Dimensional Stardust from
Rob Mazurek's evolutionary
Exploding Star Orchestra is easily his most complex, ambitious, and detailed offering in a nearly three-decade career. It defies easy categorization as it weaves through contrapuntal episodes in avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical music, engaging tenets from electronic and pop musics, spoken word, and contemporary art.
Mazurek created the then-14-piece
Exploding Star Orchestra in 2007 for
We Are All from Somewhere Else, a manifesto of musical otherness. Its signature, like much of
Mazurek's work after that, was one of polyphonic contrapuntal conversation and dialogue. The polyphonous project shifted his aesthetic worldview. His recording projects grew more involved, abstract, and at times, exotic -- à la the exploration of avant-futurist tribalism with
São Paulo Underground and
Black Cube SP, as well as the
ESO's own recordings with
Bill Dixon and
Roscoe Mitchell, and on 2015's
Galactic Parables: Volume 1.