Starring and Guardian Alien

STARRING
Since their inception in 2008, “Starring” has honed the art of sublimely stoned textures that unite progressive symphonic whatever with endless machine-like repetitions and bedroom lullabies. Unhinged, introspective, but also weirdly unpredictable, this music is like a nutty and cosmic musical ice-cream sundae made by an alien krautrock junkie. Front-woman Clara Hunter calls this wild precision “sparkle-prog.” Here in LP form, ABCDEFG-HIJK-LMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ offers a creative bouquet that… Show more integrates fastidious studio experimentation with elements of the band’s early hot-blooded and earsplitting shows in the corners of Brooklyn’s DIY rock scene.

In 2011, these long-time friends holed up in Brooklyn’s St. Cecilia’s Church with producer Matt Mehlan (of Skeletons) to write and record this album, aiming at something sculptural and deliberate that merges the lyrical with the experimental. New ideas came fast and furious as Starring explored musical territory untouched by all five members’ other musical projects (Pterodactyl, Skeletons, Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang, Talibam, Frankie Rose, the Fancy, and sundry experimental projects) so a lot of sublimated repression and newly-tapped potentiality went into the composition of this, their Northern Spy debut, a sleepy-psycho explosion of trap doors and wild juxtapositions.

ABCDEFG-HIJK-LMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ combines razor sharp minimalism with dreamy poetry. It captures elements of the frenetic energy of the band’s live show, but here it is overlain with a new palate of synthesizers, delay effects, drum processing, aux percussion, and vocals that create delicate, but sometimes radical juxtapositions. Over the course of the album’s six cuts, choruses soar at monstrous heights framed by mechanical and occult trances. Dead jazz turns up with fuzzy 8-bit solos, whistling synths pipe beneath ghostly choral arrangements, viola lines in microtonal modes swoop into ornamented curls and loops while Hunter’s girlish vocals whisper the record’s secrets with surreal, woozy melodies. Concretely, the album recalls the classic sounds of European prog rock (Magma, Faust, Neu!), the unhinged grit of 1970’s New York no wave artists like Suicide, the earliest cuts from minimalists like Terry Riley and Philip Glass, and even a dose of post-rock’s strung-out improvisations.

GUARDIAN ALIEN
Guardian Alien is a free wheeling ensemble coming into its own, having found just the right balance between structured arrangements and wild abandon. Helmed by Greg Fox, who has lent his percussive force to the likes of Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, and Liturgy, the ensemble was initially an extension of his solo music (GDFX). It rapidly took on its own identity and expanded to a core group of Greg (drums, vocals, electronics, arrangements), Alex Drewchin (vocals, synth), Turner Williams Jr. (shahai baaja), Bernard Gann (guitar and also of Liturgy), and Eli Winograd (bass), all of whom have lent their expansive talents to numerous other projects.

Guardian Alien's Thrill Jockey debut, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, is a 40 minute psychic/psychedelic meditation that is driven by an intensity that is at once expansive, focused, and heavy on multiple levels. The overall arc of the album is transportive and trance inducing. The cover artwork painted by Turner Williams is based on a specific and particularly weird experience of Greg's. It mirrors the music in its open-ended playfulness and true psychedelia.

To say that the music of Guardian Alien is also meant to be an experience is an understatement. Guardian Alien was very much born of the live performance so it is fitting that their first fully conceived album was recorded at Shea Stadium, the band's spiritual home, which is run by Greg's cousin Adam. It was mastered by Heba Kadry at the Lodge (Wooden Shjips, Eternal Tapestry). See the World Given to a One Love Entity is a single composition with a strong, singular vision. It is the culmination of a band coalescing as a group while heedlessly delving into the depths of the psyche driven by their core desire to expand their horizons, both musical and otherwise.

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