Poli?a and Stargaze have united to make a beautifully sculpted protest album – review
European orchestral collective Stargaze arrived in the US on November 9 last year to continue work on a cross-Atlantic collaboration with Minneapolis band Poli?a. They found the group in a state of disarray, reeling from President Trump’s election victory the previous day.
In the aftermath, they all improvised an extraordinary 10-minute piece, How Is This Happening, which starts as an outburst of defiance (“resisting him resisting us”) and slowly turns into something much stranger, an ominous, apocalyptic wave of cascading strings, warped synths and echoing percussion that gradually decays into static.
Trump’s election may have altered the mood of the recording sessions, although not the project’s underlying aim of merging progressive American and European sensibilities, integrating electronic and classical elements.
Poli?a are one of the most strikingly modern groups in pop. An experimental five-piece based around the talents of vocalist Channy Leaneagh and electronic producer Ryan Olson, they create heavily rhythm-based tracks processed through ear-bending digital manipulation. Their focal point is Leaneagh’s hypnotic vocals, deliriously echoed and Autotuned, concocting something at once ethereally beautiful and weirdly disturbing.
Their fourth album has been crafted as an equal partnership with Stargaze, led by German conductor André de Ridder. The marriage of electronic and classical instrumentation has been one of the great challenges of modern music, from Stockhausen to Steve Reich, the Beatles to Bj?rk. Here, arrangements strongly favour strings, horns and woodwind, yet the way the sounds have been digitally reshaped can make it nearly impossible to separate organic and synthetic elements. The resulting sound feels sinuous.
Some of the songs are lovely, with harmonic flourishes that wouldn’t sound out of place on a McCartney or Bacharach recording. Agree glides with a melodic élan that hints at Fleetwood Mac, if you can imagine the rockers on an asteroid hurtling through deep space.
But a darker strain takes hold as the album progresses, with Leaneagh’s vocals bent to the point of incomprehensibility, the rhythm section intent on shaking the speakers apart, while orchestra and synthesisers brutally collide and separate. The nearly 10-minute title track boasts an extraordinary passage where deep electronic tones aggressively interrupt a violin drone.
As protest music goes, it is not particularly uplifting. Yet despair is kept at bay by the sheer majesty of the lush, dense, beautifully sculpted, wonderfully alien sound.
Poli?a and Stargaze: Music for the Long Emergency is out now