Lord Dubious
The least amount of horn work for Mr. Mazurek than I’ve ever heard. Even so, Rob is found really taking things to other places with another amazing cast of players. Amazing, as always!
Favorite track: Black River.
Ex-Friendly
Mad sh*t here from Rob Mazurek on the best (IMO) label on the planet right now International Anthem - funky, grinding and not-caring-what-you-think space-junk jazz that Miles Davis would have recognised. Heavy lifting.....
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Purchasable with gift card
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Limited Edition 160g 'Silver Lightning' Color LP in Heavyweight Jacket, with IARC OBI strip, insert sheet & dome-pattern inner sleeve. Pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, with lacquers cut by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. Limited Edition of 555 copies.
**orders ship from US, UK and EU **
Includes unlimited streaming of Lightning Dreamers
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 7 days
edition of 555
Purchasable with gift card
$29USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
160g classic black LP in Heavyweight Jacket, with IARC OBI strip, insert sheet & dome-pattern inner sleeve. Pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, with lacquers cut by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service.
**orders ship from US, UK and EU **
Includes unlimited streaming of Lightning Dreamers
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 7 days
Purchasable with gift card
$24USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Shiny Compact Disc in 4-Panel Digipack with Hype Sticker.
*Ships from US, EU, & UK*
Includes unlimited streaming of Lightning Dreamers
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Lightning Dreamers is new work by composer, trumpeter, interdisciplinary abstractivist and modern music mogul Rob Mazurek, who wrote the music for a compacted version of his long-running Exploding Star Orchestra. A follow-up to the acclaimed 2020 Mazurek/ESO release Dimensional Stardust, the album features guitarist Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, 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 Mazurek’s 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.
The album’s opener “Future Shaman” was co-produced by Parker and features added percussion by Mazurek’s longtime São Paulo Underground collaborator Mauricio Takara, as well as synth bass from
Cathlene Pineda. The track finds Mazurek and ESO where they left off with Dimensional Stardust – deep in a chromatic beat fantasy of outer-space grooves and Bartok-ian riffs. Vocalist/MC Locks brings the Orson Welles via Deltron 3030 energy while Taborn and Sanchez face-off from behind Wurlitzer pianos and Moog synthesizers. On “Dream Sleeper” Locks’s poetry is swirled in drifting storm clouds of fractured atmospherics, both improvised and composed. “Shape Shifter” finds Mazurek recalling a past life of Isotope 217 – not just for the swinging grooves anchored by Moog basslines, but also in that he returns to the trumpet after years of playing cornet. Once the soaring melodic theme is established the ensemble shifts into On The Corner mode, creating a mangled rhythmic base for Taborn’s Wurlitzer runs and clean guitar soloing from Parker, before shapeshifting yet again under Mazurek’s rising polytonal electronics as Locks’s scattered vocal embellishments take us to the promised land.
The album’s whole B-side is an immersive trip that spans two tracks – “Black River” and “White River” – for which Mazurek interwove takes from the Sonic Ranch sessions with live material from an expanded ESO performance recorded in February 2022 at Sons d’Hiver in Paris, France. In the liner notes for Lightning Dreamers, Mazurek writes that the music is “an evocation of a theme from the “Black River Suite,” which I have been revisiting and reimagining over time.”
He elaborates: “I 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.”
Among the artists featured in the recording from Sons d’Hiver 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 on “Black River.” As production wrapped on the album that Fall, Mazurek was moved to present Lightning Dreamers as a dedication to branch’s memory.
credits
released March 31, 2023
All music composed by Rob Mazurek (OLHO, ASCAP). Words by Damon Locks.
Recorded at Sonic Ranch, Tornillo, TX, September 23rd & 24th, 2021.
"Future Shaman" co-produced by Jeff Parker, with additional synth bass played by Cathlene Pineda.
“Black River” and "Dream Sleeper" include samples of Exploding Star Orchestra recorded live at Sons d’hiver in Paris, France, on February 3rd, 2022, featuring: Rob Mazurek, jaimie branch, Tomeka Reid, Thomas Roher, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Julien Desprez, Pasquale Mirra, Angelica Sanchez, Damon Locks, Mikel Patrick Avery, Chad Taylor, and Mauricio Takara.
Engineered by: Dave Vettraino.
Additional Recording by: Jeff Parker, Mauricio Takara, Nicole Mitchell, and Rob Mazurek.
Produced and Mixed by: Dave Vettraino & Rob Mazurek.
Mastered by: David Allen.
Album art by: Rob Mazurek Radical Chimeric #1 #2 (mesh, screen, mylar, canvas, video projection) 2022.
Insert Photo by: Britt Mazurek.
Design by: Craig Hansen.
International Anthem is a Chicago-born recording company that produces and promotes progressive
media.
The IARC mission is to make positive contributions to the changing state of the music industry, and to vitalize the demand for boundary-defying music by presenting unique sounds in appealing packages to untapped audiences....more
supported by 182 fans who also own “Lightning Dreamers”
So happy to see a new album from this band. I've long been a fan of Mazurek and Parker's work in Tortoise, on top of the CUQ... Anyhow, if you're curious about contemporary jazz, this is a terrific place to start.
Hobie Anthony
supported by 140 fans who also own “Lightning Dreamers”
Mary Halvorson is a genius composer and guitarist who has developed her own musical language, and with Code Girl she has incorporated poetry into that language. Incredible compositions and lyricism (each track is a different kind of poem). Halvorson's playing is as great as usual, and all the other members of the band sound great. Robert Wyatt's singing in particular works extremely well in the tracks he's featured. Highly, highly recommend. rat
