A Musical Voyage Through the Solar System, Darkly
Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister’s bombastic <em>Planetarium</em> uses outer space to consider human folly.
Space is a real place, but we Earthlings mostly experience it as a backdrop, a trivia trove, a fantasy landscape, and a metaphor. In the cultural imagination, space can seem like just a version of not-space—how many interstellar voyage movies are really about family issues on the third rock from the Sun?
The new album embraces the way that space serves as humankind’s depository for stray ideas and symbols. Singer Sufjan Stevens, contemporary-classical composer Nico Muhly, guitarist Bryce Dessner, and percussionist James McAlisterfirst created these songs to performis unfailingly ambitious and intermittently dazzling. Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s also deeply unsettling in its use of planetary metaphor.
