Poliça & s t a r g a z e - Music for the Long Emergency (2018)

Transgressive Records present Music For The Long Emergency, a full-length collaboration between POLICA, an electronic pop band based in Minneapolis, and s t a r g a z e, a Berlin-based chamber orchestra interested in pop and electronics. Having been first introduced via the Liquid Music project run by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota, with the hope of a cross-genre collaboration, POLICA and s t a r g a z e first met in person in February 2016 in the Berlin living room of the conductor and 'leader' of musical collective s t a r g a z e, Andre de Ridder. Joined by POLICA, the Minneapolis-based electronic five-piece, led by vocalist Channy Leaneagh and producer Ryan Olson, the two bands talked and the s t a r g a z e musicians began to improvise - strings, brass, woodwind played over a handful of song sketches brought by Olson. "They were not even song structures, just electronic textures," de Ridder says. "And we started playing over them. But it was so important that the starting point was in the same room," de Ridder adds. "Because we could see how their faces lit up when we played. I guess that's where our minds met." Olson recorded the Berlin improvisations and incorporated them into several tracks he sent to the s t a r g a z e collective a few weeks later. "And I guess that was where the ping pong started," says de Ridder. What followed over the next 18 months was a long-distance musical romance of sorts, sustained by emails, mp3 files, video conferencing, as well as occasional meet-ups in Berlin, Minneapolis, and Eau Claire. Both bands were adamant that whatever they created - be it a single piece of music or a whole collection of songs - "not just be POLICA songs with s t a r g a z e pasted on top," as Leaneagh puts it. "We really wanted to maintain this conversation back and forth, and be a new version of both POLICA and s t a r g a z e."Coming together again in October 2016 to prepare for a week-long residency culminating in a festival at the Funkhaus in Berlin - the former headquarters of the GDR state radio - the players wrote, rehearsed, and developed the ideas they had been pinging back and forth via the internet in the venue's Studio 2, an exquisite, wood-panelled room with remarkable acoustics. "What that room created is pretty indescribable," recalls Leaneagh. "It was a little cocoon. The resultant album feels more than a simple collaboration, something more than a sum of its parts, a record with its own unique life force and distinctive voice. For de Ridder, the album's title, Music For The Long Emergency, reflects the confusion of the times. "It had a meaning of music being a haven, giving you a ray of hope," says de Ridder. "An alternative reality. And that became a theme of the music too. Quite a lot of the music is a little dark, and it does reflect what has been going on, but also incredible beauty at the same time which we hung onto because we needed to."



Tracklist:
1. Fake Like (03:54)
2. Marrow (02:48)
3. Speaking Of Ghost (04:14)
4. Agree (03:22)
5. Cursed (03:54)
6. How Is This Happening (10:07)
7. Music For The Long Emergency (09:47)