Bryce anderson salon12/30/2023 We were just calling things by astrological terms. Stevens: The space thing came out of random nomenclature we were using to identify audio sketches that we would bring to the table. So what was it that motivated you to go outward into space? Muhly: “Worth the Pink Eye.” That's your next album. Muhly: That was a good nap though overall. And I had covered the cot with all these dirty blankets and pillows and whatever and I had pulled them off in my sleep and my face was smashed against the cot. Stevens: Still, when I get stressed out it comes back. In the Netherlands, they were like, “Let's do a tour of the Netherlands.” That's like, “Let's play eight venues in Brooklyn.”. So it was sort of self-perpetuating, so that we did it in Sydney, we did it at BAM, somewhere in Paris, Amsterdam. And then as the project expanded, we kept getting other co-commissions to do it elsewhere. Which is really vital in getting people together from different worlds. Sufjan Stevens: And I think we just happened to be in the right head space and to have the time. It quickly became like, "Oh, we're starting this funny band." Here's $5 and give us five pieces of paper." So this is much more like, let's see how big a mess we can make and get someone else to pay.ĭessner: In truth, there was a certain formality to the commission, which is really just the impetus - it didn't take a lot of convincing for us to get in the same room and make something together. Because usually it's like, "Here’s what we want you to write. Nico Muhly: In the universe I inhabit, it's so rare to get a kind of carte blanche thing where I'm not told what it is. And we had all kind of worked together peripherally with The National stuff. And he wanted to do a big project with friends. And they wanted him to do something different. So he was doing commissions for two years, and this was the last commission. works in the classical world - the commission world. So why did you initially conceptualize “Planetarium” as a live project?īryce Dessner: Well, there were commissions. Salon sat down with Muhly, Stevens and Dessner ahead of the album’s June 9 release, to try to make sense of it all. Sonically, it is epic - an hour and 16 minutes of sounds that are at times ambient, at times rollicking, often digitally distorted - as dense as it is beautiful. It is a vast, abstract work that explores the solar system through soundscape, song, science and myth. But like the show, listening to it can be both delightful and difficult. What the group recorded is a very different work from the one they performed. Making a record is kind of set up for that.” It's actually harder to make a live show in a way. “Usually you make a record and figure out how to play it live, and in this case we were making this big live show and then figuring out how to record it. “The actual process of recording was kind of distilling all of its ideas into something presentable,” Dessner said. Muhly, Stevens, Dessner and McAlister returned to their main gigs and all the public could walk away with were periodic clips surfacing on YouTube.īut then, as the new administration's environmental policies seemed to threaten Earth in new ways, Muhly and company returned to outer space, translating the show into an album. The three musicians - plus Stevens’ drummer James McAlister - toured the show through Europe. The elements of the music were quite simple at the beginning - just chords and melodies - and then from there it expanded to kind of monumental proportions.” According to Dessner, “the three of us brought musical ideas to each other, and we did a residency where we were really just sitting together, playing through song forms. Getting someone else to pay, Muhly enlisted his friends, Stevens and Dessner. Muhly typically receives strict guidelines for commissioned work, so he viewed this one as an opportunity to “see how big a mess we can make and get someone else to pay.” “Planetarium” has its origin in 2011, when Muhly received an open commission from the Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven. The show was equally ambitious and immense, featuring an orchestra, a brass band, lasers, and a huge orb above the stage on which images corresponding to the songs’ themes were projected. The new music project, “Planetarium,” was a solar system-themed spectacle, a cycle of songs dedicated to the monuments of space: the planets, the sun, the moon. In March of 2013, composer Nico Muhly and indie-rock stars Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner took the stage at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House and took the audience to the stars.
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