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Planetatium mar17

Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, James McAlister, and The National's Bryce Dessner releasing new album

27 March 2017, 16:14 | Written by Laurence Day

Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, James McAlister, and The National's Bryce Dessner are teaming up for Planetarium, a new 17-track album themed around our Solar System.

The four collaborators have also shared the album's first single, "Saturn", and its accompanying lyric vid (check it out above).

Planetarium has been years in the making. It began when Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven commissioned Muhly to compose a new work - he then brought in friends Stevens, Dessner, and McAlister, using the opportunity to collaborate "on a larger scale". It's been performed in various states of completion for a while, before putting a pin in the whole thing for a number of years - they came back, invigorated, in 2016 with plans to "open Pandora's Box" and bring the whole beast to life in the studio.

The project is described as "part rock odyssey, part electronic experiment, part classical opus... [which] revolves around the cosmic ideas Stevens’ lyrics explore: mythology, astrology, science, astronomy and the intricacies of human consciousness."

Tracklist:

  1. Neptune
  2. Jupiter
  3. Halley's Comet
  4. Venus
  5. Uranus
  6. Mars
  7. Black Energy
  8. Sun
  9. Tides
  10. Moon
  11. Pluto
  12. Kuiper Belt
  13. Black Hole
  14. Saturn
  15. In The Beginning
  16. Earth
  17. Mercury
Planetarium is out 9 June via 4AD.

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