Lightning Dreamers Out This Friday & Big Ears Festival This Weekend!
Rob Mazurek
Exploding Star Orchestra
Lightning Dreamers
LP, CD & Digital album
out March 31st, 2023
This Friday, March 31st: we're thrilled to share with the world the entirety of Lightning Dreamers, a new work by composer, trumpeter, interdisciplinary abstractivist and modern music mogul Rob Mazurek with his long-running Exploding Star Orchestra.
((( photo by Britt Mazurek )))
Lightning Dreamers is a follow-up to the acclaimed 2020 Mazurek/ESO release Dimensional Stardust. It features guitarist Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, percussionist Mauricio Takara, 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 Mazurekโs 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.
ESO @ Adler Planetarium, CHICAGO
Last Friday, Rob Mazurekโs Exploding Star Orchestra made a return to Chicago after a five-year absence to perform at the Adler-Planetarium, which is home to a four-billion-year-old moon rock! Hannah Edgar covered the show and the band's latest album, Lightning Dreamers, for the Chicago Reader here, and we've got a photo recap below featuring captures from our friend Alex Inglizian.
*upcoming*
Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra at Big Ears Festival
March 30, 2023 @ 1015pm
Knoxville Civic Auditorium
The Big Ears Festival performance of Exploding Star Orchestra will feature the following musicians: Rob Mazurek, Damon Locks, Craig Taborn, Angelica Sanchez, Tomeka Reid, Chad Taylor, Gerald Cleaver, and Mary Halvorson.
IARC Family at Big Ears Festival
If you're lucky enough to make it to Knoxville for Big Ears festival this weekend... here are a few more things worth marking on schedule:
Friday 3/31
Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek's New Future City Radio - 12pm noon at The Standard
Friday 3/31
Makaya McCraven's In These Times - 1030pm at Tennessee Theatre
Friday 3/31
Irreversible Entanglements - 945pm at Jackson Terminal
Saturday 4/1
Brandee Younger - 845pm at St John's Cathedral
Sunday 4/2
Theon Cross - 1pm at Jackson Terminal
((( photo by Britt Mazurek )))
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 โan evocation of a theme from the โBlack River Suite,โ which I have been revisiting and reimagining over time.โ
He elaborates: โI 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.โ
Among the artists present on the expansive B-side track โBlack Riverโ 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 branchโs memory.
*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
Silver Lightning color vinyl
Lightning Dreamers comes on a 160-gram vinyl LP (pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago, with lacquers cut by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service) inside a heavyweight matte jacket, IARC obi strip, insert sheet and dome-patterned inner-sleeve.
And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of *Silver Lightning* color vinyl.
Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America
This album will also be available on CD, Cassette, and Classic Black Vinyl (same package specs as listed above).
Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up.
Distribution via !K7 for Europe, UK, Australia, and ROW
This album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!
