just really feel like they are part of the whole ecology of the system. We need all these young composers, performers, musicians, to feel like they have a purpose. To tell them we respect them and their voices are valued. Even if they never become successful… we need all of these people in order to keep the whole ecosystem fresh. Keep ideas passing from person to person and keep people optimistic. So I think that’s probably the biggest problem is that we have a system in which it’s very difficult to remind ourselves to be optimistic all of the time.

Students at the Bang on a Can summer Festival, an annual new music retreat held at Mass MoCA organized by David and the other founding members of Bang on a Can.

Are you the kind of person where when you were a young kid you said “I’m going to be a musician or a composer” or did it come to you a little later?

Well I was a chemistry student as an undergraduate so I was going to school to be a doctor. I never thought that I would do it for real though. I spent every waking minute playing music on as many instruments as I could. I played in rock bands, jazz bands, orchestras and marching bands. And I’m very nerdy, I played bugle in the boy scouts. During this time I always assumed that I would be going to medical school because that’s what I had been programmed to do from birth. My father’s a doctor.

So when was that moment, where you switched and said “Oh I’m doing this”?

Well it was really traumatic for me actually. I really wasn’t enjoying doing the sciences. In college, all the time I should been studying for my Calculus final, that was time I spent doing music. When I decided to go onto music graduate school my parents were very angry with me and actually never got over it really.

But do you actually remember that specific moment.

Yeah I actually do because it was so traumatic. I actually transferred away from Stanford to the music department at UCLA half way through school and at the end of the summer I never told Stanford that I wasn’t coming back so I just woke up one day and said to my parents, "I actually don’t want to go to UCLA but I do want to study music. So I’ll go back to Stanford, but I’ll do music there." They were not happy, that made them really angry.

So we’re meeting on the 9th of November...I was going to end with a dorky question about what music you listen to when you clean your house but maybe I’ll change that question now to say. What music do you think you’ll listen to tonight?

You mean because of the political situation?

I don’t know, just your mood.

I’m not in the mood to listen to music today. I’m completely distraught actually. And I think there are some moments where you’re not a musician any longer because being a citizen is just so much more powerful. I don’t know, I’m just afraid basically. I don’t want to use music to make me more or less afraid. I’m only going to be able to figure out how to live in the future..

But if you were home alone...and you had to clean your house…

Oh always listen to Dylan, Bob Dylan.

It’s you, a vacuum cleaner and Bob Dylan.

If the vacuuming is very loud I can put on something incredibly obnoxious but I listen to various kinds of classical music everyday but I can’t actually clean the house with it. You know if it’s on I have to sit and I have to listen to it. What do you clean the house with?

Bonnie Raitt gets played a lot for that. There’s “Let’s give them something to talk about” I think it’s partly because that’s what my parents listened to maybe when we were doing similar things so you know it feels like the right thing. But you gotta skip the love songs because they’re too sad.

But anyway, is there anything else you want the good people of Saint Paul to know?

If you think you’d like the most meticulous passage work from Vivaldi but heard by Arvo Pärt and then stretched out for an hour accompanied by a psychedelic light show, you should come to this concert.

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David Lang’s darker will be presented at the Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, MN on Saturday December 3rd at 8:00pm. 

Tickets can be reserved at: http://www.liquidmusicseries.org/tickets

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS: 
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Podcast: Liquid Music Playlist

David Lang's darker: Suzanne Bocanegra, Artist Feature

by Lisa Perry

“Bocanegra’s art is human, historical, filled with the material of life, highly organized and highly messy all at the same time.”

— BOMB magazine

Still image from darker

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Liquid Music Series and the Walker Art Center will present David Lang’s darker at the Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul on December 3, 2016 at 8:00 pm. The performance will feature musicians of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and a live video liquid light show created by Brooklyn based artist Suzanne Bocanegra.

The synthesis of visual art and live music is becoming more prevalent as the symbiotic relationship created by the two mediums can provide a unique and immersive experience for viewers. In darker, these two art forms come together and enrich each other, creating a slow-burning, yet all-consuming hypnotic atmosphere. 

In the composition of darker, Lang considered a visual lighting component from the very beginning. In an interview with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Lang states:

“So the original idea for the piece and one of the reasons why it’s called "darker" is because I imagined that this piece would have a lighting design. That this piece would be sort of like a proposal to a lighting designer – Here is this piece that gets a little darker in it’s emotional tone – maybe you could figure out a lighting plot that goes through this whole piece, which also gets darker as it goes along.”

“The lighting for this particular performance is going to be a film by the artist Suzanne Bocanegra, who happens to be my wife. She does these incredible liquid light shows where she adds very strange things – light projections of moving water, oil, and colored pigment. She made a beautiful movie to go along with this and it's going to be projected as the music goes along.”

Performance image from darker

Suzanne Bocanegra sheds light on her approach to creating visuals for darker:

"I developed a liquid light show for darker that becomes both a moving set and a quasi-narrative. Liquid light shows were originally developed for rock concerts in the 60s to engage the eyes in the mind-altering experience of the music, and I've always been interested in how this form of visual show making is a sort of live abstract expressionist painting. And, just as you see the musicians make the music in front of you, my hands are included in the frame as well, as a echo of the musicians' active hands."

Still images from darker

“In the program notes to David's score to darker he invites people to interpret the music with some kind of lighting design.  He doesn't say what the lights should do, just that they could be an important part of a performance.  David asked me to listen to the music and think about how I might add a lighting element to it.”

“My first thought was to remember Jeanette Yanikian - darker is dedicated to her memory.  She was the wife of the composer Louis Andriessen and was a composer and performance artist in her own right.  One piece she did that I never saw but I heard about was a piece where she put microphones all over her body and then broadcast the flow of all the fluids flowing through her.  I thought a liquid light show would honor her, and would also be great fun to do.”

Still image from darker

In addition to her work in darker, Bocanegra has several works that have recently toured across the country. One of these projects, entitled When a Priest Marries a Witch, is an artist lecture and performance starring Paul Lazar and was presented at the Museum of Modern Art. A lecture entitled Bodycast, featuring Frances MacDormand has toured as well and was presented at the Hammer Museum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Bocanegra is currently working on a new project entitled Farmhouse / Whorehouse, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor. It will premiere in April 2017 at the Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston, TX.

More information on the artist can be found at www.suzannebocanegra.com

Performance image from darker

David Lang’s darker will be presented at the Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, MN on Saturday December 3rd at 8:00pm. 

Tickets can be reserved at: http://www.liquidmusicseries.org/tickets

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries) 
Facebook: facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic
Podcast: Liquid Music Playlist

Interview w/ Poliça's producer Ryan Olson

by Steve Marsh

The Washington Post recently pointed out the problems inherent in protesting our addiction to oil in a world addicted to oil. “How did the out-of-state activists protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline arrive at the North Dakota site?” they asked. “How were the sleeping bags they will use when the high plains winter arrives manufactured and shipped to the stores at which they were purchased? What are the plastics made of in the phones they have been using at Standing Rock, N.D.?” 

When Poliça and s t a r g a z e named their Liquid Music collaboration Music for the Long Emergency, they weren’t planning to make music that could actually be played during the Long Emergency, when electricity will be scarce and finding the time to play music promises to be even scarcer. Neither Poliça nor s t a r g a z e are neo-Luddites nor doomsday preppers—Poliça’s sound is drenched in electronics, and while s t a r g a z e is an ensemble using classical instruments, they’re also making music that needs at least a little juice. But there is something zombie movie eerie about the sound of each group, something that anticipates a time when making music the way they’re accustomed to making it might not be possible.

Poliça’s drummer, Drew Christopherson, first heard of the concept of the Long Emergency during a wedding ceremony in Downsville, Wisconsin—the officiant dropped the title of James Howard Kunstler’s 2005 book The Long Emergency into his homily. Kunstler defines "The Long Emergency" as the interminably fallow period of civilization that will follow our present industrial age where relentless societal growth has been fueled by cheap oil. When that oil spigot finally runs dry, precipitating related crises of food and water, Kunstler argues, convincingly—frustratingly—that Elon Musk won’t be walking through that door with some miracle perpetual motion machine that will save us.

A week before s t a r g a z e arrived in St. Paul, I met with Polica’s Ryan Olson at his practice space in the decaying husk of a paint factory in North Minneapolis. It was a different setting from where I watched him work with s t a r g a z e in Berlin: at the starkly beautiful Bauhaus-designed East German-era radio complex, the Funkhaus. But not too different — there was still something post-industrial about it, a “we just survived something” vibe. We talked about his plans for finishing the collaboration, for making music inspired by, as Olson says, “this shit that cannot sustain.” Throughout our conversation, I was reminded of a long passage in Kunstler’s book, where he seizes on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the axiom of entropy, which states that over time, energy cannot be destroyed or created, only changed from ordered to disorder. “Entropy explains why logs burn,” Kunstler writes, “why iron rusts, why tornadoes happen, and why animals die.”

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Steve: What does the Long Emergency mean to you?

Ryan: Preparations for the next stage, after this wave of life explodes. It’s insane who we’re handing the power over to these days. It’s incredible. It’s going to be run into the ground. So we have to figure out ways to do it without that system’s funding.

Steve: The second law of thermodynamics says that as you lose energy, as it dissipates, it spins out of control. It doesn’t resolve itself. It pinwheels off. And some of the music that I heard you make with s t a r g a z e in Berlin was atonal, it had aspects of noise. There weren’t pretty melodies all the way though, it didn’t resolve every time. So what kind of ideas inspired by the Long Emergency ideas will be built into the actual music?

Ryan: Everyone has their own ideas about preparing for the future. It all seems quasi-apocalyptic. It’s too much to even name what exactly it’s about. It’s a good enough blanket to allow you to create under. But everyone is bringing their own dynamic to the project.

Steve: Kunstler believes that one of the reasons modernism sneers at beauty is because it isn’t necessary. He argues that in the Long Emergency, when 90% of our effort will be spent in our gardens, a beautiful human voice will become much more appreciated. But your music is a less literal interpretation: you’re only anticipating the Long Emergency, not making music that will be played during it.

Ryan: It might be kind of apocalyptic sounding. It definitely gets there. The main deal is we are still writing in the days leading up to the show.

Poliça and s t a r g a z e rehearsing at Funkhaus studios in Berlin

Steve: The musicians in s t a r g a z e, they’re classically trained but they can behave more like noise musicians.

Ryan: Yeah, they’re able to react. It’s not all sheet music. They can improvise very well.

Steve: Is that because of their personalities or their training? What makes them special as classically trained musicians?

Ryan: They’re incredibly versatile and are to pick up on a lot of different sounds. I was playing random radio blasts with like static signal, like sample hits, and they would recreate them on violin. They are insane sculptors of sound, masters of their tone. They are able to react to it and play with it.

Steve: Can all classically trained musicians do that?

Ryan: No. It’s not a common trait.

Steve: You’ve worked with some SPCO musicians.

Ryan: Yes, and they’re all phenomenal players. But in collaboration, s t a r g a z e may be more adventurous. Their sight reading is automatic as hell. But they can also go off the paper, and their ears are quick and responsive.

Steve: Improvisation is a big part of what you do in your band, Marijuana Deathsquads, and you and Channy have been recently playing improvised sets as a Poliça duo. Why is improvisation important to you?

Ryan: The reaction to your environment is pretty important to how music works.

Steve: I was talking to your friend Boys Noize about this in Berlin. In a consumer based society, where everything is about buying this music, whether it’s at Walmart or on iTunes, we have a stricter expectation about how the music will be presented. So we can be prejudiced: in a live setting we want to hear the record played the way it sounded on the record, the way we’re used to consuming it. So there may be something more honest when you’re reacting to the music for the first time in a room, and improv ensures that.

Ryan: That’s true.

Steve: So when you’re playing noise improv, which is another step removed from the western classical music tradition, when you’re abandoning that classical language by making noise music, you’re abandoning the baggage of that language.

Ryan: There’s so much 12 tone noise in classical too. It’s run the gamut. But I agree, noise has sprung up from a rebuttal to the classical tradition.

Steve: And you do love these avant garde musicians—you played me that Steve Reich track the other day, you love John Zorn too.

Ryan: Yeah it’s the 50th anniversary of Come Out. I want to do something with the Reich tribute. Something like Come Out but with a different process.

Steve: Can you explain his polyrhythmic approach?

Ryan: Yeah, like with Come Out, it’s like using the phasing of the tape echo, phasing off of itself. I want to do something like that, but with tremolos that are slightly phasing and a three part harmony in the round.

Steve: So the delayed phasing will prevent the three-part harmony from absolutely resolving itself.

Ryan: Well it might. We’ll see, it could get there.

Steve: But it will be frustrating. It will sound like something falling apart.

Ryan: We make things that make sense, sounding like something that’s on our minds. Especially with the seeming end of the world creeping its way directly up there. Police state fucking problems, climate disaster issues. Just all of it, ready to pop.

Steve: Kunstler writes that in the 14th century, during the height of the black plague, spooky skulls and crossbones were prominent in art. Do you think we’ll see goth again?

Ryan: It’s a bumming time, to be sure. It’s hard to say going into it how much that plays into it. It makes sense, but I can’t claim all those things as having meaning for us. I do believe those messages will be there.

Steve: Channy will make this more explicit with the words. I think about the Come Out. It was a direct response to the railroading of the Harlem Six in 1964. You feel the mayhem of that time, with it’s overtones of racial injustice and Vietnam. And you feel that in that song even though it’s just one phrase.

Ryan: Lift my shirt and push on the bruise and let the bruise blood come out to show them.

Harlem protests of 1964

Steve: The other thing that’s interesting about this project, is that it’s being underwritten by the SPCO and it’s being put on in the Fitzgerald Theater. But presumably the music will be confrontational to our establishment culture. Isn’t the SPCO the quintessential establishment? And now they’ve commissioned a piece called Music for the Long Emergency. How confrontational will it be? Is it going to be shades of Stavinsky’s debut of Rites of Spring in Paris in 1913? Are you hoping for riots in the aisles?

Ryan: Well the only times we’ve been down to Fitzgerald they’ve been incredibly accommodating and exceptionally professional. The folks that run it are amazing. So that shouldn’t be a problem.

Steve: I’m talking about the audience.

Ryan: I actually don’t know the audience for Liquid Music.

Steve: What kind of reaction are you hoping to get from bourgeois Hillary Clinton voters (like me) who are coming in with sour stomachs? Are you hoping to turn our stomachs further or are you hoping we'll enjoy it?

Ryan: I think they should always be entertained in some sense.

Steve: Like in the Gladiator sense?

Ryan: Kinda. It should be entertaining, whether that be a pretty song or introverted noise. It should take you somewhere. It should be some form of entertainment. That covers enough of what it should be. That’s the goal and there are lots of ways to do that. It’s just interesting to try to mix these different conversations together. The classical world conversation versus what we do, which is not that. To try to utilize them both in a unique way to try to understand. There’s a lot to know. That’s the thing about s t a r g a z e, they know that language so well, they can express such exotic emotions. I can say, “play the violin like this sort of thing,” or “play this kind of sound.” It’s like having tons of synths that you can turn into any kind of sound you want basically. They run the gamut of the expression on those instruments. So it’s fascinating to like have that in your band. You know?

Steve: So they’re like an analog modular synth personified.

Ryan: Yeah and they know how to patch themselves very well.

Steve: Can you explain “patch” to the layman?

Ryan: The routing to create a tone, a signal path, is a patch. 

Steve: If you were able to come up with a piece on your synthesizer or on your laptop, and had them make something that sounds similar or to write something inspired by that sound, could you use s t a r g a z e to play electronic noise music without electricity after the fall?

Ryan: Yeah, they could do that. That’s true. But we’re also employing electronics on their instruments to create different sounds.

Steve: But in a pinch, this could literally be music for the Long Emergency?

Ryan: Yes.

Steve: Do you think this music will be beautiful?

Ryan: There will be parts. It won’t get too “campfire.”

Steve Marsh is a Twin Cities based writer who has published with Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, Pitchfork, GQ and many others.

See the world premiere of Music for the Long Emergency:
Co-presented with The Current
Friday, November 18, 2016, 8pm (SOLD OUT)
Fitzgerald Theater, Saint Paul, MN

Follow Poliça:
Website: thisispolica.com
Twitter: @thisispolica (twitter.com/thisispolica)
Instagram: @thisispolica (instagram.com/thisispolica)
Facebook: facebook.com/thisispolica
Youtube: youtube.com/user/polica

Follow s t a r g a z e:
Website: we-are-stargaze.com
Twitter: @wearestargaze (twitter.com/wearestargaze)
Instagram: @we_are_stargaze (instagram.com/we_are_stargaze)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/wearestargaze/
Vimeo: vimeo.com/wearestargaze

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries) 
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Podcast: Liquid Music Playlist

s t a r g a z e: Collaboration and Interpretation

By Jeffrey Niblack

The world premiere of “Music for the Long Emergency” brings together two distinctive musical artists: Poliça and s t a r g a z e. While Twin Cities audiences are likely familiar with Poliça’s music, this performance marks the U.S. debut of the “renegade new classical ensemble,” (Boiler Room) s t a r g a z e, a Berlin-based collective. 

s t a r g a z e often performs new and existing compositions, but they also have a history of collaborating with musicians outside of contemporary classical music. To better understand the unique contributions of s t a r g a z e to their projects, we are presenting a series of comparisons using some of their collaborations with or interpretations of the music of others.

The Dodos
The Dodos are known for lush pop music that incorporates strong poly-rhythmic components. As part of performances in London, The Dodos collaborated with s t a r g a z e to revisit several of their songs. Writing about these performances, The Huffington Post said “orchestral support can often feel self indulgent and egotistical with the orchestra often only there to serve the band. But here it feels entirely equal; two like-minded musical entities fluidly playing and communicating with each other." The below performances of the song “Transformer” illustrate this. The original version is dominated by two distinct guitar parts. In the version with s t a r g a z e, one of the guitar parts is taken over by strings and woodwinds. As the song grows, the number of instruments expands until it reaches an exciting wall of sound.  Although the basics of the song remain much unchanged, the musicians of s t a r g a z e add a richness and dynamism to the original version. 

The Grateful Dead - “What’s Become of the Baby”
On the recent Day of the Dead tribute compilation--a collection of contemporary musicians performing Grateful Dead songs, curated by Aaron and Bryce Dessner--s t a r g a z e performs “What’s Become of the Baby”. The original recording is a bit of an oddity in the Grateful Dead catalog: Jerry Garcia sings an a capella chant-like melody, his voice obscured by heavy echo, the song occasionally bathed in a faintly perceptible drone.  

The s t a r g a z e rendition uses the vocal line in the original song as an inspiration and a starting point: different instruments--including voices late in the piece--take on the vocal melody and repeat it.  The shifting instrumentation creates small movements through the piece--more complex than the original version and wholly unique. 

Deerhoof Chamber Variations
Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier composed Deerhoof Chamber Variations which took several of his band’s songs and arranged them as a single piece for chamber musicians. “Data," one of the songs included in the piece, is made up of angular guitar lines and punctuated by percussion. The s t a r g a z e recording of the "Data" section of Deerhoof Chamber Variations replaces the guitars and drums with strings, harp, and brass, but the most intriguing augmentation is the vocal part. Using stereo sound, the dual voices interactively layer to become their own instrument, their emotional reservedness providing a stark contrast to the warmth of s t a r g a z e's instrumental arrangement.  

Terry Riley: In C
Terry Riley’s composition “In C”, a series of 53 musical phrases for unspecified instruments and musicians, is defined by the collaboration and interpretation that is part of every performance. Riley provides guidance on its performance, but there are many choices to be determined by the performers. 

s t a r g a z e began a string of collaborative performances of “In C” in 2013, collaborating with artists including Nils Frahm, Bill Frissell and Sam Amidon. Below are separate performances with Nils Frahm and composer Terry Riley.  

The two recordings below illustrate how the collaborative process can yield vastly different results. The performance with Frahm sets off with a burst of tension and energy, culminating with most of the musicians giving it their all. In contrast, the performance with Riley builds slowly, closing quietly, in an almost meditative state.  

With these comparisons, we see how s t a r g a z e can add or reveal new elements in the music and what a vital and joyful presence they are when they collaborate with other musicians.  We can’t wait to see what they bring to Liquid Music and the world premiere of Music for the Long Emergency.  

See the world premiere of Music for the Long Emergency:
Copresented with The Current
Friday, November 18, 2016, 8pm (SOLD OUT)
Fitzgerald Theater, Saint Paul, MN

Keep up with Music for the Long Emergency on the Liquid Music Blog:
First Look 
Tables Turned: André de Ridder interviews Channy Leaneagh
Catching up with s t a r g a z e: Weekender Festival, Berlin 2015
Virtual Residency Mini Doc Part I
Meet s t a r g a z e
From Virtual to Reality: s t a r g a z e + Poliça's First Musical Meet-up
Music for the Long Emergency: Naming the Virtual Residency with Poliça and s t a r g a z e
Podcast interview with Channy Leaneagh on Liquid Music Playlist 

Follow s t a r g a z e:
Website: we-are-stargaze.com
Twitter: @wearestargaze (twitter.com/wearestargaze)
Instagram: @we_are_stargaze (instagram.com/we_are_stargaze)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/wearestargaze/
Vimeo: vimeo.com/wearestargaze

Follow Poliça:
Website: thisispolica.com
Twitter: @thisispolica (twitter.com/thisispolica)
Instagram: @thisispolica (instagram.com/thisispolica)
Facebook: facebook.com/thisispolica
Youtube: youtube.com/user/polica

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries) 
Facebook: facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic
Podcast: Liquid Music Playlist